Woman comes forward, details attempted rape by Kavanaugh

California college professor Christine Blasey Ford Sunday came forward as the women who said Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her when both were teen-agers at private prep schools in Maryland.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford told the Washington Post in a report that appeared at the paper’s web site Sunday.  “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Ford said Kavanaugh and friend Mark Judge were “stumbling drunk” when they cornered her in a bedroom at a party of teenagers from private schools in Montgomery County, a suburb of Washington, DC.

Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her through her clothes, grinded his body against her and then tried to pull off her outer clothing and the one-piece bathing suit she wore underneath it, Ford said.

Judge tried to join in by drunkenly when he jumped onto both of them, which knocked Kavanaugh off her and she was able run from the room and lock herself in a bathroom before finally fleeing the house.  She said she heard the two searching for her while drunkenly running into the walls along the hallway.

Kavanaugh and Judge attended Georgetown Prep, a private all-boys school while Ford studied at Holton-Arms, another private prep school.

Ford said she and other private school students, including Judge and Kavanaugh, at the pools of Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, where word would circulate about parties at someone’s home in the area.

At the home that summer evening, Kavanaugh and Judge had been drinking heavily and cornered her after she had gone to the bathroom on the second level of the home.

Kavanaugh, in his senior-class entry to the Georgetown Prep yearbook, referred to drinking parties and claimed membership to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Keg City Club.”

An author and filmmaker, Judge has written for The Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post and told about his own drinking and alcoholism in “Wasted: Tails of a Gen-X Drunk,” which included a passage about a “Bart Kavanaugh” who he said “puked in someone else’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”

Judge also called Georgetown Prep “Loyola Prep” in the piece and detailed “black out drinking” and a party culture at the school.

One former student at Georgetown Prep along with Judge and Kavanaugh said the two were “tight” and “good friends who liked to have a good time and raise hell.”

However, he refused to let his name be used, saying that he has no desire to “be slut-shamed by Trump” on Twitter or elsewhere.

“We partied hard and we chased girls,” he said.  “We didn’t always believe a girl really meant ‘no’ so she ‘needed convincing’.”

Ford passed

In a statement released by the White House before Ford went public Kavanaugh “categorically and unequivocally” denied any incident claimed by the “anonymous letter” that Sen. Diane Feinstein turned over to the FBI about the incident.

After Ford’s name became public Sunday, Kavanaugh has not responded to  specific questions.  Neither has Judge.

Ford says she told her husband, Russell Ford, about the attack after their marriage in 2002 and discussed it with a therapist who asked for details in 2012.

Washington lawyer Debra Katz, who now represents Ford, arranged for her client to take a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in August.  Ford passed and Katz provided the report to The Washington Post.

“I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong,” Russell Ford tells the Post. “If they don’t have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard.”

Before Ford went public, three Senators — one Democrat and two Republicans — said Sunday that they did not think Ford coming forward would delay the confirmation process for Kavanaugh.

Now, however, Sen. Jeff Flake, a retiring GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Sunday night he “want to hear more” from Ford and the committee cannot forward Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate without Flake’s vote.

“If they push forward without any attempt with hearing what she’s had to say, I’m not comfortable voting yes,” Flake said. “We need to hear from her. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.”

Another Republican Senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee, also said the committee to stop fast-tracking Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Reports from the office of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) say he now wants more information on what did or did not happen in that suburban bedroom more than three decades ago.

An increasing number on Capitol Hill now suggest Kavanaugh is facing a “MeToo” moment like the ones that has sidelined celebrities and other politicians because of past (and often present) sexual habits.

Writes Ruth Marcus, Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post:

The urgency is to investigate, not to rush to confirm a lifetime appointment. Surely a few Republican senators retain enough sense of institutional responsibility to insist on that — if not because it is clearly the right thing to do, because in the era of #MeToo, their female constituents will not tolerate such rug-sweeping.

(Updated at 11:25 p.m.)

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