In some ways, Christine Blasey Ford’s experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, last Thursday, was as different from Anita Hill’s as you would expect it to be, nearly thirty years later, in the midst of the #MeToo movement. When Hill, in 1991, described the sexual harassment that she said Clarence Thomas had subjected her to, she faced skepticism that such behavior even had relevance when it came to assessing the fitness of a nominee for the Supreme Court. Among the instructional moments that Hill endured was Senator Arlen Specter’s explanation that unsolicited discussion of large breasts in the workplace was “not too bad—women’s large breasts. That is a word we use all the time.”
When Ford appeared before the committee to make her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, none of the senators overtly downplayed the gravity of the behavior she described. There seemed to be broad agreement that, if Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford when they were teen-agers, it would render him unfit for a lifetime appointment to the Court.
Decades’ worth of research about the trauma of sexual assault made a difference, too. Ford spoke with disarming directness and vulnerability, occasionally using the language of research psychology, her field of scholarship. When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her how she could be so sure that it was Kavanaugh who had attacked her, despite being unable to remember some other details about the event, she explained, “The level of norepinephrine and the epinephrine in the brain”—each a neurotransmitter released when a person is under stress—“encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so the trauma-related experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.” It might have been a little technical for the Judiciary Committee, and most of the time Ford spoke much more colloquially. Still, invoking the workings of memory and trauma in such cases is now commonplace. When Senator Dick Durbin remarked, “A polished liar can create a seamless story, but a trauma survivor cannot be expected to remember every painful detail,” he was providing a social and psychological context that is far more recognizable to Americans today than it was in the past.
Finally, Anita Hill had to face a Senate Judiciary Committee made up entirely of white men; Ford’s questioners included four female senators. The Republicans, all men, evidently so doubted their ability to question a woman about an alleged sexual assault without bungling the job that they called in a sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, Rachel Mitchell, to do it for them. (When Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators let Mitchell ask a few questions, then promptly took over.) In 1991, none of the Republican committee members appeared to have any concerns about the gender makeup of their panel.
But, in certain ways, Ford’s experience was just as bad as Hill’s, and maybe worse. The hearing unleashed in Brett Kavanaugh a bitter, partisan rage pumped up with conspiracy theory. It would have been strange if he were not rattled, especially if he is innocent. But Kavanaugh seemed to have very little command of his emotions. He described the handling of the allegations against him as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fuelled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election,” and went on about “revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He said that his family and his name had been “totally and permanently destroyed.” He wept throughout his long opening statement—a performance that likely would have doomed a woman being evaluated for her jurisprudential temperament. When Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Kavanaugh if he had ever had so much to drink that he couldn’t remember all or part of what happened, he snapped at her, “I don’t know. Have you?” Nearly a dozen people who knew Kavanaugh in college described him to the Times as a heavy drinker, and, according to several classmates, his fraternity was well known at the time for being hard-partying—a relevant consideration if you’re investigating whether alcohol could have led to a sexual assault or made it difficult to remember one. (After a break, he apologized to Klobuchar.)
Clarence Thomas, in his hearing, denounced the Judiciary Committee for carrying out “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves,” but he did not specifically call out Democrats or invoke a revenge plot by politicians. The kind of vitriol that Kavanaugh displayed should be a red flag for the committee: elevating him to the Supreme Court after that rant will make it even harder to regard the Court as the impartial body it’s supposed to be.
Kavanaugh’s rage was pitched for the ear of the President who nominated him—loud, belligerent, and predicated on the Trumpian tactic of “Deny, deny, deny.” His sense of injustice was that of an entitled, upper-middle-class striver who, in his telling, “busted my butt” to get into Yale University and then Yale Law School, “the No. 1 law school in the country,” while doing service projects, keeping meticulous calendars, playing varsity sports, and being nice to women, with never a “whiff” of anything untoward, only to be detained at the threshold of the Supreme Court by a woman who remembered something very different about him.
On Friday afternoon, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, Senator Jeff Flake called for postponing the final decision by a week, so that the F.B.I. could conduct an investigation. But, even then, the saga will continue. What Ford would call the sequelae of the hearings will truly come into focus only with the midterm elections. The 1992 elections, after Clarence Thomas’s confirmation, brought a record number of women into Congress. Even more women are running this year: two hundred and thirty-nine, of whom a hundred and eighty-seven are Democrats. If the Republicans in the Senate listened politely to Ford only to ignore her, then they may pay the price on November 6th. ♦
