Six years after she testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, Blasey Ford shares her disappointments and disillusionment with our political system—and her hopes for the future.
On Sept. 27, 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982, when she was 15 and he was 17. Despite her compelling and credible testimony, and Kavanaugh’s subsequent testimony temper tantrum, the Senate confirmed him to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh then made fast work of dismantling women’s rights, including overturning the half-century-old precedent of Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to abortion.
In a beautifully-written and searing new memoir, One Way Back, Blasey Ford recounts her life before, during and after the 1982 sexual assault and her 2018 testimony. She explains her decision to report the sexual assault to the Senate, her experience of testifying, and her life in the aftermath as a target of right-wing smear campaigns and threats of violence. She describes the friends and family members who supported her during her ordeal, as well as those who betrayed her.
Blasey Ford’s memoir demonstrates how little progress we have made in the thirty-three years since Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the sexual harassment she experienced from Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the early 1980s. Both Hill and Blasey Ford were treated terribly by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hid corroborating evidence and confirmed their perpetrators, despite the women’s credible and compelling testimony. The press slandered both women, and they both received relentless hate mail and death threats, disrupting their lives for years.
You pay a price for telling the truth.
Christine Blasey Ford
Anita Hill’s 1997 memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, published six years after her testimony, gave her the opportunity to tell her story in the context of her whole life and share her disappointments and disillusionment with our political system, but also her hopes for the future. Following in Hill’s footsteps, Blasey Ford’s memoir also speaks truth to power.
From DC Beltway Baby to California Surfer Girl
“My story just can’t be about the three months in 2018 when my life exploded in front of the world’s eyes. My life weaves together surfing, statistics, motherhood, friendships and politics,” writes Blasey Ford.
Blasey Ford grew up in a Washington D.C. suburb “where country clubs dictated the social scene, where the men talked and the women laughed”—and where she never fit in. On childhood field trips to D.C., she learned to revere the people working under the Capital dome and in the Supreme Court—generating a sense of patriotism and civic duty to step forward with the information she had about Brett Kavanaugh when he was being considered for the Supreme Court.
After college, she moved across country to California for grad school, where she did fit in, studying psychology at Pepperdine and University of Southern California and discovering a love of surfing. She later became a psychology professor at Palo Alto University and a clinical professor and consulting biostatistician at the Stanford School of Medicine. She married and had two sons, who were young teens at the time of the 2018 hearing.
Using her training in psychology to understand and explain her life and decisions, Blasey Ford reveals herself to be a deeply thoughtful person with a generous spirit, as well as a scientist who carefully and analytically weighs the evidence before coming to conclusions. The title of her book—One Way Back—is one of many surfing metaphors she uses, referring to how reporting the assault was like paddling out past the break in the waves, with only one way to get back to land—through the waves, either on top or under them.
Right Wing Smear Campaign
Blasey Ford’s memoir recounts how during and after her 2018 testimony, she was buried under a tsunami of right-wing attacks, media misinformation, a sham FBI investigation based on 4,500 tips filtered through Trump’s White House and a slanderous 414-page Senate Judiciary Committee report released by Senator Chuck Grassley. The error-riddled report accused Blasey Ford of being a “drug dealer, a credit card thief, and a pathological liar” and claimed to find “no credible evidence” to support her allegations. Blasey Ford’s memoir corrects the record, and explains what happened after her testimony.
She describes the mountains of mail she received—over 100,000 physical letters from 42 different countries and all 50 states. Most of them were supportive, and about 24 percent were from survivors, but a “small but terrifying 1 or 2 percent contained hate mail and death threats.” The letters were “mostly typed out, sometimes handwritten, and occasionally illustrated (violently).” She struggled to “absorb the weight of all that trauma.”
“There were letters from little girls who had watched me on TV and thanked me for being brave, while expressing worry that our country had appointed someone who hurt women to its highest court. There were stories from women in their sixties and seventies who had been raped decades ago and had carried it with them as a shameful secret all these years.” These letters, arriving amid the #MeToo movement, revealed the “inconceivable scale” of the harm and trauma women and girls experienced at the hands of men and boys.
She also describes the terror she felt when she read the threatening letters: “We want you dead,” “I give you a year,” “We haven’t forgotten about you,” “We’re coming for your firstborn.” Blasey Ford and her family were forced to leave their home for four months, living in hotels under the watch of private security guards at a cost of up to $10,000 a day, covered by money donated through a GoFundMe account set up by supporters. Her sons went to school with bodyguards. It would be four years before her life returned to anything resembling normalcy.
I had to stop underestimating the evil that these people were capable of. And the reality that they would never give up.
Christine Blasey Ford in One Way Back
Blasey Ford says the right-wing smear campaigns felt like the “DARVO” manipulation tactics used by perpetrators: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. “The accused reverse the roles to blame the victim, while also taking the role of victim on themselves. It’s gaslighting to the maximum degree, and it felt like half the country decided to team up and DARVO me in 2019.”
Her attackers doxed her and sent pictures of her being strangled. They created fake accounts in her name and sent out messages recanting her testimony, and they created fake photos of her and George Soros, accusing her of being a left-wing political operative. “I had to stop underestimating the evil that these people were capable of. And the reality that they would never give up,” she writes.
Disillusionment from Political Leaders
Blasey Ford’s memoir also delves into her resulting disillusionment with many people, from those in political leadership to her own father. After initially calling her a good witness and her testimony credible, a week later Trump mocked her at a rally in Mississippi, saying “A man’s life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered”—which generated even more death threats. She then describes the painful experience of learning through a reporter that her father had written an email to Kavanaugh’s father who traveled in the same Washington DC social circles, shortly after the hearings to say he was glad the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
She weathered a relentless storm of books and articles smearing her character, but even journalists and writers supposedly on her side got her story wrong time and time again, says Blasey Ford. “Each arrival of a new project brought hope that the errors of the prior could be undone… Then their book would come out, and I’d read it and feel my world turning upside down all over again. ‘That’s not how it happened,’ I would speak back to the pages. ‘I must have been unclear.’”
By contrast, Blasey Ford praises the many survivors who stood up and supported her, such as the two women, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, who confronted Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake in the elevator after he said he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh.
The interaction was caught on camera by CNN and broadcast worldwide. “I thought those women did the right thing,” said Blasey Ford. “I wanted to applaud them for their ability to show the kind of anger and despair I hadn’t summoned in myself. But I also worried that it was a risky way to approach someone like Jeff Flake.”
When she later went back and reviewed all her text messages, emails and letters, she commented: “I was struck by the chasm between the way I’d felt during each moment and the politeness I’d hidden behind… I’d been a good girl who followed the rules, and look where it had gotten me. Perhaps I should have been more like those women in the elevator with Flake.”
Brett’s “Lie Under Oath”
Blasey Ford assesses Kavanaugh’s character, saying that if he had acknowledged what had happened—or even said he didn’t remember but that it might have happened and he was sorry—she might have thought he was a good person. But instead, he “flat-out denied any possibility of every single thing… [so] the question of whether he had changed was answered.”
“The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know. Once he categorically denied my allegations as well as any bad behavior from his past during a Fox News interview, I felt more certain than ever that after my experience with him, he had not gone on to become the consummately honest person befitting a Supreme Court justice.”
The question wasn’t whether partying and acting crudely as a teenager disqualified Brett from being on the Supreme Court. It was whether he could be truthful about it.
Christine Blasey Ford in One Way Back
Blasey Ford describes Kavanaugh’s testimony as “enraged, his face twisted into an angry glare, words spewing from his mouth like venom.” She assesses his performance: “the red face, the screaming, the inappropriate jabs at Democratic senators, the infamous declaration ‘I still like beer.’ There’s not much I can add. Regardless of how you feel, only one of us was testifying as a candidate for a lifelong appointment to one of the most prestigious jobs in the world. I’d held to the field trip rules I’d been taught as a child about how to behave in the Senate. He had not.”
Blasey Ford zeroes in on what was really at issue in the hearing: “The question wasn’t whether partying and acting crudely as a teenager disqualified Brett from being on the Supreme Court. It was whether he could be truthful about it. To me, his suitability for the job should have been made clear in his response to the charges. Brett’s response was to clap back with rage and, I am convinced, lie under oath.”
Subsequent investigations and evidence collected after his confirmation, including in a book by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, produced extensive evidence that Kavanaugh was sexually abusive to girls and women in prep school and college, and that he regularly lied about his abusive past.
“We’re in the Middle of a Revolution”
Blasey Ford says that despite many misgivings about the process, she never questioned the way she presented her testimony, which “helped survivors feel seen.” “I know that the ultimate outcome was not a result of something I’d done during the dizzying hours I spent in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was the result of what was wrong with the people who had heard it, who had heard him, and decided to disregard me and give him the job anyway.”
Blasey Ford describes herself as an imperfect survivor. When deciding whether or not to step forward and report the assault in 2018, she questioned herself: “I wasn’t a perfect person either. Did I really have the right to say something?” She describes her hesitation as “easy to diagnose in hindsight”: “the patriarchy was in my blood. I was gaslighting myself before anyone else could do it.” The experience changed her: “What I’m finally coming to understand is that being imperfect doesn’t disqualify you from speaking out, finding peace and healing.”
The patriarchy was in my blood. I was gaslighting myself before anyone else could do it.
Christine Blasey Ford in One Way Back
She also explains how she was reluctant to step forward and report Kavanaugh. “I can offer insight to all the other people who might not have chosen this path for themselves either but who have chosen to do what’s right in the face of a seemingly all-powerful opposition, a monster of a wave. I’ve learned that sometimes you don’t do it because you are a natural-born disrupter. You do it because you have the power to help push the tides in the right direction. To cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”
Both Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford experienced relentless abuse and dishonesty not only from the Supreme Court nominees, but from men on the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as by the press and some members of the public. Both women spoke truth to power by testifying, and by writing books about their lives and experiences six years after their testimony.
Despite hopes of many that things might have changed in the decades years since Anita Hill spoke out in 1991, the men on the Senate Judiciary Committee once again appointed a credibly-accused sexual perpetrator and liar to the Supreme Court, who went on to attack women’s rights and survivors’ rights. How little has changed.
I’d like to believe that we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in years to come. If it takes countless survivors to tell their story despite personal risks and consequences on an individual level… I’m proud to have contributed.
Christine Blasey Ford in One Way Back
Nevertheless, Blasey Ford is still optimistic that change is still possible. “I’d like to believe that we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in years to come. If it takes countless survivors to tell their story despite personal risks and consequences on an individual level—all of us slowly stacking on top of one another until there is finally a collective response—I’m proud to have contributed. If my act of speaking out plays a role in an eventual paradigm shift, ending stigma around sexual assault and holding powerful people accountable for their actions, then I accept whatever personal sacrifices I had to make.”
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