I come down on the side of due process.
I am a survivor twice over. I think I might have shared this before, but I haven’t checked, so maybe not.
At 15 I was walking home from a party by myself, after midnight. I wasn’t supposed to be at that party. I wasn’t supposed to be where I’d been. I was supposed to be in my room asleep, but I had climbed out the window and gone to the party anyway. I don’t know the date, and I don’t know the address, but I could find the house again. It was a party of four- two boys and 2 girls. I can name two of them, I never knew the other girl. We had our party, and then I had to go- I don’t really remember if one of the guys offered to walk me home or not, but it would have been typical of me to turn down that offer.
I was bold and brash… and I would have said fearless. I am not sure fearless is right. I was unknowingly already in deeply traumatized mode due to the things I’d grown up with and was into textbook risk-taking behaviour. So I may have chosen to walk home by myself precisely because I knew it was a risky and scary thing to do. I may have been planning not to walk home at all, but to take a left at the next street over and head down to a busier corner where I could hitch-hike to another party, but that would also have been because it was a risky thing to do.
Anyway, as I walked home the same red car drove past me two or three times. The subdivision wasn’t large and there was never traffic, so I was suspicious. I might have thought that if passed by once more, I’d head back to the boy’s house where the party had been and see if I could get a ride, but I am not sure. I had one short connecting street to take on my route, the only place that wasn’t well lit, that provided cover, and I knew it. It was a neighbourhood that still had alleys, those little dirt roads between the backyards of the houses on the block where you put out your trash cans for the garbage collectors. So this short connecting bit of road that didn’t really even have a name had two alleys that opened up on it, and there were oleander or bougainvillea bushes, or maybe both, growing over the back fences providing more cover and darkness.
I moved to the middle of the road but I kept walking. I heard the bushes rustle as I got to the point where I was between the two alleys, and I turned and looked, and the red car was pulled back into the alley and there was a young man standing in front of it. For some reason, I associate him with the local marine base, but I can’t tell you why. It might have been the hair cut, but I don’t know because I can’t remember anything about his face or him, except he was a young man, not very tall, not very big, maybe blonde? He asked my name, I told him some fake name, he walked up to me and picked me up, carried me to the alley, threw me down on a bag of lawn clippings somebody had put out for pick up and told me not to scream.
I have always been extremely thankful that he told me not to scream, because up until that point I had been in a bizarre state of shock- like a bird being eyed by a cobra. I couldn’t think or move, and everything was in a sort of suspended animation state. The second he told me not to scream I realized that’s exactly what I needed to do and I screamed like a banshee, jumped up and ran to the next street, which was well-lit and also offered pedestrian cover by way of groups of trees and bushes in several of the landscaped yards. It wasn’t far to that street, and my impression is that the guy must have jumped into his car and peeled out the opposite direction. I hid in one of the bushes, waited to see if any cars were coming, then dashed to the next set of bushes. At some point, some high school kids in a truck stopped nearby and waited- I was pretty sure I knew them and they were headed to that party I’d previously planned on going to, but I was no longer interested in the party. I just wanted to go home safe and alone. I made my way the rest of the way home- it wasn’t that far, maybe half a mile I think, scooted back in my window and went to bed, shivering. I was so scared I think it might have been two whole days before I sneaked out the window again.
It was a few years before I told anybody that I remember, maybe ten. It was few more years before I told somebody else. I was never ashamed nor did I feel guilty. I didn’t feel like I deserved it. At the same time I did and do recognize that I had been foolhardy- in fact, acting foolhardy had been my goal, my way of life for high school, related to previous trauma.
It doesn’t strike me as awfully unbelievable that Ford never reported. It’s a little unusual that she never told anybody at all anything about it even once until she told a therapist in 2012. It does strike me as odd that she changed so many of the key details, that she gave her therapist’s notes to a reporter but refuses to give them to the Senate investigation or the FBI and that she ‘forgot’ giving them to the reporter. It strikes me as odd that she remembers going to couples therapy in 2012 because she needed a second door on the front of her home and her husband disagreed, when the records show the second door permit was obtained in 2008 and it’s not a second front door, it’s a second entrance they use for a rental apartment. It strikes me as very odd that she wouldn’t testify because she was afraid of flying when she flies frequently, and that she didn’t seem to knwo the Senate committee had offered to come to her so she didn’t have to come face the Senate committee in D.C. But maybe her lawyers didn’t tell her. They aren’t her lawyers anyway- she doesn’t know who is paying them. That’s odd. It’s weird that these are the lawyers Senator Feinstein *specifically* referred her to- is that Kosher? Senators steer business to legal firms?
There are some other odd things: Doesn’t she also say somewhere that after the attack it really messed her up for the first couple years of college? That would be consistent with the account placing the attack in the mid to late 80s when she was in her late teens, as she first told it. But Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t around then, so that date and age had to change.