Following Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about being sexually assaulted by the US Supreme Court nominee when he was 17, numerous women on American news reported that listening to her terrible story made them cry.
I didn’t cry. Indeed, my reaction to Ford’s statement was at such odds with the garment–rending anguish of my fellow Democrats that I had to wonder whether either I’d missed something or maybe there was something wrong with me. So I just read the entire transcript. I hadn’t missed anything.
As for whether there’s something wrong with me, I’ll leave that for others to judge. But here’s how I’ve parsed a tale that roiled my country for weeks and which, even after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Democrats in Congress are not letting go.
Purportedly, at age 15, Ford was pushed into a bedroom at a teenage gathering by two boys. One laid on top of her and began ‘running his hands’ over her body and ‘grinding into’ her. She yelled, and he put a hand over her mouth. The other boy sat down on the mattress twice. She escaped to a bathroom across the hall.
Although the dump-Trump media all reference this incident as ‘attempted rape’, nothing in Ford’s account substantiates that her assailant had any such intention. She was afraid she’d be raped, and that part, for a young girl, is likely true. However briefly, she was also afraid she’d be killed — I’ll barely buy that — but nobody tried to murder her, and they didn’t. The boys locked the bedroom door, but on the inside; she was not locked in. While Ford claims Kavanaugh tried to remove her clothes, he didn’t. Her testimony doesn’t cite so much as a strap being tugged off her shoulder. If she escaped from two older boys, they weren’t trying very hard to detain her.
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