page_title: Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination
section_title: Christine Blasey Ford
hierarchical_section_title: Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination / Sexual assault allegations / Allegations / Christine Blasey Ford
caption_attribution_description: English: Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford rises to give an oath prior to her opening statement.
context_page_description: On July 9, 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to succeed retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. When nominated, Kavanaugh was a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a position he was appointed to in 2006 by President George W. Bush.
  The Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Judge Kavanaugh and heard witness testimonies concerning his nomination to the Supreme Court over the course of a four-day hearing, September 4–7, 2018. Several days later, it was revealed that Christine Blasey Ford had written a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein in July accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault while they were both in high school in 1982. The Committee postponed its vote and invited both Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford to appear at public hearing. In the interim, two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, accused Kavanaugh of separate past instances of sexual assault.
  Both Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford testified before the Committee on September 27; the following day the nomination was forwarded to the full Senate on an 11–10 vote.
context_section_description: On July 30, 2018, Christine Blasey Ford wrote U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein a letter accusing Kavanaugh of having sexually assaulted her in the 1980s. Ford requested that her allegation be kept confidential. Feinstein did not refer the allegation to the FBI until September 14, 2018, after the Judiciary Committee had completed its hearings on Kavanaugh's nomination and "after leaks to the media about [the Ford allegation] had reached a "fever pitch".
  On September 16, Ford was revealed by The Washington Post to be the author of the allegations against Kavanaugh. In her report to the Post, Ford stated that in the early 1980s, when she and Kavanaugh were teenagers, Kavanaugh and his classmate Mark Judge "corralled" her in a bedroom at a party in Maryland. According to Ford, Kavanaugh pinned her to the bed, groped her, ground against her, and tried to pull off her clothes and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. Ford said that she was afraid Kavanaugh "might inadvertently kill me" during the attack. She got away when Judge jumped on the bed, knocking them all over.
  Ford said she later attended couples counseling with her husband where she first talked about the incident in 2012. The therapist's notes from the time, parts of which were released on September 16, 2018, said that she had stated that she was assaulted by students "from an elitist boys' school", who eventually became "highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington", although the notes do not name Kavanaugh. Notes from another session a year later say that Ford had previously described a "rape attempt" while in high school.
  In August, Ford took a polygraph test with a former FBI agent, who concluded Ford was being truthful when she endorsed a statement summarizing her allegations as accurate.
  On September 22, it was revealed that Garrett Ventry, who had been assigned by the GOP to promote the media campaign for Kavanaugh's nomination, resigned from his position as a communications aide for the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 21 following revelations of his own sexual harassment allegations from a previous job. Multiple U.S. Senators acquired copies of Judge's books about his time at Georgetown Preparatory School, in order to prepare for questioning of Kavanaugh and Ford before the committee.
caption: Christine Blasey Ford
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