I suspect that Christine Blasey Ford is being truthful
September 23, 2018Nobody asked for my personal take on the Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh allegations, but here it is anyway.
My main concern here is the question, who is most likely to be telling the truth? We will never know for sure, but we can consider what is possible and what is likely.
First: Could they BOTH be telling the truth? Could Blasey Ford really have been assaulted in the manner that she described, but by someone else whom she mistook for or misremembers as Kavanaugh? Not likely. Blasey Ford has said there is zero chance that she has the wrong guy. Either her story is wrong, or Kavanaugh’s is.
Second: Is either person known to be serially dishonest? I don’t think so. Blasey Ford is a generally respected psychology professor; Kavanaugh is a generally respected judge. Some have argued that Kavanaugh perjured himself before the Senate, but the details are sufficiently dense that I’m not sure what to believe.
No, what really has me pissed off are the ignorant, disingenuous, and cruel portrayals of Blasey Ford as an out-of-control liar — from people who demonstrate little to no germane understanding of sexual assault in general or Blasey Ford’s case in particular. Here are some of the common yet utterly wrong claims being made.
(1) “The timing of her compliant is highly suspicious.” No, it’s not, explains Dahlia Lithwick. Blasey Ford kept this to herself for a long time because that’s what many girls and women do in a society that has shown them little sympathy. She eventually alluded to the event in years-ago conversations with her husband and therapist, then wrote her letter when Kavanaugh was one of several potential nominees under consideration. That’s not proof of anything, but it’s not suspicious either. Imperfect handling of her charge by Sen. Feinstein and Democrats is not her fault.
(2) “It’s not plausible that she remembers X from this incident, but not Y.” Blasey Ford’s account should certainly be examined for internal consistency and for consistency with other external facts. But if you claim (as a physician friend of mine did on Facebook) that Blasey Ford’s story is incompatible with “basic behavioral psychology,” you’re being WAY too presumptuous about what she should and shouldn’t remember. When a person experiences trauma and then tries unsuccessfully to forget about it for 35 years, the nature of the 35-year-old memory will depend on (A) the details of the trauma, (B) the details of the post-trauma processing, and (C) the particular brain of the survivor. I’m not an expert on memory per se, but I do have a Ph.D. in physiology. Most amateur psychologists, including my friend, are in over their heads on this one.
(3) “She just made this up to stop the Kavanaugh nomination because she’s pro-choice, etc.” I’d assume that Blasey Ford, like most academics, is politically liberal, and there has been some reporting to support that. But I haven’t seen any good evidence that she’s a radical activist or anything like that. More to the point, who among us would trade a peaceful, happy life for a flurry of death threats and public vilification, all for the sake of possibly reducing a particular judge’s chances of confirmation, when the next judge nominated will probably be equally pro-life anyway? That’s not an ulterior motive; that’s closer to masochism.
It’s those who are smearing Blasey Ford who have the ulterior motive.
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