How many credibly accused sexual predators does the
Supreme Court need before it can be considered appropriately “balanced?”
We already have Justice Clarence Thomas, famous
for his angry yet unconvincing denial about using inappropriate sexual language
against Anita Hill while she worked for him. Of course, Republicans continue to
imagine that Professor Hill made up her accusations about Thomas, even though David
Brock, the author of the attack-book, The
Real Anita Hill, eventually admitted that he had lied in order to trash Ms.
Hill’s reputation and to protect Clarence Thomas.
One example of Brock’s (and Thomas’s) brutal attacks
against Hill is revealed in a New York Times article that describes the intimidation
of a witness who had spoken in support of Hill: “Justice Thomas used an
intermediary to provide Mr. Brock with damaging information about a woman who
had come forward to provide support for Ms. Hill's accusations of harassment by
Justice Thomas.”
With this material at his disposal, Brock “then
used the information to force the woman to retract her statements about Justice
Thomas.”
In other words, a woman who had been willing to offer
support for Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas was then, with the
help of the Justice himself, intimidated into withdrawing her support. Brock
also admitted to engineering attacks against Democrats and feminists who supported
Hill.
All of this is reported in Brock’s later confessional
book, Blinded by the Right: The
Conscience of an Ex Conservative.
Given the vicious onslaught against Anita Hill that
Brock spearheaded, and Clarence Thomas abetted, it’s no surprise that Professor
Christine Blasey Ford was reluctant to come forward with her accusations
against Brett Kavanaugh.
I believe that Blasey Ford is telling the truth when
she says she was held down and groped by Kavanaugh as he held her mouth shut
and tried to take her clothes off. This incident happened at a party in the early
1980s when she and Kavanaugh were both high school students.
Here’s why I find Blasey Ford convincing: She only
revealed her concerns about Kavanaugh’s character to her senator, Diane
Feinstein, last July before he was designated to be President Trump’s pick for
the Court. Furthermore, she was clearly deeply traumatized by the experience,
which she regards as attempted rape. She brought it up in at least two therapy
sessions that she underwent about six years ago, which is to say, decades after
the incident occurred. This assault changed her life very much for the worse.
Notes from those therapy sessions confirm this point.
Finally, in accordance with her attorney’s advice,
she took a lie detector test administered by a former FBI agent and passed.
How can she not be telling the truth?
Kavanaugh, she says, was stumbling drunk at the 1980s
party and this point, along with the fact that he was then only 17, has led
some people to argue that even if true, the incident shouldn’t be counted as significant
since he was a mere adolescent. But I disagree. For one thing, if, when I was a
high school student, I had found out that one of my classmates had done such a
thing to a young woman, I would have considered him a nasty character and I
would not pass it off with the thought that, after all, he’s just a teenager.
In fact, one of my friends in college acted abusively toward a young woman at a
drunken fraternity party when he was about 20. The points that redeemed my
friend in my eyes were that he admitted to what he had done and, most importantly,
he clearly felt terrible about it.
This is what’s most troubling about Brett Kavanaugh.
He is unwilling to express remorse for this incident.
Of course, like Clarence Thomas, he denies
everything. But…
It is worth adding that Blasey Ford says there was
another young man in the room along with Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge. Mr. Judge,
who today is a writer, strongly denies that the incident took place. However,
Mr. Judge has written extensively about the drunken parties which he and fellow
Georgetown Prep students engaged in during the 1980s. In his fictionalized
account of this scene, he refers at one point to a fellow prep student named Bart
O’Kavanaugh who pukes and passes out in someone’s car after leaving a party.
I sincerely hope we do not put another accused
sexual predator on the Supreme Court. But if the Republicans do decide to go
ahead with Kavanaugh’s appointment, shouldn’t they at least expect a little
remorse from him? Shouldn’t he be expected, at a minimum, to express heartfelt
sympathy for the woman who says he traumatized her with his sexual aggression?
If, as he claims, he has no memory of this incident (possible, given the drunken
atmosphere surrounding Georgetown Prep parties) shouldn’t he at the very least
be empathetic and apologetic about Ms. Basely Ford’s suffering? Is that too
much to ask that of a man who presents himself as worthy of sitting on the
highest court in the land?
And, by the way, what is in those hundreds of
documents from Kavanaugh’s past that the White House refuses to release?
From The New Republic
