Christine Blasey Ford will tell the Senate that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault on her in their high school years stayed with her for her whole life, according to prepared testimony for Thursday’s hearing.
Ford, in her testimony, is due to make clear she has no uncertainty about the identity of her alleged attacker, referring to Kavanaugh as “the boy who sexually assaulted me.”
“I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t remember as much as I would like to,” Ford said. “But the details about that night that bring me here today are ones I will never forget. They have been seared into my memory and have haunted me episodically as an adult.”
“Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” Ford added. “For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone the details.”
Kavanaugh has denied her allegations, and in his prepared testimony for Thursday’s hearing, he is set to again issue a complete denial of her claim.
In her written testimony, Ford describes the long path her accusations took from her private outreach earlier this year to her public appearance on Thursday, and her reluctance to appear before the committee.
“I am here today not because I want to be,” Ford said. “I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”
And as for political considerations, Ford said it was not her place to determine if Kavanaugh would ultimately head to the Supreme Court and that although the all-male GOP side of the committee hired a female attorney to ask questions on its behalf, she hoped to engage with the senators themselves.
“It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court,” she said. “My responsibility is to tell the truth.”
Kavanaugh, in his testimony, is prepared to say that while he did not assault Ford, he was “not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time.”