Kavanaugh: An attacker of women both legally and literally?

There are constitutionalreasons to put on hold any consideration of a nominee to the Supreme Court by President Trump, and plenty of other grounds for denying Brett Kavanaugh the lifetime appointment. When a letter about a sexual assault that Kavanaugh had allegedly committed in high school was released last week, I personally thought it might be a poor last-ditch effort to impede his appointment. We knew nothing about the anonymous allegation. Perhaps all there was to it was a clumsy encounter with a clueless high school boy. Why undermine the #MeToo movement with this cynical move? Surely, of all the reasons not to move forward with the appointment of Judge Kavanaugh, this was not the most robust.

Today the person alleging the sexual assault came forward with a credible bone-chilling story. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, “decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.” What she described was not a clumsy high-school encounter, but premeditated sexual assault by a pair of young men from an elite all-male school (Georgetown Preparatory School). The two sequestered her in a bedroom while one (Mark Judge) watched Kavanaugh sexually assault Ford, their prey. When she tried to scream, Kavanaugh covered her mouth: He obviously knew she did not want him to be pinning her to the bed, groping her, and trying to tear off her clothes.

This experience so affected Ford that the story was shared during couples therapy six years ago, more than 30 years since the incident took place, and was documented in notes by the therapist. Of course, Ford had no political motive for retelling her experience in this confidential setting with her husband and therapist as she tried to work through the effects of the trauma. She did not intend to share it with anyone else or come forward publicly in this way.

Pack hunting by elite schoolboys who isolate their prey is something that gets socialized over years. Kavanaugh was a late teen when this incident occurred in the early 1980s. That’s mature enough to have done this before, and it is unlikely that he and his buddies suddenly realized it was a bad idea and stopped. I would bet this was not the only time Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman, and his fundamental disrespect for women continues to be expressed through his legal opinions.

So, to the array of reasons why Kavanaugh’s appointment should not go forward, add this portrait of a sexual predator.