Two Victims…Kavanagh and Blasely-Ford

I heard MOST of Brett Kavanagh’s opening statement in real time and the next morning I listened to all of Christine Blasely-Ford’s. I have gone on to listen to their testimony. Here is how I break it down.  Make no mistake – both of these people have been through hell.  This isn’t about them at all.  Not one bit. She is being used and he abused by people posing as her champions and protectors.  I am deeply ashamed of what I have heard and witnessed.  It is my hope that fair-minded people see this for what it is.  It, for me, has been such a stunning abuse, such an amazing sham and a glaring illustration of how far some people will go.

I believe Blasely-Ford believes what she has testified to and that she WAS motivated by what she has called her civic duty.  I do not believe she ever envisioned what Senator Dianne Feinstein did with her information and the circus, the ugly circus, that it produced. I am sad when I see angry, right-winged memes that attack Dr. Blasely-Ford or make her look badly.  Please, people, stop it.  She is as much a victim as Mr. Kavanagh.  She has been used so egregiously that I find it hard to fathom human beings doing this to other human beings.  I had no idea that people would go to this length for power in this nation.  Now I have seen it.  I am sickened and I am saddened by it. For all of us.

Here is my break down of what I have seen and heard.

Telling “the truth” vs. the facts. It isn’t about who is “telling the truth” but about which story is most likely to BE true.  I believe that both Brett Kavanagh and Christine Blasely-Ford believe they are telling the “truth.” But a personal truth isn’t necessarily factual.

In 1985, I was in a horrific, prom-night, auto accident. I was not hurt badly but others were, very seriously. It was HORRIBLE.  My boyfriend and I managed the accident scene until help arrived. Our actions saved the life of one of our friends by ensuring he had a passage to breathe as the blood poured from his mouth; he would have drowned in his own blood. 

In the following few years there were lawsuits and stupid-ness.  I was a passenger in one of the two cars so I was a “witness” and nothing else; I had no dog in the fight and wasn’t party to any lawsuit. I owed nothing to anyone but the truth. 

I recall one major deposition, with over half a dozen various lawyers present, where I, a 17 or 18 year old, was asked to describe, in detail, what I did from the moment of impact; they wanted my story from the first thing I recalled.  I told my story with abject clarity and confidence.  In my story I talked of unbuckling my seatbelt and getting out of the car using the rear, left, passenger door and then going on to locate everyone. I said that everyone except our driver got out of their own doors; he had to crawl across as his door would not open. They allowed me to continue for an hour or two tell them everything I recalled.  They then asked me to reaffirm my story.  I did so again insisting that I had exited the car through that rear, left, passenger door.  They then slid a photo to me across the table we are all seated around of the car I was in.  The car was a 2-door and the driver’s side was smashed and would not open; the car didn’t even HAVE a rear, left, passenger door!  That meant that we ALL exited through the front, right door. I had to crawl into the front seat and across the car to get out! I was rocked; my “memory” had been so clear!  I was telling the TRUTH – as I recalled it. It was vivid and my brain had NO REASON to create that story.  My brain, for whatever reason, completely created that story.

That was only a 1-2 year lapse between event and interview.  It was not 36 years. It is EASY for a memory to fabricate things.  It is easy to imagine a brain tying an event and a person together that are not connected by anything other than a chapter of life; if asked I would guess that Dr. Blasely-Ford would affirm that our brains, especially around traumatic events, work to make sense of things and to have “facts” even if the brain creates “facts” that are not real; it gives us a sense of stability.  She may have met Brett that same summer and for some reason he stayed in the recesses of her memory and over the years, her brain melded the assault and Mr. Kavanagh together. This is her brain’s truth.  Sadly now, because it has been handled the way it has, her brain will never be able to disconnect the two.  As Rachel Mitchell, who obviously had mental-health experience, pointed out, this was NOT a method for good results for either the facts or for Dr. Blasely-Ford’s mental and emotional health.

Of course I haven’t any knowledge of this other than what we all have but I know from personal experience what MY brain did to ME.  I too was under oath to TELL THE TRUTH.  The thing was is that MY truth did not mirror the facts.

Bullet dodged, not life-altering trauma. I want to know how we are going to label sexual assault moving forward.  Granted, what she described happened to her should NOT have happened to her and I believe it DID happen to her; I don’t believe that Brett Kavanagh had anything to do with it.  If it happened to me it would have been scary as hell.  It would have been memorable and would have served as a great lesson of what young girls should and should not do and what sort of situations they should avoid in the future.  This doesn’t excuse the described boys’ behavior in ANY way. Drinking with boys who are hormonal zombies can lead to bad things and often does. This for me is a serious “dodged a bullet” story and not an “it damaged me forever story.”  But that’s me…

In defining sexual assault. Is it rape, I mean full-blown rape?  Is it groping? Is asking a women out and not taking no for an answer? Is it a wolf-whistle as we walk by? Is it was Dr. Blasely-Ford described?  These things are NOT the same and do NOT have the same effect on a woman. The #metoo movement has completely high-jacked the term and now women are creating trauma that never was trauma before because they are being told that things they experience WAS sexual assault when they didn’t think that way at all before! At the same time it is minimizing what happened to women who were truly assaulted.  I have been full-blown raped and when I hear of “lesser” crimes and incidents being called “sexual assault” I want to scream and say shut the F up – get over it.  

It is like our labeling of sexual offenders.  I read a story years back of two men who had to register and sex offenders.  One was a pedophile who had raped young children; he was a sexual predator and sick to his core.  The other was an 18 year old boy who had urinated outside in the wrong place at the wrong time and a little girl happened to see his penis.  THESE TWO ARE NOT EQUALS.  This use of the blanket term “sexual assault” is an assault on men for being men.  I am sorry that Dr. Blasely-Ford allowed this to so seriously color her life.  It would not have done the same to me and in fact because far more serious things have happened to me – and they didn’t color my life this way – I KNOW it wouldn’t have. Also, under today’s definition of the #metoo movement, every man on the planet is guilty of sexual assault.

Adjectives aren’t records & impressions of people. In this case I am forced to say who is more believable?  I do think that both people believe they are telling the truth.  But which one is more likely to be telling us the facts?  Christine Blasely-Ford lacks details so many that it there is no “case” from a legal perspective.  She recalls a couple of names. Doesn’t know others.  Describes some characteristics of the house with the bathroom being on the 2^nd floor a stairway being “narrow”, music being “turned up.”  These are adjectives that give both us and her the sense that there is a burned memory with clear recall.  Just because I could describe adjectives about getting out of that car the way I did, did not make them facts.

Brett Kavanagh is a highly organized personality; his successful career demanded it and it appears that he was the product of a father who lived it.  He describes his calendars as both a personal endeavor but one that his father took seriously too and sort of a family “thing”. I have old calendars that I have saved for years for the very same reason.  I wished I had been more deliberate with it but the years that I did do it, mean a great deal to me!  I look back every now and again and recall things that I would NEVER have retained without those calendar notes! Kavanagh's doing it with great regularity over the years are characteristics of a highly detailed, highly organized personality. My doing it was episodic – NOT highly organized, just episodes of it when I was engaged in things I wanted to record. Kavanagh presents himself as one who places a great deal of importance on details and facts and having something recorded to preserve memory.

Trajectories and life choices. Simply the two career paths these people chose, and took to great success, tells us a great deal about what each person values or finds important and attractive. It is what they are GOOD at.  Psychology is the study of mind and behavior in relation to a particular field of knowledge or activity. All minds and all behaviors are unique and while we have studies, norms and defined, aberrant behaviors as determined by society, it is a study of grays.  The law is black and white, far less gray. It is or isn’t against the law.  Facts matter. Proof matters. The law is filled with definitions and definitions OF definitions.  It is based in Latin, like medicine, a dead language, so no matter what present-day language is being spoke in the courts, the Latin definition remains WHAT IT IS.

This does tell me a bit about each person, the careers they chose.  It also leads me to believe that one person is tied more to facts produced from investigation and the other to emotional responses to derive facts.  A psychologist might interview a patient who is in an emotional state BECAUSE of the emotional state and out of that session distill facts about what produced the emotional response and how to manage it.  A lawyer is one who presents the facts and with those facts hopes to encourage a jury to get emotionally involved.  A lawyer must have facts and a psychologist doesn’t need or care about facts, because the focus is feelings regardless of the facts!  We can’t change the facts of our lives, like my having been raped. We can only the way we FEEL about it and our feelings are our responsibility.  That is the basis of most psychology therapies. I don’t say one profession or trajectory is better than the other.  I am just pointing out the differences in the two.

What is more likely factually accurate? Brett Kavanagh has been examined over his lifetime time and time again, beyond anything most of us can imagine. In 2012 he was appointed to the 2^nd most powerful court in the nation. This did NOT come up during that background investigation.  In the dozens and dozens of background checks, and we are talking the deepest most exhaustive background checks that can be done, how did the event, the described party-animal behavior and his penchant to over indulge NOT COME UP? I was married to a Naval Officer who had top-tippy-top security clearance.  The background checks for these things is profound; I got calls long after we were divorced and these investigations covered from birth to your last trip to the bathroom. It is virtually impossible for this described purported pattern of bad behavior to have gone undiscovered until now.

Dr. Blasely-Ford describes and visually and audibly presents being deeply affected by what happened to her.  She describes being so terrified that she did not cry for help at the time, she did not tell anyone about the attack and she carried this burden for years.  This flies in the FACE of all of her education and training.  This is the worst thing a victim can do and her education is of the highest degree on the very subject.  Further, she then tells of a day, not long after the assault, where she goes into a grocery store.  She is with her parents and it is a store where she KNOWS one of her alleged attackers, Mark Judge, works.  She describes herself as wanting to be “independent” of her parents and enters the store through a different door than they do.  

Why would she CHOOSE to be alone in such a situation? She sees her alleged attacker there working, approaches him in a self-described “friendly manner” and says hello to him.  Her story is that he then turned “white as a sheet.”  But wait Dr. Blasely-Ford, why would you, being so terrified, separate from your parents, knowing he worked there, approach him as a friend and engage him?  This simply doesn’t make any sense.  It leads me to wonder if even Mark Judge wasn't actually involved either.  Her brain tied these young men to an event that had nothing to do with them. 

Again very detailed little episodes like the grocery store story are compelling and make us want to believe this person really remembers well!  But these stories are coupled with gaping holes, lacking facts and information, as in how she got to the party, how she got home, etc.  when she lived far away and did not drive.

Dr. Blasely-Ford is relying on her “memory” and we have already discussed what our brains do with that; memory is not reliable.  Mr. Kavanagh is saying he doesn’t remember details from 36 years ago and is instead relying on a calendar, a written record, detailing his schedule.

Which is more likely to be factually true?

So this is all I can really say on the matter.  I will repeat, this is sad, stunning and a disgusting display of manipulation. An abuse of power to gain more power. It is something we, as voters should be ashamed.  We, collectively, are the people who put these people in power.  We should remember what we have seen and heard.  It was that bad.  It was that obvious and since we can do something about it, we must.