Christine Blasey Ford Has Some Scores to Settle

Christine Blasey Ford loves kelp, which to anyone who’s spent much time in the ocean may be the most shocking revelation in One Way Back, her account of her experiences testifying during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Senate confirmation hearing. She acknowledges that most people, including longtime surfers like herself, get “creeped out” by kelp and its “slippery tendrils that pull at your legs in the water,” but to Ford it’s a “perfect, slimy, living thing.”

This slightly goofy yet somehow exemplary confession is quintessential Ford. In an era of widespread posturing, she is unaffected and earnest, which is why her testimony about the high school party during which Kavanaugh and a friend allegedly assaulted her had such impact, though it couldn’t stop Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation. Ford opens One Way Back with a dedication to “the letter writers” and a photo of her dining room, overrun with stacks of mail she’s received. As Ford, a research psychologist at Stanford’s medical school, breaks it down, the letters are 75 percent offers of “general support,” 24 percent the stories of fellow sexual assault survivors, and a “small but terrifying” 1 percent hate mail and death threats.

The letters give a better sense of how Ford is viewed than you can get online, where die-hard MAGA-heads and suspiciously defensive men rage on about her “lies.” Even Donald Trump was initially impressed by her, letting slip to reporters that he found Ford a “very credible witness” and her testimony “very compelling,” before he realized that this was against his best interest and resorted to mocking her instead. “The strange part,” Ford writes, “was that it didn’t feel like I hadn’t been heard. It felt like I had been believed, but then the response was a proverbial shrug.”

One Way Back explains much, if not that shrug. Why did Ford essentially derail her happy life and—contrary to much internet conspiracizing—nearly empty her bank account by going public with an accusation of a nearly 40-year-old assault? She believed she had important evidence of Kavanaugh’s character that might cause Trump to select another candidate instead, and hoped that she could supply that evidence to responsible authorities while maintaining her own anonymity. People have called her naïve, but Ford prefers to consider herself “idealistic,” the product of a D.C.–area upbringing that stuffed her full of the exact sort of lofty rhetoric about U.S. history and institutions that GOP culture warriors want to see inculcated into American schoolchildren nationwide.

But Ford was also a rebel. Her father was an old-school country club Republican, as was everyone in the posh but stultifying environs of her childhood. “Whenever something bad happened,” she writes, “my family avoided talking about it. If anyone did bring it up, even casually, everyone would get upset at the person who addressed the issue” and reimpose the code of silence. Ford resisted this and, as a result, “felt like the odd one out, too emotional,” too sensitive to being teased with that phony joviality such people use to conceal their hostility. (At Ford’s wedding, one of her brothers made a toast elaborating on how much more money their father had spent on her than on either of her two brothers.)

Ford felt at home only after leaving her hometown. Her bumpy undergraduate years in North Carolina segued into the discovery of California, where she learned to surf and encountered an entirely new form of masculinity. Where the “East Coast prep school guys were performatively misogynistic,” she writes, “the West Coast surfers were strong and self-possessed.” The life she found, pursuing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology while bumming around the beach with guys who picked up odd jobs in construction to fund their surfing life, struck her as “perfectly imperfect,” the place she finally belonged. She acquired a passion for Metallica and Pearl Jam, bands thanked in her acknowledgments as “the music that heals.”

Surfing metaphors abound in One Way Back. When, after months of struggling to get her accusation to register with the Senate Judiciary Committee behind the scenes, Ford wanted to go public with her story, her lawyers advised against it. “You made me paddle out,” she told them. “That’s the hardest part. And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave.” While Ford describes her initial impulse in accusing Kavanaugh as a scientist’s attempt to provide the committee with important “data,” she had a rather unscientific investment in a particular outcome. She did not think Kavanaugh was a worthy candidate for appointment to a judicial body that should be above reproach.

Although Ford wouldn’t see it this way, One Way Back makes it clear that these two sides of her personality—the scientist and the surfer—often war with each other. She has some considerable bones to pick with various parties involved in the run-up to her testimony. Her senator, Dianne Feinstein, in particular, played a muddling role in bringing Ford’s accusation to her colleagues. But Ford’s primary grievances arise from the aftermath of the confirmation hearing. Sen. Chuck Grassley issued a memo dismissing the charges against Kavanaugh that was full of untruths and distortions, including mention of a photo of Ford with George Soros that even the memo itself acknowledged was faked. A much-publicized FBI investigation didn’t even bother to question her or to look at records indicating that she’d discussed the assault with a therapist and friends long before Kavanaugh’s nomination. A smear machine aimed at discrediting her ground into motion, producing bestselling books that reproduced the false claims of a disgruntled ex-boyfriend and the equivocations of Ford’s onetime friend, a woman who privately sent her supportive texts but publicly cast doubt on her account of the night in question. Ford also lodges a foggy complaint against two unnamed journalists—immediately recognizable as Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times—who provided an account of her ordeal in a book (She Said) with which she takes unspecified exception.

Ford, who was truly a naïf in this respect, kept expecting the event of her testimony—the responses of the senators, the behavior of old friends, and above all the depiction in the media—to unfold like the rational proceedings of science, when in fact it was more like the heavings of the sea. The media is much like the ocean; you can get a great deal out of it, but never on your own terms. You can ride a wave, but not control it. Its behavior is somewhat predictable, just not in the way that Ford expected. Of course partisan operatives launched a campaign to discredit her. The venom was in direct proportion to her believability as a witness, which was considerable. It was precisely because Ford came across as so unstudied and sincere, so uncalculating in her self-presentation, that she had to be so furiously denounced as a fake. “It was unfortunately never just about telling the truth,” she writes, and you have to wonder if she might have been the last person left in the world who expected a Senate hearing to be about that.

The intensity of harassment and threats leveled against Ford and her family forced them to leave their house and to employ a 24-hour security team. She was unable to teach. It was more than a year before they could move back home and replace the bodyguards with an extensive security system, still in place. During this interlude of what Ford describes as “hibernation”—it sounds more like depression—she spent a lot more time online than she had in her previously carefree life as a surfing professor. This was, of course, disastrous and only amplified her feelings of being under siege. Anyone who’s ever been the target of an internet pile-on can recognize themself in Ford’s desperation as misrepresentations ballooned into the realm of fantasy, creating a 2D image of female perfidy. Her advisers warned her not to read the comments, but like most noobs, she could not resist, then she could not let go of her distress at seeing so many people being so wrong about her on the internet.

If this sounds like a criticism of Ford, it’s not. True, she did not understand how the media and the internet work, and she admits as much. But it is precisely the destruction of this innocence that makes One Way Back uniquely tragic. It is horrible that Ford endured a sexual assault in high school, but despite lingering anxiety, she did go on to a fulfilling life: a great marriage and career; two lovely-sounding sons; a capacity for having fun, especially in the water, of which she is justly proud. The person who emerges in the pages of this memoir is quirky, guileless, and incredibly likable: the professor who teaches her students surf sign language, the fantasy football enthusiast, the headbanger and grunge lover, the aficionado of kelp. In the last few pages of One Way Back Ford mourns this former self. “I don’t know if she even exists anymore,” she writes. When Facebook serves up photos of her with her sons from the before times, building sandcastles on the beach, she grieves. The unexpected power of her memoir is that she makes you grieve for that woman too.

The first time Ford tried to write this book, she was so angry about her loss that she had to abandon the attempt. She still worries that her story will discourage other victims from coming forward, and it very well could. She writes that while she has some regrets, she would do it again. She feels that she’s contributed to a “swell” of resistance against the tolerance of sexual assault that may someday amount to more than a shrug. Still, “I wanted this book to set the record straight,” she writes, “but if I’m being perfectly honest, I was also kind of bitter that I was the one who had to do it.” There were politicians, activists, journalists—all people better acquainted with the blasted terrain where her battle to be heard was joined. But it was precisely her unfamiliarity with such battles that made her so persuasive. She made a great personal sacrifice to tell her story, and she doesn’t hesitate to say so. That is, after all, the truth.