Dr. Christine Blasey Ford Is a Whistle-Blower

Last month, Bob Woodward’s Fear went on sale; it sold more than 750,000 copies on the first day. Woodward’s behind-the-curtain look at Donald Trump’s White House is typical of his journalistic style in that, as Dwight Garner put it, “named sources for scenes, thoughts, and quotations appear only sometimes.” It’s a methodology that Woodward notoriously pioneered in his first book, All the President’s Men, in which he and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein chronicled their reporting based on the account of famed anonymous informant Deep Throat, which ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Woodward himself admits that it wasn’t their stellar reporting that brought Nixon down—in a recent interview, Woodward explained that “Nixon resigned not because of our reporting, but because we started a process of the government looking more intensely at what had gone on.” Nor was it Deep Throat’s information alone that was enough. His use was as a whistle-blower: someone on the inside of a house of cards who agrees to pull one out, knowing that the whole thing will come crashing down. And, in Nixon’s case, it did. The Senate Watergate Committee, which followed the first Deep Throat articles in 1972, “was the gold standard of congressional investigations,” says Woodward. “They got testimony from everyone. I mean, it went on for weeks. I mean, the networks stopped doing soap operas and ran the Senate Watergate hearings back to back. So I think that there was a sense that you can go from journalism to government action.”

Emphasis, perhaps, on was. At the same time that Fear was flying off the shelves, Americans were at odds about the veracity of another very non-anonymous account, from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the researcher and professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were high school students in the early 1980s. Doubt came from both sides of the aisle, if at different moments and to varying degrees: Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary committee, sat on the information for more than a month before making the allegation known to the rest of her colleagues. Republicans immediately said Ford was part of a last-ditch effort on the part of Democrats to derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation; Ford was “mixed up”; Ford had mistaken Kavanaugh for another man (an argument that seems to have been both coordinated by the Republican party and hastily recanted); or perhaps most disturbingly, that if the event Ford described did occur, it wasn’t such a big deal. (As former Congressman Joe Walsh tweeted, “If stupid, bad, or drunken behavior as a minor back in high school were the standard, every male politician in Washington, D.C. would fail.”)

And ranking Republicans continued to refuse to authorize an FBI investigation into Ford’s claims until forced to by public pressure—the exact catalyst that Woodward said made Deep Throat’s story, and his reporting, viable. The contrast between how the government has reacted to Ford’s firsthand account and how it reacted 40 years ago to Woodward and Bernstein’s anonymous one is telling. From All the President’s Men to Fear, Woodward has made a career out of a proudly imperfect documentation methodology. His reporting style is acceptable because it ostensibly serves the larger project of the truth, therefore justifying itself even if it can’t be corroborated at the time (although All the President's Men is perhaps the only work that has actually delivered on this model). “The sources are not anonymous to me,” is his famous refrain; pundits and political junkies on all sides were salivating over how quickly Fear would rankle the highest echelons of the White House, even as Donald Trump dismissed its contents as false, and even as Ford has been maligned at worst, and scrutinized at best, for her own imperfect story.

But Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is a whistle-blower, too: one who is willing to risk the rest of her life and her personal safety by revealing one of the most painful and traumatic moments of her life. Despite Republicans’ best efforts, her whistle-blowing already working, almost immediately after she spoke out: Since she came out with her accusations against Kavanaugh, two more women have come forward with stories in which Kavanaugh was drunk and sexually aggressive; one of them, Julie Swetnick, has claimed that he knew about and was present for a series of gang rapes at house parties like the one at which Ford was assaulted. Kavanaugh’s defenses—that this is a smear campaign, that he did not drink to excess in high school, nor did he have disrespectful relationships with women—have begun to fray under the weight of unearthed yearbook entries and other witnesses accounts from his time in high school and college.

So why haven’t we yet deemed Ford a whistle-blower? Is it because the truth she’s getting at is just so big and so universally damning that too many people in power have too much to lose by treating her like one? This is, ironically, the same truth gestured at throughout this entire year in the wake of the #MeToo movement: that our society is pervasively, historically imbalanced toward men, and that much of that imbalance is maintained by demeaning and dehumanizing women through sexual intimidation, harassment, and violence. Even outside partisanship, this is a structural reality that implicates nearly everyone at the top. Republican senators, as they attempt to express their belief that survivors should be heard (while at the same time as dismissing Dr. Ford), have also worked amicably for the past two years with a man accused of sexual misconduct by 22 women, who was recorded bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” That fact alone should show that there will never be “evidence” capable of persuading those who would decide that Ford’s story has no bearing on Kavanaugh’s future—it’s not that they don’t believe Kavanaugh could have engaged in the kind of behavior he is accused of; they simply don’t care, until it becomes too untenable publicly not to care.

Which is another reason, in our new era of trying to consider sexual assault with more empathy and clarity, that it is important to understand Ford as a whistle-blower: The imperfections of her account are perfectly understandable if you know about why women don’t report for so long, if at all, or how often assailants in sexual assault are people that victims know. Her willingness to share her story in spite of them—her conviction—becomes her credibility, which is no less than that of the high school classmates who signed a letter in support of Kavanaugh (though one has since found reason to potentially remove herself, or the members of the girls’ basketball team who sat behind him when his hearing began. And, in its wake, the system that it has brought down around Kavanaugh—not just his individual culpability, but an elite pipeline of schools and legal communities that enabled and benefit from his success—is revealed. It might seem antithetical to consider Ford’s role in these hearings as an individual intervening in a system, rather than as one individual making a claim against another, given the profoundly personal nature of her story—but siloing sexual assault into the realm of the personal (the “he said, she said”) is exactly why Republicans thought they could get away with refusing to investigate. Ford has already dealt with the personal trauma she endured in therapy and with her family. She came forward—at great personal cost—because she could not watch her abuser achieve the highest legal distinction in the country, one that would give him the power to decide laws that she herself, her children, would have live by, or go without.

Historically, America doesn’t tend to treat its government whistle-blowers with respect, Deep Throat aside. Even when whistle-blowers provide the kinds of unimpeachable “hard” evidence that politicians care about, they are called traitors, and, of course, some of them are incarcerated. The political and public reaction to a whistle-blower reveals exactly who in power is scared to be giving it up, even if they themselves aren’t accused of anything, because of the sweeping change a whistle-blower often ushers in. The #MeToo movement has showed, if nothing else, how the deterrence around disrupting a power circuit from which many people benefit is perhaps even more harmful and cruel to victims than the abuse itself. As does the outcome of the FBI investigation that the White House finally called for, a week after Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of the Senate Judiciary: Kavanaugh's confirmation will likely go ahead as planned.

Anita Hill was a whistle-blower, too, one who, like many others, wasn’t understood as such for a very long time. And like Ford’s evidence, hers was imperfect: her memory, her humiliation. But, again, just like Ford, there were others who came after her, though the Senate Judiciary committee, through bipartisan negotiation, decided not to hear from them. A fight against a Supreme Court justice, a lifetime appointment, is a fight against, or, really, for a certain type of future, which makes it all the more upsetting to feel like we are reliving the past. We can demand not just that we believe women, but that we are willing to take a cold, hard look at what happens when we believe them, and let that change things, too.