Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who wrote a letter accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, is going public with her story, saying she thought he might kill her during an alleged drunken high school attack.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California, to The Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them and sent them tumbling.
She told the newspaper she ran from the room, locked herself in a bathroom until she heard the boys go back downstairs, and then fled the house where the party was taking place.
Ford described the attack as taking place during the summer in the early 1980s, when Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford charges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
In her first public comments on the incident, which came to light last week after Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein referred a ‘letter’ describing a sexual assault to the FBI, she described what happened when they were high school students in suburban Maryland.
While his friend watched, Ford recounts to The Post, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding against and attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it.
She said she tried to scream and he put his hand over her mouth.
She told the paper she did not recall all the details after such a long time but she thinks the incident occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15 and at the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda.
Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at the all-male Georgetown Prep.
Kavanaugh has denied the charges.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) and a growing number of Senate Democrats are now calling for the Senate to postpone a vote on Kavanaugh.
“Senator Grassley must postpone the vote until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated,” said Schumer. “For too long, when woman have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) also said the nomination “should be put on hold until the FBI conducts an investigation.”