The woman who has accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers said today that the hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hold next week to examine her allegations would not be fair or adequate.
Speaking through a lawyer, Christine Blasey Ford, a university professor in Northern California, said she remained willing to cooperate with the committee as it considers Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but did not want to appear at a hearing where the two of them would be the only witnesses.
“The committee’s stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding,” the lawyer, Lisa Banks, said in a statement. “The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the committee discovering the truth.”
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the committee, said today that he was flexible on how to handle the questioning of Dr. Blasey but not on the date. He offered to hold a public hearing or to conduct the interview behind closed doors, whichever she preferred, and that Blasey could be questioned by staff members or lawyers who could interview her in California.
But Grassley rejected Blasey’s request that the F.B.I. investigate her charges before any hearing and made clear that he would not postpone the hearing past Monday. “It would be a disservice to Dr. Ford, Judge Kavanaugh, this Committee, and the American people to delay this hearing any further,” he wrote in a letter to committee Democrats.
The back-and-forth came hours after President Trump described the allegation against Kavanaugh as hard to believe and the furor surrounding it as “very unfair” to the judge.
Blasey, 51, who is sometimes also called by her married name, Ford, has accused Kavanaugh, 53, of pinning her to a bed, groping her, trying to remove her clothing and covering her mouth to keep her from screaming during a party when the two were teenagers in Maryland in the early 1980s.