Christine Blasey Ford's Timing Isn't Suspect

[ashling]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-brett-kavanaugh-accusation-timing.html

It doesn’t matter when assault victims speak up. People will always say they are too late.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

SEPT 17, 20182:44 PM

“But why did she wait so long?” A woman came forward Sunday with credible and specific claims about an alleged sexual assault she suffered at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when she was 15 and he was 17. And that was the principal objection raised: that her timing, and the timing of Senate Democrats, is the material issue here.

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Why do women wait until the last possible second to speak out about sexual harassment and assault claims? This is exactly the line of questioning Senate Republicans used to smear Anita Hill back when she testified against Clarence Thomas. Why didn’t she lodge these complaints until he was poised to sit on the highest court of the land, given that he had previously been appointed to prestigious positions?

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Here’s one problem with that analysis: It’s only the “eleventh hour” because Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell have decided this hearing needs to happen at light speed.

The definition of power must include the power to set the timetable in which facts are discernible, and Senate Republicans, who held a Supreme Court seat open for almost a year, are now unwilling to hold one open for three months. The reason the eleventh hour wasn’t, say, the third hour is entirely because the timetable has been set by those who wanted to short-circuit meaningful scrutiny. So the complaint that it’s too late in the process is hard to swallow.

That is one reason why complaints about Ford’s timing ring hollow. But here is the deeper reason why women don’t publicly report their assaults until the last possible instant and until they absolutely have to: Women who are victims start the clock at the moment of their trauma. Men who are perpetrators start it at the moment they are caught.

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Why don’t women come forward on the very day it happens? Because they have friends and hopes and dreams and confusion and alcohol and hope and every Hollywood movie ever. Because for a very long time, it’s not worth the cost.

In Ford’s case, the decision to come forward on the record in September was not an active choice but instead the result of a position she was forced into after her anonymous account was made public against her will. Consider Ford’s explanation to the Post:

As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.

“These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”

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