Silence on Wall Street. Tears in a retirement home. The country watches, transfixed, as Ford tells h

[Demovictory9]

At a cafe in Kansas City, Mo., Coleen Voeks sipped a glass of Redemption whiskey. She held it up to the TV, as a kind of toast.

Voeks, now 45, said she was raped in high school but never told anyone until recently. She felt guilt and remorse, as if she had done something wrong.


“I shouldn’t have gone to his house — I knew his family wasn’t there,” Voeks said. “I should have fought harder. You go through those things for years. What could I have done?”

She continued: “I was 17, and now I’m 45, and it’s taken a long time to get to the point that I realized, when I say no, no means no.”

In Milwaukee, a small group of people watched the hearing on TV at a bar called Y-Not.

The TV above the bar showed Rachel Mitchell — an Arizona prosecutor brought in by Republicans — questioning Ford about her memories and a polygraph test Ford had taken about the allegations.

The crowd, which previously had been ambivalent about the hearing, turned strongly — and profanely — in favor of Ford.

“She’s not on [expletive] trial,” said Paul Chier, sitting at the bar, responding to the prosecutor’s questioning of Ford.


“Unfortunately, she is on trial, and she is [expletive] killing it,” answered Matt Earnest, sitting three chairs down at the bar.

A bit later, during a break in the hearing, the TV showed Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), who said two-thirds of sexual assault victims don’t report. Amanda Delsant, a bartender, yelled back at the TV.

“Because no one [expletive] believes them!” she said, the anger obvious in her voice.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/silence-on-wall-street-tears-in-a-retirement-home-the-country-watches-transfixed-as-ford-tells-her-story/2018/09/27/09de532a-c261-11e8-97a5-ab1e46bb3bc7_story.html?utm_term=.feb71d837adb