The power of Christine Blasey Ford's voice - By Jennifer Rubin
By Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
September 27 at 1:15 PM
Only the cruelest partisans who watched or listened to Christine Blasey Ford’s opening statement Thursday could be unmoved. The quiver in her voice, just short of tears, made her statement, which in writing seemed unexceptional, arguably the most gripping testimony most of us have ever heard. Her sincerity, and her pain, cut through weeks of gum-flapping on cable TV news. Here was a woman raw with emotion, visibly scared and utterly without guile.
Granted, the Republicans made a mess of things. Starting off with grumpy chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) grumbling about Democrats’ failure to bring the claim — which Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) felt obligated to keep confidential — was the embodiment of cluelessness. Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell played the sympathetic but ineffective interrogator, meticulously trying to evoke details. She recognized and apologized for Ford’s feeling of terror (“that’s not right”) but in fact made Ford seem more credible, more honest, as Ford corrected a word here or there in her previous letter.
The real damage to the nomination, which now seems entirely beside the point and ludicrous, was done on examination from Democrats. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked how certain she was that it was Brett M. Kavanaugh who attacked her. “One hundred percent,” she said.
How could she be sure it was Kavanaugh? “Just basic memory functions, and also just the level of norepinephrine and the epinephrine in the brain, that, as you know, encodes that neurotransmitter that codes memories into the hippocampus, and so the trauma-related experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.”
Sen. Pat Leahy (I-Vt.) asked what she recalled most vividly. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two,” she said, referring to Kavanaugh and Mike Judge, who she says was also present in the room when she was attacked.
She provided other details as well. She described running into Judge several weeks later. He looked “white” and “ill,” she reported, as she detailed a trip to the Safeway where he worked. Under questioning from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), she described where the bed was in the room, the location of the bathroom.
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