Dissent by Jackie Calmes

Author:Jackie Calmes [Calmes, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Saturday evening, Ford was at the Koeglers’ home, on a back patio with an outdoor fireplace and sofas. In that laid-back setting, she had a tense final talk with Keith Koegler and Deepa Lalla about giving the Post a green light and then participated in a conference call with Post editors. At about 7:30—10:30 in the East—she gave the go-ahead. Ford later went home. She slept in her own bed, fitfully, for what would be the last time in months, until Christmas.

At midmorning Sunday, Lalla texted that the newspaper had posted its story. There, finally, was her name in the first sentence: Christine Blasey Ford. “Since Wednesday,” it began, “she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent.…Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.” The account confirmed details in prior reports—the small gathering, Kavanaugh and Judge “stumbling drunk,” his assaulting her on a bed while Judge egged him on, his stifling her cries, loud music, her escape, and her lingering anxieties. Kavanaugh’s denial was the same statement the White House had provided to the New Yorker, the Times, and others. What was new was Ford’s voice.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” she said, by covering her mouth and nose. She described the boys laughing “maniacally,” then Judge inadvertently freeing her when he jumped on top of her and Kavanaugh and sent them all tumbling. “My biggest fear was, do I look like someone just attacked me?”—because, she said, she’d resolved instantly, “I’m not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing. It didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.” Turning to the present, the story told of her message to the Post’s tip line more than two months before, her contacts with Eshoo and Feinstein and requests to them and the Post for secrecy, her resort to lawyers, and her polygraph test.9

Within minutes, the Koeglers watched as the Post story was reported on the Sunday talk shows. Koegler couldn’t reach Ford; her phone was blowing up. But after noon, she came to his house for refuge. Koegler’s wife, Elizabeth, took their sons and one of the Fords’ to their tennis club for lunch and swimming. Ford and Koegler watched the news, each with a sense of an out-of-body experience, then joined the others. After a neighbor reached Ford to tell her that TV trucks and reporters had swarmed her house, she had a friend go there to get clothes and the dog and bring them to the club. The friend told reporters, “They’re not coming back, so you can go.”

With that, the Fords began their months-long odyssey of living in hotels and a friend’s house. They first went to a secure resort hotel in nearby Menlo Park. A few friends would keep Ford company there. Within days, she had a security detail; several guards stayed in an adjacent suite, working in round-the-clock shifts to electronically monitor who came and went.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.