While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.

Through a White House spokesman, Kavanaugh declined to comment further on Ford’s allegation and did not respond to questions about whether he knew her during high school. The White House had no additional comment.

I dunno about that, but she passed a polygraph and has therapist notes from over a decade ago. They have “but he was so young at the time...” So it just got a little bit harder to be someone like Susan Collins, and there’s no way those swing state Democrats who were on the fence before can afford to confirm.

If he gets confirmed (still likely?), it will severely compound Republican election problems.

Totally not exactly according to the plan

3. It’s weird to me that anyone would have more to say about or criticism for the timing of the news than the information contained within.

Please don’t infer that I am a rape apologist because my response was unsatisfactory to you.

There can be multiple types of crap all with their own stink. One stink doesn't negate the other.

This, then, was the fatal flaw of #MeToo: We thought that patriarchal systems, based in entrenched power, and supported by others in power, could be brought down by individual, brave women.

Why don’t women come forward? The story now unfolding on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and an unidentified woman who alleges that he sexually assaulted her when they were in high school underscores why. This is what we do know: The woman went to her congresswoman with a complaint about President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, that dated back to high school. The complaint is that he and another boy violently assaulted (but did not rape) her at a party. She put that complaint in a letter, which the congresswoman will not discuss, citing confidentiality. That letter was also sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office, who promised confidentiality.

In adhering to this promise of confidentiality, Feinstein’s office did not share the letter with other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and did not question Kavanaugh about the event during his hearings. It was only this week that other Democrats got wind of the letter and began to demand that its contents be shared with them. On Wednesday, the Intercept was the first to report on the controversy, and on Friday morning, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer at the New Yorker reported the specifics of the allegations contained in the letter.

What we can gather from this chain of events is that at some point this summer, the woman changed her mind—as the New Yorker put it, “after the interactions with Eshoo’s and Feinstein’s offices, the woman decided not to speak about the matter publicly.” We can litigate until the end of time whether Senate Democrats should have been given the letter sooner and who was in the best position to evaluate the weight of her claims. The better question is why a woman making claims about a sexual attack would change her mind about levying them. The controversy that has ensued since the Intercept publicized the existence of this letter and its accusation serves as a perfectly coherent argument for why.

Almost anyone who has played any part in the #MeToo movement might say with confidence that the cost of coming forward is crippling. And indeed, as soon as the New Yorker published its story, Kavanaugh defenders were quick to say that the woman, still unnamed, was a drunk and a liar. Had I been asked to advise this woman, who, according to the New Yorker, is already in trauma, and according to CNN has sought medical help for it, I would have told her to stand down. I would have told her that neither politics nor journalism are institutions that can evaluate and adjudicate facts about systems in which powerful men use their power to harm women. I would have told her that she would be risking considerable peril to her personal reputation, even as she would be lauded as a hero.

starting to think they might actually sink Kavanaugh