Christine Blasey Ford has provided four sworn statements from people who say they had discussed her alleged assault before Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.
The declarations are from three of her friends as well as her husband, Russell Ford. Russell says that Christine had told him that her assailant was Kavanaugh before his nomination but did not mention him specifically again until his name came up as a potential Supreme Court nominee for the seat that would eventually go to Neil Gorsuch. “I remember Christine saying she was afraid the President might nominate Kavanaugh,” Russell Ford wrote.
In a meeting with Christine Blasey Ford in 2013, her friend Adela Gildo-Mazzo says that Ford told her “she had been having a hard day because she was thinking about an assault she experienced when she was younger.” Gildo-Mazzo says Ford told her “she had been almost raped by someone who was now a federal judge.”
Rebecca White, a friend and neighbor of Ford, said in her statement that after she had written a post on social media last year about “my own experience of sexual assault,” Ford told her “that when she was a young teen, she had been sexually assaulted by an older teen.”
“I remember her saying her assailant was now a federal judge,” White wrote in her statement.
In the statement from her friend Keith Koegler, he says that he had discussed the alleged assault with Ford after the infamously short sentence of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner for sexual assault in 2016: “Christine expressed anger at Mr. Turner’s lenient sentence, stating that she was particularly bothered by it because she was assaulted in high school by a man who was now a federal judge in Washington, D.C.”
Koegler said that Ford later mentioned Kavanaugh specifically after Anthony Kennedy resigned from the Supreme Court: She wrote him an email “in which she stated that the person who assaulted her in high school was the President’s ‘favorite for SCOTUS.’ ” Koegler responded that he had remembered the conversation they had in 2016 and asked for the name of the man she was referring to.
Ford responded: “Brett Kavanaugh.”