Kavanaugh Accuser Identifies Herself

The woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has come forward, and new details have also emerged about Kavanaugh's alleged accomplice.

Kavanaugh's accuser is Christine Blasey Ford, now 51, a research psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University in Northern California. In writing a letter to U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, she had requested that her name not be released, but now she has spoken to The Washington Post.

"Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it," the Post reports in an article published today.

Ford described Kavanaugh and friend his friend Mark Judge, both "stumbling drunk," herding her into a bedroom during a house party in Montgomery County, Md., in the early 1980s. Kavanaugh held her down on the bed, groped her, rubbed his body against hers, and tried to take her clothes off, according to her account. She characterized the attack as an attempted rape. Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream, she said.

"I thought he might inadvertently kill me," she told the Post. "He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing." She managed to escape when Judge jumped onto the bed and knocked them all off, she said. She left the house soon afterward.

Ford didn't discuss the incident in detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband, Russell Ford. He said that in those sessions, she used Kavanaugh's last name and wondered if he might someday be a Supreme Court nominee. The Post received transcripts from some of the therapy sessions.

Contacted by the Post, the White House issued the same statement from Kavanaugh that it had last week, denying that any such incident occurred, and declined further comment. The Post could not reach Judge, but in interviews with other publications, he also denied that the incident had taken place.

Anita Hill, who spoke out Friday, before Christine Blasey Ford was identified, noted the difficulty people have in coming forward with accusations of sexual misconduct, and said the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to establish a process to hear them. In 1991, when Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court was being considered, she accused him of sexual harassment.

Kavanaugh and Judge with both students at Georgetown Preparatory School, an elite boys' school, at the time, while Ford attended a nearby private girls' school. Judge, now a conservative writer, has written about drinking excessively in his teenage years.

Judge also has a history of homophobic statements. At Georgetown Prep, "alcoholism was rampant, as was homosexuality in the clergy," he wrote in 2006, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. "It was a combustive place that was playing with fire."

In another essay from that year, Judge wrote, "You're thinking it even if you don't say it: Are gay people perverts?" He went on to denounce gay people, gay men at least, as sex-obsessed and promiscuous.

A possible explanation, he wrote, "is that along with the genetic or hormonal hardwiring that makes someone gay comes a level of pathological compulsiveness. It's there waiting to explode the way alcoholism is, and requires a constant struggle to tamp down."

He also denounced John Cloud, a gay journalist, calling him "a liberal with an agenda to make homosexuality mainstream" -- not meaning it as a compliment.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote Thursday on whether to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to the full Senate.