Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, used a rare interview to detail the trauma she faced after her explosive allegations thrust her into a charged confirmation battle for one of the nation’s most powerful positions.
Speaking on CBS Sunday Morning, Ford described how she wasn’t prepared for the backlash her 2018 testimony would inspire and suggested she might not have come forward if she had realized how that experience would affect her and her family.
“I like to use the word ‘idealistic,’ but maybe I was naïve for sure about the consequences and how bad it would be after I testified,” Ford said, according to an excerpt of the interview posted online. “In a way that was actually good – that I didn’t really know how it would play out later. Because if I had known, I don’t think I would have jumped off the diving board.”
Ford, who has written a memoir about her experiences that will publish on Tuesday, emerged as a central figure in the confirmation of former President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee after she alleged Kavanaugh assaulted her during a party they attended in 1982, when they were in high school.
Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations.
Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed and has since become a key voice on the Supreme Court – a sometimes-harbinger of which way its conservative 6-3 supermajority is leaning on controversial issues like abortion, guns and affirmative action.
Ford, until now, has remained mostly out of view. In the aftermath of the emotional Senate hearing at which she detailed her allegations, Ford said she had to repeatedly move her family and also hire private security in response to threats she received.
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