Maybe another hemisphere would be far enough

Four Post reporters give us some background:

When Donald Trump won his upset presidential victory in 2016, Christine Blasey Ford’s thoughts quickly turned to a name most Americans had never heard of but one that had unsettled her for years: Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh — a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — was among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. When Trump nominated Neil M. Gorsuch, Ford was relieved but still uneasy.

Then, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement, and Ford, 51, began fretting again.

“Her mind-set was, ‘I’ve got this terrible secret. . . . What am I going to do with this secret?’ ” her husband, Russell Ford, 56, recalled.

To many, Kavanaugh was a respected jurist. To her, he was the teenager who had attacked her when they were in high school.

And, apparently, had never made any move to apologize or acknowledge that he did a bad thing to her. That’s another aspect of him. He just went ahead with his life, untroubled.

Ford had already moved 3,000 miles away from the affluent Maryland suburbs where she says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party — a charge he would emphatically deny. Suddenly, living in California didn’t seem far enough. Maybe another hemisphere would be. She went online to research other democracies where her family might settle, including New Zealand.

“She was like, ‘I can’t deal with this. If he becomes the nominee, then I’m moving to another country. I cannot live in this country if he’s in the Supreme Court,’ ” her husband said. “She wanted out.”

But it’s all her fault, because she forgot to “file charges.”

As senators weigh Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the endless news cycle has pried into every corner of his accuser’s life to find out who Christine Blasey Ford really is.

The answer is someone very different than who she was. In Bethesda, Ford’s life was one of cloistered advantage, with her time spent at a private school for girls, at the Columbia Country Club and at parties where she moved easily among the privileged and popular.

But after high school she got out of there and never went back.

Quietly, she garnered a reputation for her research on depression, anxiety and resilience after trauma — telling almost no one what she herself had endured.

“I have lived with that story my whole life,” she said in an interview with The Post before her name became public. “I’ve moved on. I have done wonderful things and have a great career and a great community, and have done a total reboot living in California.”

And now she has to go back and be grilled by those horrifying evil men.

It’s going to suck.

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