On Monday, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in which he attributed the two sexual assault allegations against him to a “coordinated effort to destroy my good name” — in short, some sort of left-wing conspiracy. Kavanaugh offered no evidence for his conspiratorial claim, but other leading Republicans, including President Trump, have repeated it.
But sworn affidavits obtained by NBC indicate Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has been telling people for years that Kavanaugh was the man who sexually assaulted her in high school.
Four people sent sworn affidavits to the Judiciary Committee corroborating Ford’s story, and saying that she told them about it well before Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her husband, Russell Ford, writes that in a couples therapy session in 2012, Christine “said that in high school she had been trapped in a room and physically restrained by one boy who was molesting her while another boy watched. She said she was eventually able to escape before she was raped, but that the experience was very traumatic because she felt like she had no control and was physically dominated.”
“I remember her saying that the attacker’s name was Brett Kavanaugh, that he was a successful lawyer who had grown up in Christine’s home town, and that he was well-known in the Washington, D.C. community,” Russell Ford adds.
A Ford family friend, Keith Koegler, writes that in the summer of 2016, he and Christine had a conversation about Brock Turner, a Stanford University student who was convicted of sexual assault.
“Christine expressed anger at Mr. Turner’s lenient statement, 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 adds. “Christine did not mention the assault to me again until June 29, 2018, two days after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation from the Supreme Court of the United States. On June 29, 2018, she wrote me an email in which she stated that the person who assaulted her in high school was the President’s ‘favorite for SCOTUS.”
Koegler says that in a follow-up email, Ford identified her assailant as Kavanaugh.
NEW: @NBCNews has obtained sworn and signed declarations from 4 people who corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s claims of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, sent to Senate Cmte. pic.twitter.com/psl62NWZ4J
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) September 26, 2018
The third sworn affidavit is from Christine’s friend Adela Gildo-Mazzon. Gildo-Mazzon writes that in June 2013, Christine confided in her that “she had been having a hard day because she was thinking about an assault she experienced when she was much younger. She said she had been almost raped by someone who was now a federal judge. She told me she had been trapped in a room with two drunken guys, and that she escaped, and hid away.”
Gildo-Mazzon says she contacted Ford’s lawyers after reading Ford’s account of the alleged assault in the Washington Post earlier this month “to advise them that she had told me about this assault in 2013.”
The fourth affidavit is from a friend of Ford’s, Rebecca White. White writes that in 2017, after she posted on social media about her own experience with sexual assault, Ford has a conversation with her and “told me that when she was a young teen, she had been sexually assaulted by an older teen. I remember her saying that her assailant was now a federal judge.”
The affidavits don’t provide incontrovertible, physical evidence that the assault occurred, as Republicans have hinted is the kind of evidence they are awaiting. But they do serve as proof that Ford’s allegation wasn’t concocted — by Democrats or any one else — to destroy Kavanaugh’s chances of sitting on the Supreme Court, despite what the judge himself would have the public believe.
Another woman who has publicly accused Kavanaugh of assault, Deborah Ramirez, also has provided corroboration for her story. According to the New Yorker, a classmate of Ramirez’s told the publication he heard that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to Ramirez at a party shortly after it allegedly happened. Another classmate says he heard about the incident at the time, but wasn’t specifically aware that Kavanaugh was the alleged perpetrator.
“Ramirez told her mother and sister about an upsetting incident at the time, but did not describe the details to either due to her embarrassment,” the New Yorker adds.