Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh plans to produce his personal calendars to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week as part of his defense against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that he tried to rape her at a party in the early 1980s. Kavanaugh’s team showed the New York Times his monthly calendar pages for 1982 — the year Ford said she believed the attack happened — and noted the lack of any party that resembled the one Ford has described.
As the Times’ source acknowledged, the calendars don’t actually disprove Ford, since Kavanaugh may not have added every alcohol-friendly house party he remembered attending that year. Instead, it seems the only thing the calendars do prove is that Brett Kavanaugh was once a teenager who kept a calendar, that he or a family member felt the need to hold onto to such documentation, and that if he did assault Ford, he wasn’t stupid enough to make a note of it. Kavanaugh’s team, however, argues that the calendars are important because they don’t corroborate Ford’s story.
Ford, however, has indicated she can’t remember the exact date or location of the party, so it’s not clear how one can cross-reference an unknown date against a calendar which lists when Kavanaugh’s vacations, basketball games, movie nights, football practices, and college interviews happened in 1982. Instead, per the Times:
The calendar pages are one-month pages with each day in a small box. Unusual for a teenager, Judge Kavanaugh seemed to keep track of his days even during summer vacation. The pages show typical teenage activities from the era, including “beach week” after the end of the school year and nights at the theater to see “Grease II,” “Rocky III” and “Poltergeist” with friends.
Aside from all that, the Kavanaugh team thought his 1982 calendars were significant enough to leak to the New York Times before submitting them in a congressional hearing, and the reason for that significance is that they don’t include any specific reference to the specific details of a party which has never been definitively placed in time or space.
When she came forward a week ago, Ford was only able to offer some vague information about the party where she says Kavanaugh and another teenager, Mark Judge, assaulted her 36 years ago. She told the Washington Post that she believed the party happened in the summer of 1982 near the end of her sophomore year, and that the house where it was held was somewhere in Montgomery County, Maryland. She was not able to provide any other details about the timing and location of the party, or whose house it was hosted in. But she was able to vividly recall how Kavanaugh and Judge, after they arrived to the party heavily intoxicated, assaulted her in an upstairs bedroom. And since she says she didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone about what happened to her that night until a 2012 couples’ therapy session, there is no reason why the assault or party would have left an impression on anyone other than her and her alleged attackers.
In addition, her account has been corroborated, in that she told her husband she was once abused, then later told him and their therapist the details years later, then told another, different therapist about the attack a considerable amount of time after that. Ford may not remember all the precise details of a night 36 years ago, but so far, no one has been able to offer any credible theory for why she, an expert in the psychological impact of trauma, would be lying about her own.
