Christine Blasey Ford’s confidential letter to Dianne Feinstein

Christine Blasey Ford’s confidential letter to Dianne Feinstein was Ford’s written account of an alleged high-school assault by Brett Kavanaugh, submitted during his nomination to the Supreme Court. Dated July 30, 2018, and marked confidential, it combined a specific allegation with a request for privacy. Its delivery placed Ford’s account before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, even as she feared that sharing it would expose her identity and story.

The decision to write

In the last week of July, Ford returned to the Washington area with her sons after her grandmother suffered a stroke and was nearing death. They stayed with Ford’s parents at their summer home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Her parents did not know about the account she had kept secret, and Ford did not want to burden them while they cared for her grandmother.

When an aide from Anna Eshoo’s office called, Ford stepped onto the porch to speak privately. The aide asked her to write down what had happened with Kavanaugh for the committee that considered Supreme Court nominees. By then, Ford was accustomed to repeating her account, but the question of whom to address remained difficult: sending the letter to both the committee’s leading Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, and its Republican chair, Chuck Grassley, seemed to her to increase the risk that her identity would become public. She therefore sent it only to Feinstein, relying on what Eshoo’s office had told her about constituent confidentiality.

What Ford put on the record

The letter identified Kavanaugh and his close friend Mark Judge as the people involved in the alleged assault. Ford placed it in the early 1980s, when she was in high school and the two boys were one or two years older. She located the incident at a gathering in a suburban Maryland home attended by her and four other people. In her account, Kavanaugh assaulted her while Judge was present; Ford described being unable to call for help, escaping to a bathroom, and then leaving the house.

Ford also wrote that she had not knowingly seen Kavanaugh since the incident. She recalled encountering Judge once at the Potomac Village Safeway, where, in her description, he seemed extremely uncomfortable to see her. She said she had received medical treatment related to the assault. These details gave the letter a wider frame than the account of the incident alone: it recorded Ford’s later relationship to the two men and indicated that the event had continuing consequences for her.

The letter connected Ford’s disclosure to the public responsibilities of the nomination process. She said she had contacted her local government representative on July 6 to ask how to proceed, and that discussing sexual assault and its repercussions was upsetting. At the same time, she described feeling a civic obligation not to remain silent. Her stated conflict was therefore both personal and political: she wanted protection for her identity, yet believed the allegation bore on the evaluation of a nominee for the nation’s highest court.

Delivery and reception

After Ford signed the letter in Palo Alto, California, an aide confirmed that it would be delivered by hand. Ford then received a running account as another staff member carried the paper to Feinstein’s office in Washington. The unusually close attention to its physical passage underscored how much depended, for Ford, on the letter reaching its intended recipient without becoming public.

Feinstein spoke with Ford by telephone after receiving it. The senator, then eighty-five, had difficulty hearing; she and Ford raised their voices as Feinstein asked about the nature of the incident. Feinstein said she would keep the letter confidential and promised to contact Ford again. The exchange gave Ford an assurance of privacy, but it also made the possible reach of her written account newly apparent to her. Until then, she had resisted confidantes’ suggestions that she retain a lawyer, partly because she and her husband were saving for a condominium in Hawaii and did not want to spend those savings. After the call, she recognized that she needed legal representation.

Significance

The letter’s importance lies in the contrast between its deliberately limited circulation and the institutional process it entered. Ford addressed it to one senator rather than both committee leaders, and explicitly sought confidentiality; nevertheless, its subject was the fitness of a Supreme Court nominee, a matter before a Senate committee. The document thus became a means of reporting the allegation while Ford still hoped to control when and how it might be disclosed.

It also preserved Ford’s account in her own written statement before the public controversy that followed. The letter did not settle the allegation; it recorded what Ford said had happened, why she believed it mattered to the nomination, and the personal cost she associated with speaking. The hand delivery and the telephone call mark the moment that private account crossed into a formal political channel—and the point at which Ford began to understand that confidentiality alone might not preserve her control over what came next.