Ford agrees to testify at Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing

Christine Blasey Ford’s agreement to testify at Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing turned a confidential allegation into a public encounter with the Senate, without resolving the questions of fairness and procedure surrounding it. The negotiations made testimony possible, but left Ford’s team and the committee still contesting who would be heard, how, and under what rules.

The Agreement and Its Unsettled Terms

On September 23, 2018, The New York Times reported that Ford had reached a deal to testify at the hearing. The agreement came after her team sought an FBI investigation of her allegation, only to be told that the bureau considered Kavanaugh’s background check closed. Republicans on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary maintained that the committee had the authority and expertise to investigate instead.

Ford’s team rejected offers to interview her privately. With the parties negotiating the terms of a hearing rather than relying on an established protocol, basic questions remained open: its timing and format, and who else would participate. The agreement therefore marked a decision to appear, not a resolution of the dispute over how her account would be assessed.

Witnesses and the Limits of the Inquiry

Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, pressed the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, whom Ford said had been in the room during the alleged assault. In her account, she later saw Judge looking uncomfortable at a neighborhood grocery store. His memoirs described heavy drinking at Georgetown Preparatory School, a context Ford’s team believed could help establish the party’s drinking culture.

The committee declined to make Judge’s appearance a condition of Ford’s testimony. Instead, staff accepted written statements from Judge and P. J. Smyth, another person Ford recalled being at the party. Judge acknowledged his high-school friendship with Kavanaugh but said he did not recall the party or seeing Kavanaugh behave as Ford described. Smyth likewise said he had no memory of the gathering and had not seen Kavanaugh act improperly toward women. With potential witnesses absent from live questioning, the dispute narrowed to a stark choice between competing accounts.

The procedural uncertainty carried a history. In an opinion article published as negotiations continued, Anita Hill warned that the committee still lacked a specific protocol for evaluating allegations of sexual harassment or assault against a nominee. Her reference to the earlier Clarence Thomas hearing made the negotiations part of a longer argument about whether institutions learn from the way they handle testimony—or reproduce the same failures.

A Public Process Under Political Scrutiny

Ford asked her attorneys to deal with the committee as collegially as possible and maintained that her decision was not partisan: she said she would have spoken out if Kavanaugh belonged to her own party. At the same time, the allegation concerned a Republican Supreme Court nominee, and Ford was working with Democratic lawyers and adviser Ricki Seidman. Mike Davis, the Republican staff member leading the committee’s negotiations, viewed the team’s actions as politically motivated. The tension between Ford’s stated intention and the political meanings others assigned to her accusation shaped the setting in which she agreed to testify.

The book places this negotiation beside a different process of public accountability: The New York Times reporters’ decision to present Harvey Weinstein with the findings of their investigation and give him an opportunity to respond. Their editors debated the response period, balancing the need to treat a subject fairly against the risk that advance notice could expose sources to pressure. That journalistic procedure was not the Senate hearing, but the contrast underscores a shared problem: an opportunity to answer matters, while the way it is structured can affect the people whose accounts are at stake.

Preparing to Speak in Her Own Words

Before the hearing, Ford worked with her lawyers in a conference room at the Watergate Hotel. Katz, a junior attorney, and Michael Bromwich had drafted an opening statement from details Ford had supplied to them and The Washington Post. Ford rewrote nearly all of it—not because she identified factual errors, but because its language and order did not feel like her own. She approached the task as she did scientific writing, revising until the statement reflected her voice.

Bromwich and Larry Robbins prepared her for questioning: they advised her to tell the truth, ask senators to divide complicated questions into parts, and avoid guessing at ambiguous wording. They also rehearsed the demands of the testimony format, which made the short preparation period consequential. The effort was not simply to produce a statement; it was to help Ford enter a formal proceeding without surrendering control of how she described her account.

Speaking Out and Unequal Costs

A later gathering of women who had spoken publicly about harassment and assault placed Ford’s experience alongside accounts from very different lives. Kim Lawson, a McDonald’s worker, was earning $10 an hour and had been homeless six months earlier; the gathering took place amid the material comfort of Gwyneth Paltrow’s home. The women’s stories were treated as equally important, but the surroundings and their circumstances made clear that speaking out did not carry the same resources or risks for everyone.

Lawson described filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and taking part in a September strike, where she gave a speech, spoke to the press, and pushed her daughter in a stroller. She said the action had given her a sense of power and solidarity. Zelda Perkins, who had left Miramax decades earlier, described a related reversal: speaking about confidentiality agreements had helped her reclaim authority in a political space. Their accounts show that public speech could become a source of agency as well as exposure.

Rowena Chiu, by contrast, had not yet made her account public. At the gathering she explained that her family, apart from her husband, still did not know what had happened, and that she had little practice telling the story. She also connected her hesitation to the scarcity of Asian voices speaking about such experiences and to a model-minority expectation not to make trouble. Her presence clarified what Ford’s agreement could not mean for everyone: choosing to speak was a consequential opening, not a uniform or easy route out of silence.