Palo Alto, California, is a reporting location in the account of Christine Blasey Ford’s path to testimony before the Senate. In December after the hearing, Megan Twohey met Ford there for breakfast and conducted the first post-hearing interview with her, opening a sustained effort to understand how Ford came to speak publicly and what followed.

The First Post-Hearing Interview

The breakfast meeting gave Twohey an opportunity to hear Ford’s account after the Senate testimony. It was the first interview with Ford after the hearing, but not the last: in the following months, Twohey held dozens of additional hours of interviews with her about how she came to raise her voice and the consequences of doing so.

A Reporting Destination

Palo Alto also marks the geographic reach of the book’s reporting. The authors describe three years of work and hundreds of interviews conducted from London to Palo Alto, combining conversations with participants and witnesses with records and other firsthand materials. The city therefore appears not as a broadly described setting, but as a specific point of access to Ford’s experience and to the reporting behind its account.