Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court concluded a bitter political dispute over Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were teenagers. The Senate advanced his nomination on October 5, 2018, and the following day completed the vote that confirmed him. For Ford and her lawyers, the confirmation came after a public hearing shaped by contested decisions about investigation, witnesses, and procedure; for the senators and protesters gathered around the vote, it became a confrontation over how allegations of sexual assault should be heard and judged.

Background and Stakes

Ford’s team had asked the FBI to investigate her allegation, hoping impartial law enforcement officials could shed light on an event from roughly three decades earlier. The FBI declined, saying Kavanaugh’s background check was closed. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee argued that the committee itself had the authority and ability to investigate. Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, rejected the committee’s offers to interview Ford privately and instead negotiated the terms of a hearing, including its timing, format, and participants.

The negotiations took place without an established committee protocol for assessing allegations of sexual harassment or assault against a nominee. Anita Hill, whose testimony during the Clarence Thomas hearings had become a point of comparison, warned that the committee had learned too little from that earlier episode and from the #MeToo movement. In this account, the uncertainty about process was not incidental: even the rules for hearing Ford’s allegation were still being worked out as the nomination proceeded.

Investigation and Witnesses

Katz and Banks pressed for Mark Judge to be subpoenaed and testify in person. Ford had identified Judge, Kavanaugh’s old friend, as another person in the room during the alleged assault. Her team argued that his testimony could help establish what had happened at the gathering and, at minimum, address the extent of drinking among the teenagers. Judge’s memoirs described a party culture involving frequent heavy drinking, but that background did not resolve what he remembered about Ford’s account.

The committee’s staff refused the subpoena request, explaining that witnesses could not make their testimony conditional on the committee issuing subpoenas. Instead, the staff accepted written statements from Judge and P. J. Smyth, another friend Ford recalled being at the party. Judge acknowledged his high-school friendship with Kavanaugh but said he did not remember such a party and had never seen Kavanaugh behave as Ford described. Smyth likewise said he had no memory of the gathering and had not seen Kavanaugh behave improperly toward women. With those potential witnesses not appearing in person, the dispute narrowed in the public account to a choice between competing claims rather than a fuller examination of the people Ford said were present.

Ford’s Preparation and the Senate Vote

Before the hearing, Ford worked with her lawyers on an opening statement. In a conference room at the Watergate Hotel, she substantially rewrote the draft prepared by Katz, a junior attorney, and Michael Bromwich. Her objection was not that the draft contained factual errors; it did not sound like her, and she wanted the language and order to be her own. The account describes her revising it as she would a scientific paper, while her advisers prepared her for questions and explained the demands of testifying before senators.

On October 5, the Senate advanced the nomination. The date coincided with the first anniversary of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s first Weinstein story and fell almost exactly two years after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Megan traveled to Washington and found Katz outside her office, speaking by phone with Ford as they absorbed the outcome. Katz told Ford to stay strong; Ford had done far more than she had originally planned, yet Kavanaugh was still on course to join the Supreme Court.

The next day, Katz, Banks, and a junior attorney walked past hundreds of protesters and entered the Senate building, with Megan following them. The lawyers took seats in the gallery to represent Ford through the final vote. Republican senators spoke about the risk of unfairly targeting innocent men and portrayed Ford as a pawn of opponents seeking to block Kavanaugh’s nomination. Democratic senators criticized Kavanaugh and expressed support for his accusers and for victims of sexual assault. When Dick Durbin praised Ford’s civic duty and apologized for the treatment she had received, Katz lowered her head, overcome by the moment.

Protesters carried signs expressing belief in Ford and in survivors more broadly. Some entered the gallery and shouted objections before security removed them; their protests made the vote’s surroundings part of the public spectacle rather than a quiet legislative conclusion. Across the room, Donald Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn watched with a smile. After the vote, Mitch McConnell celebrated the outcome and said the confrontation had energized the Republican base. The confirmation thus ended the Senate contest while leaving its competing accounts of fairness and political purpose sharply visible.

Aftermath and Significance

The confirmation did not, the book emphasizes, settle the wider consequences of the #MeToo movement. Around the same period, McDonald’s employees, including Kim Lawson, took part in a nationwide walkout protesting weak sexual-harassment policies. Leslie Moonves resigned as chairman of CBS amid the broader reckoning, and the New York Times was finishing an investigation into Google and allegations involving senior male executives. These developments placed Kavanaugh’s confirmation beside other struggles over workplace power and institutional accountability, without making the Senate vote a measure of the movement’s entire fate.

The book also links the Senate’s handling of Ford’s allegation to its account of journalistic procedure. In preparing the Weinstein investigation, Kantor and Twohey’s editors debated how long to give Harvey Weinstein to respond: they wanted to protect sources and the story while ensuring that he received a fair opportunity to answer. The analogy is not that a newspaper investigation and a Senate confirmation hearing are the same process. Rather, both narratives make procedure consequential: who gets to speak, which evidence is pursued, and how an institution defines fairness shape what can be established before a powerful decision is made. Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the decisive outcome of that particular vote, but the unresolved argument over those procedures continued beyond it.