Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Jeff Flake

Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Jeff Flake was a secret appeal sent on the eve of the Senate’s first vote on whether to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. Written after an investigation that had not interviewed either Ford or Kavanaugh and had found no corroboration, it gave Ford a final means of addressing the impending vote while the allegation’s central questions remained unsettled.

A hearing shaped by disputed procedure

Ford’s team had requested an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hoping impartial law-enforcement officials might shed light on an alleged assault from three decades earlier. The bureau refused to reopen Kavanaugh’s background check, while Republicans on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary maintained that the committee itself had the authority and skill to investigate. Ford’s lawyers rejected offers for a private interview and instead negotiated the terms of a hearing, including its timing, format, and participants.

That negotiation left key questions of procedure unresolved. Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, asked the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, whom Ford said had been in the room during the assault, and P. J. Smyth, whom she also recalled at the party. The committee declined to treat subpoenas as a condition of Ford’s testimony. It accepted written statements from Judge and Smyth: Judge acknowledged his high-school friendship with Kavanaugh but said he did not remember the party or seeing Kavanaugh behave as Ford described; Smyth said he had no memory of the gathering and had never seen Kavanaugh behave improperly toward women. By declining to require these potential witnesses to testify in person, the committee narrowed the public dispute to whether Ford or Kavanaugh would be believed.

An inquiry that left the allegation unresolved

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry was extremely narrow. It interviewed Mark Judge, P. J. Smyth, Leland Keyser, and an attorney for one of the witnesses, but interviewed neither Ford nor Kavanaugh. Its finding of no corroboration therefore did not settle what had happened three decades earlier. The inquiry also found no corroboration of Deborah Ramirez’s allegation.

The result sharpened the significance of Ford’s next move: the process had produced an official finding, but the question she wanted examined remained unanswered. With the Senate’s first vote on advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination due the following day, Ford called Katz and Banks on Thursday night, October 4. She still wanted a final say, although her lawyers had counseled that further efforts could not make critics accept her account or allow her to bear the hopes of every survivor.

Writing and sending the letter

Ford had begun drafting the secret letter two days earlier. It was addressed to Senator Jeff Flake and thanked him for the kindness he had shown her. The book records that limited description of its contents; it does not present the letter as a public account of the allegation or as a resolution of the factual dispute.

Late on October 4, Banks sent the letter to Flake’s private email address. The next morning, before the vote, a courier delivered a hard copy to his office. The two-part delivery—private email followed by a physical letter—placed Ford’s appeal before him immediately before the Senate acted.

The vote and the letter’s significance

On Friday afternoon, October 5, the Senate advanced Kavanaugh’s nomination; the final vote was expected the next day. Ford’s letter did not settle the allegation or reverse that day’s vote. Its significance lies in the timing and the agency it represented: after speaking with the Washington Post and testifying before cameras, Ford had felt that others were appropriating her story. The letter was her last recorded attempt in this sequence to address a senator directly while the inquiry remained inconclusive and the Senate moved toward a decision.