Christine Blasey Ford's opening statement

Christine Blasey Ford’s opening statement was the public account she began to deliver as proceedings opened at the September 27, 2018, Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. Its significance lies in the transition it marks: an allegation Ford had disclosed privately over many years was now being presented in a formal public setting. The evidence identifies the statement and its occasion, but does not reproduce its text, so its specific wording and structure cannot be described here.

Occasion and Documentary Record

The book records that Ford began reading her statement as the hearing came to order. Its source notes cite Ford’s opening statement from the hearing, hosted by C-SPAN, making the statement a document as well as a moment in the proceedings. The book’s index also points readers to Ford’s testimony across several portions of the narrative, but the material available here does not establish which particular testimony details appeared in the opening statement itself.

The Account Before the Hearing

Ford had described the high-school incident to her husband, Russell Ford, during counseling in 2012. As he later recounted in a sworn affidavit, she said that she had been trapped in a room and physically restrained by a boy who molested her while another boy watched; she said she escaped before being raped. He recalled that she named Brett Kavanaugh as the attacker. The account also connected the experience to Ford’s insistence on a second front door for their Palo Alto home: she had explained that she would feel trapped without another exit.

Counseling helped Ford recognize how the incident’s aftermath continued to affect her. She told other therapists, including a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as several friends. In 2016, she told her friend Keith Koegler that she had been assaulted as a teenager by someone who was then a federal judge. These disclosures establish a history of telling the account before the hearing, but they should not be mistaken for the contents of the opening statement.

From Private Account to Public Testimony

Ford’s route to public testimony involved a separate process of deciding how the allegation would be reported. After her confidential letter became a matter of public attention, she met with Washington Post reporter Emma Brown for an interview that began on Wednesday evening, continued the next morning, and resumed by phone. Ford supplied excerpts from therapy records, answered questions about the limits of the alleged assault, and her husband confirmed that she had named Kavanaugh in 2012. The reporting process preceded the hearing; the available evidence does not show that these interview exchanges were part of the statement she read there.

The opening statement therefore stands at the public threshold of Ford’s testimony, following years in which the account had been shared privately and then subjected to the practical demands of reporting and scrutiny. The book’s documentation anchors that threshold to a specific act—Ford beginning to read her prepared statement—but does not provide enough of the text to assess its phrasing or detailed claims independently.