Debra Katz

Debra Katz is an employment and sexual-harassment lawyer whose work moved from confidential workplace disputes into the public arena when she represented Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Her role was not simply to convey an allegation: she helped assess its risks, secure legal support for Ford, and negotiate whether and how Ford would testify. The book portrays Katz as an experienced, politically alert advocate who understood the stakes of public exposure, while insisting that Ford retain meaningful choices about what happened next.

Identity and Legal Background

Known to most people as Debbie, Katz is presented as a take-charge lawyer steeped in Washington politics and feminist advocacy. She approached law as a means of advancing civil rights, and her career had given her an unusually long view of sexual-harassment claims. Early in her professional life, she served on the legal team strategizing how to argue the first sexual-harassment case heard by the Supreme Court. The case established that sexual harassment could constitute discrimination, a principle that framed the work she continued to do decades later.

Katz’s advocacy combined an activist outlook with the practical work of employment law. She negotiated for employees who believed they had been wronged, often in a legal landscape where settlements were routine and secrecy was common. The broader system described in the book helps explain the limits and pressures surrounding that work: federal protections excluded some workers, including freelancers and employees of workplaces with fewer than fifteen employees; the filing period could be as short as 180 days; and damages were capped. For many complainants, a settlement could seem more attainable than litigation, even when confidentiality restricted what they could say afterward. Katz’s later representation of Ford unfolded against this history of unequal access to legal remedies and the imperfect reliance on private agreements.

From Reporter Source to Ford’s Counsel

Before Ford’s allegation became a potential national story, Katz had a professional relationship with Jodi Kantor as a legal source. Kantor had sought Katz’s analysis, quoted her in articles, and discussed Irwin Reiter with her after Reiter became one of Katz’s clients. That established channel mattered when Katz urgently contacted Kantor on a Saturday afternoon in early August. Katz said the subject could not wait and explained that she was calling off the record about a new client who might become a story.

The client, Katz disclosed, was a research scientist who said that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were both in high school in suburban Maryland. The alleged incident had taken place at a party. Katz told Kantor that her client had described lasting anguish and anxiety, but that there was limited corroboration: Ford had not told anyone at the time, some particulars had faded, and the people she had spoken with in later years were still being identified. She had discussed the experience with therapists and with her husband and some friends, and had taken a lie-detector test arranged by Katz.

Katz was especially worried about the gap between Ford’s earnestness and the danger of public exposure. She described Ford as careful and precise, with no apparent reason to invent the account, but without the protection that can come from being accustomed to public life. Ford had already written to an elected official; Katz feared that the letter could leak before Ford had decided what she wanted to do. Her call had two purposes: to prompt the Times to investigate whether Kavanaugh had a broader pattern of misconduct, and to raise the possibility that Ford might tell her account to Kantor and Megan Twohey before a leak dictated the timing. Katz agreed that Kantor’s first step should be an off-the-record conversation with Ford, and warned her not to identify or approach Ford independently, because a surprise approach could make a frightened potential source retreat.

Taking on Ford as a Client

After Ford’s letter reached Dianne Feinstein, Ford began to understand the possible consequences of having sent it. She had resisted getting a lawyer, partly because she and her husband were saving for a home and worried about the cost. The first Washington firms she contacted declined to take the case. One lawyer listened carefully but could not represent her publicly because his partners feared that doing so might damage the firm’s cases before the Supreme Court. His view that Ford deserved serious consideration offered support, but not a public legal advocate.

On August 6, shortly after Ford’s grandmother died and just before Ford was due to leave the Washington area, she met Katz and Lisa Banks at a hotel near the Baltimore airport. Feinstein’s office had recommended the two partners, whose practice included this kind of allegation. Katz and Banks had already received an initial, unnamed outline of Ford’s story from Feinstein’s office and had considered what might be done to assess an old allegation. Their meeting with Ford lasted several hours. They regarded her as credible and were moved by what they understood as her sense of civic duty, but they also thought she did not fully grasp how exposed she might become if the letter became public. They decided they wanted to represent her pro bono, so that the cost would not bar her from obtaining counsel.

The lawyers prepared Ford for possible scrutiny by asking her to take practical steps. She passed a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent and contacted two former boyfriends to ask whether she had ever told them about an assault. Neither recalled such a disclosure. The calls reinforced how little Ford had shared for years, while also making the limits of contemporaneous corroboration harder to ignore. Katz’s work therefore involved holding two considerations together: the account’s significance and Ford’s vulnerability, and the need to prepare without treating the absence of an earlier report as a simple resolution of the allegation.

Strategy, Testimony, and Public Pressure

Katz, Banks, and adviser Ricki Seidman initially urged caution about Ford’s exposure. As the confirmation process accelerated, however, they came to believe that open testimony, with cameras present, offered the best chance for Americans to hear Ford directly. A closed meeting with senators or staff, they feared, could leave her words easier to recast or dismiss. Their strategy was also shaped by a determination not to surrender Ford’s options at the outset. Katz later explained that appearing equivocal about whether Ford would testify could allow Republicans to portray her as unserious. The lawyers therefore announced that Ford would come, while negotiating the format and timing and delaying the hearing as long as possible. They hoped the delay would give Ford time to adjust and preserve room for further developments. Ford agreed to trust the advisers while continuing to say that she would never appear; the tension between their strategy and her reluctance remained central to the process.

That tension sharpened when the committee’s Republican staff imposed a deadline. After CNN broadcast a confidential list of demands Katz had sent to Chuck Grassley’s team, Donald Trump publicly questioned why Ford had not reported the alleged assault to law enforcement at the time. Mitch McConnell said the Senate would proceed with Kavanaugh’s confirmation. The staff then announced that the committee would vote the following Monday and required Ford to confirm by 10 p.m. Friday if she wanted to appear. Katz and Banks responded from their office with a public letter accusing the staff of pressuring a vulnerable woman who was receiving death threats. They called the deadline arbitrary and asked for one additional day for Ford to make a decision with life-altering consequences for herself and her family. Releasing the letter to the media turned a private negotiation over timing into a public dispute over how the committee was treating Ford.

Practice, Partnership, and Narrative Role

Katz and Banks were not new to high-stakes harassment claims. Banks was Katz’s law partner and close friend, and the two had spent the months after the Weinstein reporting pursuing cases and legal changes. In the ten months after that reporting, Katz represented congressional staffers whose complaints led to the resignations of a House member and a senior congressional staffer. She and Banks also sued a Washington-area celebrity chef; his partners later left and his business empire dissolved. They met with legislators to advocate stronger protections. Their momentum came with concern that a brief period of increased attention could give way to backlash, making the timing of Ford’s allegation feel consequential beyond one client’s case.

The book’s account of Katz thus connects individual representation to the structures that shape whether allegations can be heard. She had worked in a field where confidential settlements could provide recourse while also limiting disclosure; she had seen how much a client might risk by going public; and she entered Ford’s case at a moment when both legal process and political calculation were moving quickly. Her advocacy sought to preserve Ford’s ability to choose, even as the lawyers pressed for an open hearing they believed would protect her account from being privately managed. That unresolved balance—between a client’s control, public accountability, and the pressure of institutional deadlines—is the defining tension of Katz’s role in the story.