Lisa Banks

Lisa Banks is a gender-discrimination lawyer whose work with Debra Katz placed her at the center of Christine Blasey Ford’s decision whether to make a decades-old allegation public. Banks helped weigh the risks, prepare Ford for scrutiny, and negotiate the conditions of her testimony. Her account also gives the story a clear-eyed counterpoint to the hope that public attention alone could change powerful institutions.

Identity and Legal Work

Banks was Katz’s law partner and closest friend outside the office. The two had markedly different temperaments: Katz was an outspoken activist, while Banks was cooler and more impassive, a quality that could serve her in difficult encounters with adversaries. The book connects Banks’s perseverance to an early experience of gender exclusion: when she was seven, she was told that she could never play for the Boston Red Sox because she was a girl.

Their professional partnership had developed in a field where individual victories often came through confidential settlements. Katz and Banks had secured awards for women who felt wronged, sometimes substantial ones, but they understood secret settlements as imperfect tools rather than a transformation of workplace conditions. In the months after the Harvey Weinstein investigation, they felt that complaints were being taken more seriously. Their work included representing Capitol Hill staffers whose harassment complaints led to the resignations of a House member and a senior congressional staffer, suing a Washington-area celebrity chef, and pressing legislators for stronger protections. They saw a rare opening for reform, while worrying that backlash could close it.

Taking on Ford’s Case

Ford met Banks and Katz on August 6, 2018, after Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office identified them as lawyers experienced with allegations of this kind. Earlier Washington firms had declined to take the case. Lawrence Robbins, an attorney who listened to Ford and regarded her as believable, could offer help only behind the scenes because his partners feared that publicly opposing a Supreme Court justice might harm the firm’s appellate work. Banks and Katz, by contrast, were available to meet Ford promptly at a hotel near the Baltimore airport.

The lawyers came away from their meeting impressed by Ford’s credibility and moved by what she described as civic duty. They also saw risks she seemed not to grasp: she appeared naïve about the consequences of the letter she had sent Feinstein. If it became public, she would need protection; if it did not, she would need advice about whether to pursue the allegation. Banks and Katz decided to represent Ford without charge. In preparation, they helped set practical tasks in motion, including a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent and calls to two former boyfriends to ask whether Ford had ever mentioned an assault. Neither recalled such a disclosure, reinforcing how long she had kept the allegation to herself.

Strategy and Testimony

Ford’s advisers initially urged caution about exposure. They later concluded that testimony at an open hearing, with cameras present, offered a better chance for Americans to hear Ford directly than private conversations with senators or their staff, where her account might be reshaped or dismissed. Banks and Katz sought to preserve Ford’s choices while negotiating the form and timing of the hearing. They pushed to delay it, giving Ford more time to consider what she could bear and leaving open the possibility that other allegations might emerge.

The strategy required the lawyers to project resolve even while Ford remained unwilling to appear. They believed that a hesitant public commitment could be used to suggest that Ford was not serious about making her claim. Their advisers told her to trust them and keep her options open; Ford agreed to proceed with the planning but told her team she was never coming. Banks was therefore part of a difficult balance: the lawyers had to negotiate assertively without mistaking their strategy for Ford’s settled decision.

That balance became especially precarious when Katz was unavailable and Ricki Seidman was out of town. At the law office on Connecticut Avenue, Banks monitored the situation as Senator Chuck Grassley’s office sought to schedule a call with Katz and Ford. The aides did not know why Katz was not responding. Banks was left to manage an escalating process while Ford’s chief public representative was in the hospital and activists continued to mobilize without knowing that Ford did not want to testify. The episode shows Banks not simply as a strategist beside Katz, but as the person left to navigate the immediate pressure when the team’s usual channels faltered.

Outcome and Institutional Limits

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared to vote on whether to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, Banks watched the television coverage with Katz and Jodi Kantor. Katz paced and texted Ford, who was airborne; the lawyers waited to see whether Ford’s testimony would affect the nomination. Banks doubted that the country would be better off if Kavanaugh were confirmed. Katz countered that Ford had been given an opportunity to testify because the #MeToo movement had shifted expectations: a year earlier, she argued, Ford would not have been heard in this way.

Banks’s pessimism and Katz’s guarded optimism register two different measures of change. The Senate and other powerful institutions had not changed, Katz acknowledged, and the nomination’s likely outcome offered little reassurance. Yet the public hearing itself marked a difference: Ford could appear, speak, and be considered in a way that Katz believed would previously have been denied. Banks’s place in the narrative is consequential precisely because she does not resolve that tension. Her work helped Ford reach a public hearing, while her response to the likely confirmation kept the limits of that achievement in view.