openpolitics.com

Ford had already moved 3,000 miles away from the affluent Maryland suburbs where she says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party — a charge he would emphatically deny. Suddenly, living in California didn’t seem far enough. Maybe another hemisphere would be. She went online to research other democracies where her family might settle, including New Zealand.

“She was like, ‘I can’t deal with this. If he becomes the nominee, then I’m moving to another country. I cannot live in this country if he’s in the Supreme Court,’ ” her husband said. “She wanted out.”

.. On the day that Ford publicly identified herself as Kavanaugh’s accuser in an interview with The Washington Post, her husband was driving their 15-year-old son and his friends from a soccer tournament in Lake Tahoe. He couldn’t answer the calls that were blowing up his phone; by the time they reached home, a crowd of reporters was waiting.

.. Russell struggled to explain it to his children. “I said that Mommy had a story about a Supreme Court nominee, and now it’s broken into the news, and we can’t stay in the house anymore,” he recalled. The family was separated for days, with the boys staying with friends and their parents living at a hotel. They’ve looked into a security service to escort their children to school.

.. Quietly, she garnered a reputation for her research on depression, anxiety and resilience after trauma — telling almost no one what she herself had endured.

.. Ford’s inner circle was, “How do you say this? The pretty, popular girls,” explained Andrea Evers, a close friend. “It wasn’t like we were a bunch of vapid preppies, but God, we were preppy then.”

.. the drinking age was 18 then

.. frequently left the girls feeling embattled.

“The boys were pretty brutal,” Evers said. “They would do what they could to get you drunk, and do whatever they would try to do to you.”

.. Kavanaugh and his classmate Mark Judge had started drinking earlier than others, she said, and the two were “stumbling drunk” when they pushed her into a bedroom.

.. Her biggest fear afterward, she recalled 37 years later, was looking as if she had just been attacked. So she carried herself as if she wasn’t. Down the stairs. Out the door. Onto the rest of her high school years, she said. On graduation day, she wore the required white dress and carried red roses. She told no one.

.. Years later, Ford would describe college as a time when she “derailed,” struggling with symptoms of trauma she did not yet understand.

.. She’d been a cheerleader in high school and joined a sorority, but the lifestyle was too much like the place from which she’d come. Despite the talent for math she had shown in high school, one college classmate recalled Ford failing a statistics class.

.. “He said, ‘You’re really smart, and you’re just like totally [messed] up,’ ” Ford recalled. She remembers him saying, “ ‘What are you doing? . . . Everybody’s getting it together but you’re like not.’ It was kind of a harsh talk.”

If she was going to graduate on time, he said, she ought to major in psychology. The major didn’t require students to take classes in a specific order, so Ford could take them all at once.

That was how Christine Blasey Ford came to spend her life researching trauma and if it is possible to get past it.

.. “I think she had really reinvented herself,” said Jeff Harris, her supervisor at the University of Hawaii counseling center. “A surfer from California is a different image than a prep-school girl from Bethesda.”

.. He knew that more than a love of water had brought her west.

“She didn’t always get along with her parents because of differing political views,” Russell said. “It was a very male-dominated environment. Everyone was interested in what’s going on with the men, and the women are sidelined, and she didn’t get the attention or respect she felt she deserved. That’s why she was in California, to get away from the D.C. scene.”

.. As their relationship deepened, Ford told him she’d been physically abused years earlier. He would learn the specifics of the event, including Kavanaugh’s name, during a couple’s therapy session years later. But then, he just listened.

.. Her master’s thesis explored the relationship between trauma and depression.

.. admired by colleagues for her analytical mind and inventive mathematical models.

.. She took a particular interest in resilience and post-traumatic growth — the ideas that people who endure trauma can return to normal and even wind up stronger than before. Ford said she has given speeches about this topic to students, telling them, “You can always recover.”

.. She will probably be asked to detail every moment of the alleged attack. How much she had to drink. Why she went upstairs. What she was wearing.