{"id":32366,"date":"2024-03-17T12:39:34","date_gmt":"2024-03-17T19:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=32366"},"modified":"2024-03-17T12:39:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-17T19:39:34","slug":"bay-area-professor-and-brett-kavanaugh-accuser-christine-blasey-ford-publishes-memoir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/03\/17\/bay-area-professor-and-brett-kavanaugh-accuser-christine-blasey-ford-publishes-memoir\/","title":{"rendered":"Bay Area Professor and Brett Kavanaugh Accuser Christine Blasey Ford Publishes Memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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15 MARCH 2024\/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT<\/a>\/JAY BARMANN<\/a> (SFist.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christine Blasey Ford’s quiet life as a professor of psychology in the SF Bay Area was turned upside down in 2018 when she was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about an assault accusation she made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Now, having come out the other side of the media wringer, she has published a memoir titled One Way Back<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the New York Times book critic Alexandra Jacobs quips<\/a>, that media wringer Blasey Ford went through six years ago, “once called a \u201cspin cycle,\u201d [is] now more like a clown car going through the wash tunnel.” But one way that uncomfortably public figures put a capstone on their experience is writing a book like this, to finally put their side of the experience down on the page for history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is heavy on surfing metaphors, Jacobs notes \u2014 in addition to being psychologist, Blasey Ford is an avid surfer \u2014 and they are employed to describe how her lawyers had her “paddle out” to catch the wave of this very public hearing, and she therefore couldn’t just swim back without trying to “catch the wave.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She became most known for the clinical phrasing she applied to describing Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, laughing as a 15-year-old Kavanaugh lay on top of her covering her mouth, when she was just 13. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kavanaugh was then a student at Georgetown Prep, while Blasey Ford attended the all-girls Holton-Arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book also adds a cringe-y detail to the aftermath of the Senate hearing, vis a vis Blasey Ford’s Republican father who still lives in the DC area. He apparently wrote a congenial note to Kavanaugh’s father after it was all done, by way of some kind of apology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blasey Ford continues to teach psychology at Palo Alto University, as far as we know, and she works as a research psychologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. The perks of being an accuser of a conservative Trump appointee to the Supreme Court were several, as she describes in the memoir. Apparently she slept over at Oprah’s estate in Montecito, had lunch with Laurene Powell Jobs, and got backstage passes to a Metallica show \u2014 and her basketball-fan sons got Steph Curry’s jersey after a Warriors game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to processing the trauma of her experience in the spotlight \u2014 a hero of Democrats, and a villain for all Trumpists \u2014 Blasey Ford gets out one bit of a message to Kavanaugh about how he could avoided the whole mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If he\u2019d come to me, really leveled with me, and said, \u2018I don\u2019t remember this happening, but it might have, and I\u2019m so sorry,\u2019 it might have been a significant, therapeutic moment for survivors in general,\u201d Blasey Ford writes. “I might have wobbled a bit. I might have thought, \u2018You know, he was a jackass in high school, but now he\u2019s not.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also describes getting to talk to Anita Hill, the only other living person in the country to go through something similar to what she did \u2014 the same sort of trial, vilification, and relegation to a historical footnote while the accused still sits on the highest court in the land. Hill apparently told her “Twenty-five years does a lot,” when it comes to getting over the trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At least, it sounds like, Blasey Ford has gotten back to some sort of normal, after just six years. And the book has helped exorcise the mess from her life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

15 MARCH 2024\/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT\/JAY BARMANN (SFist.com) Christine Blasey Ford’s quiet life as a professor of psychology in the SF Bay Area was turned upside down in 2018 when she was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about an assault accusation she made against Supreme Court Justice Brett… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1872],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32368,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32366\/revisions\/32368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}