We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Dr. Christine Blasey Ford: 6 Years Since Her Kavanaugh Testimony

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Do you remember where you were?  On September 27, 2018, as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford raised her right hand and testified in the hearings of Brett Kavanaugh—who would go on to be confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the nation.  This week marks six years since we were eyewitnesses to her historic, courageous patriotism. In honor of her bravery and resolve, today we reshare our powerful conversation with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford—about the heartbreak, and hope, of being an American woman. About Dr. Ford:  Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a clinical professor and consulting biostatistician at the Stanford University School of Medicine. On September 27, 2018, Dr. Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding her sexual assault in connection with the Committee’s consideration of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s lifetime confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. Following her testimony, Ford and her family endured constant intimidation, harassment, and death threats forcing them to move out of their home, living in various secure locales with guards. In 2019, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in Time 100. Dr. Ford’s memoir, ONE WAY BACK, is available now. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's podcast is really special, and you'll remember why. Do you remember where you were? I was streaming it on C-SPAN, glued to my laptop, my heart beating out of my chest as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford raised her right hand and testified that Brett Kavanaugh, the man under consideration for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the nation, had sexually assaulted her. It was history happening before our eyes, as it had unfolded 33 years before when Professor Hill did the same courageous act.

We were eyewitnesses to historic patriotism. It was September 27th, 2018. It feels like it was yesterday, but this week marks six years since she testified. In the years since that time, her families had to go into hiding because of unrelenting death threats threats and she has emerged with her voice and her courage intact. Brett Kavanaugh is now six years into his lifetime appointment.

It is right and good to honor Dr. Blasey Ford's historic courage six years ago by re-sharing our amazing conversation with her. It is about the heartbreak and hope of being an American woman. I hope it will be as powerful for you as it was for us. ["We Can Do Hard Things"] Hello, you all. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today we have the epitome of We Can Do Hard Things. You will all know her as one of our absolute heroes, and I'm sure one of yours. Her name is Dr. Christine Lassie Ford. How is that possible that we have her here? We know her as a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a clinical professor and consulting biostatistician at the Stanford University School of Medicine. On September 27, 2018, Dr. Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding her sexual assault in connection with the committee's consideration of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's lifetime confirmation

to the United States Supreme Court. Following her testimony, Ford and her family endured constant intimidation, harassment, and death threats, forcing them to move out of their home, living in various secure locales with guards. Time magazine included Dr. Ford on its shortlist for Person of the Year in 2018. In 2019, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in Time 100. Dr. Ford's memoir, which I absolutely loved and finished in one day. It's called One Way Back and it's available now. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you so much. Well for everything.

Thank you so much for having me as a long time fan of this podcast. I'm so happy to be here. Longtime fan of this podcast. I'm so happy to be here. It's gonna be hard to not call you Dr. Ford. So forgive me if I do that, but in thinking about this conversation, I was thinking about how Professor Anita Hill, when she watched your testimony, she said you didn't feel far away from us in some fancy important room that you felt like you were here with us and we were with you. And she said that watching it, she felt a spiritual solidarity with you. And that is what we all felt watching it. You were with us and we

were with you. And in that moment where you raised your hand and you were such a human person and you closed your eyes and you spoke your truth, you were speaking your truth, but you were also speaking our truth. Your job was to say the truth and whatever they did with it was their business, but you were making sure the world had to hear it. And when we watched it, we knew the world wouldn't be the same because it never is after the world is forced to hear the truth. Thank you for changing the world that way for us.

And thank you from one way back. It was so beautiful. One of the reasons I think we have that spiritual solidarity is because of the horrendous ubiquity of what you described that day. Over half of women experience sexual violence. So when we saw your story, we knew it. It was yours, but we knew it.

And when we saw him, we knew him from our own lives. And when we saw him, we knew him from our own lives. And so what is it about how commonplace that phenomenon is that conflates it with being normal? And was that part of how you told yourself the story for so long before it finally came out? Did it feel like something that was normal because it was common? Well, before my day on TV, there was this three-month period of wrangling with how I

was going to report the assault and to who. So that three months was quite a journey. And at that time I didn't really identify as an assault survivor. I kept calling it an attack and I thought of myself as more of like a whistleblower or someone who was just weighing in on a really important job applicant to a really important job that having grown up in Washington DC was the cream of the crop job for only the best of us could aspire to that job. And so I felt compelled by sort of a higher calling that I, no matter what, had to say something. And then afterward, I started getting a lot of correspondence from people, particularly survivors. And then I started to identify as a survivor and feel connected to this huge community.

identify as a survivor and feel connected to this huge community. It's an epidemic. I think 25% of the people who wrote to me wrote their story in a letter and shared it. And many of them were sharing it for the first time and had never told anyone. And I also, you know, regarding Anita, I don't know that I would have been compelled if she hadn't already done that because I probably wouldn't have thought it was an option. We wouldn't have thought of that as an option. So maybe I would have written an email or something, but I don't know that I would have ever ended up on TV at a hearing

if it weren't for her. So she broke that barrier and then made me realize, well, if she did that, I should do that. I should definitely say something, whether it's in a private or public way. And that took a while to figure out. In that figuring out what was fascinating to me in reading your book is that that was not clear at all. I mean, your lawyers, they believed in you. They were champions of you and were working for free. Right. Told you not to. They said, we can't let you stand in front of an oncoming train.

So how did you receive that from the people who were there advising you? I mean, that would have scared the hell out of me. How do you go from that to, yes, and I'm going to do it anyway? So that was a long process as well. Starting with when Justice Kennedy resigned in the early summer, I started wrangling with it without lawyers for a long time. And I was sure that I was going to do something. I just didn't know how. And so I met with my congressperson and talked to her and then retained lawyers and the lawyers would work with me on it, a plan to come forward and we sort of laid out a plan of how we would communicate with the judiciary committee. And then right before Brett's initial hearings, they advised that

they didn't think it was a good idea that the blowback would be really hard. It would be hard on me. It would be just difficult and it wouldn't change the outcome. That was rough news to hear. Although I had been myself pretty ambivalent all summer, like one day like, yes, we're doing this. And the next day, like, no, I'm scared. I don't really want to kind of back and forth. And so I was really upset when they told me that, but they said, if you really want to do it, we will keep fighting. We just don't think that it is the correct thing for you and your life. So, yeah, it was hard. I wanted to ask you, I had this shift in understanding of the world and the country while watching your process, which is when you were first testifying,

Abhinaya, you know, we were wearing our like trust women shirts everywhere. We'd wash them, put them on the neck. Everything was trust women, trust women, believe women. And what I understood for the first time while watching you testify and watching the world's reaction and then watching the lack of change afterwards was that that is not our problem. Everybody believed you.

If they said they didn't believe you, they were lying. Like everybody believed you. It's just that it didn't matter enough to make any change. Right? Right. I just feel like that was such a huge paradigm shift for me. Like, oh, it's not about belief. It's actually about caring enough to do anything about what we know is true.

Right. Because I guess what were they going to do? And apparently they struggled for a couple of days with what they were going to do. According to my attorneys, the fact that it took them a couple of days to start darvowing and retaliating was it was because they did believe and they needed to figure out their strategy and how to have political cover for their votes. So I've heard you say always extremely kindly and with such deep generosity and understanding, but you have talked about when a woman says, I was assaulted, I was raped, I was harassed. A fascinating reaction comes from people, which is, I believe you. Why, Christine, do people say, I believe you, to a woman who is reporting her assault, when they don't say, I believe you, to a man when he's reporting that his car got stolen? Exactly. That is exactly, to me, the interesting thing. I can't think of anything else that we say in conversations

where the response is, I believe you. So when someone says to me, I believe you, I recognize that their intention is really nice. It's the same as if I just said, my name is Christine and they say, I believe you. And the inverse of that is that if they said, I don't believe you, I'm not sure I really care that much either. So it just doesn't really hit me in the right way. But I always say thank you so much because I know that the intent is very supportive. But yeah, the I believe you, I just think is an interesting linguistic situation. That's our response to these stories.

Yeah. It goes back to what you were saying, Glennon. Professor Hill said the same thing as you. When she looked out, she said, I'm looking at this panel and they believe me, but they just aren't willing to do anything about it. And so I think the reason people say, I believe you, is that's supposed to be your reward. That's supposed to be all you ask for.

Like this horrible injustice happened to you. And congratulations, I believe you because I'm not going to take an additional step, which is holding any kind of accountability for the perpetrator of the violence. Your reward is belief and you should be thrilled with that. And I'm a good person because I believe you because women in general are untrustworthy.

So if I believe you, what's in question here is your believability. Right. I don't think we say it for anything else other than sexual assault or maybe domestic violence. I just don't think it's something that we say other than in those situations. When someone tells me that they've been assaulted and I get a lot of correspondence from people who have been, I say, I'm so sorry, are you okay? Is usually what, and I don't know that that's much better,

but that's just kind of what comes out for me when someone decides to disclose something that personal. You talk a lot about it. You felt like it was your duty as a citizen to come forward. Can you tell us about that? What does that feel like and duty to whom and citizenship of what, what is that, that responsibility?

Yeah, so in all this reflection over the last five years or so, I keep thinking, I wonder if I had not grown up in Washington, DC, going on all those field trips to the Supreme Court and to Congress and having that be our just grandeur of our location of where we lived. And we were all in awe of those places. And We also had very strict rules about how to behave in those settings and how to be respectful. It becomes part of your identity when you grow up there. Although certainly there's people who are extremely patriotic that live in other parts of the country, but I think in Washington, DC, it's really the core of the neighborhood.

And so I talk about in the book that my first thought was, oh no, once I say something, people are going to find out a lot of things about me. Nevertheless, I'm going to have to say something. And reading your book, Glennon, was actually really helpful when I was getting over a lot of these things in the aftermath that you knew you were going to have to do something difficult and you don't exactly know how it's going to play out and what you're going to do and how it's going to work. And so I really resonated when I was listening to your book

and it seemed like your story was almost my story, right? Even though they weren't anything alike in the context, but that idea that you know something has happened that's gonna change your life forever and it's gonna affect other people around you, and it's going to happen, but you just don't know yet exactly how. So for me, the compelling part was like a higher power of patriotism,

which unfortunately clashes with partisanship, right? Right? How do you reconcile that patriotism? Because patriotism can be viewed as a belief in the integrity of institutions in the best possible version of the institutions we have with the failure of the institutions, both in Professor Hill's case and in yours, to maintain the integrity of those institutions. I mean, for someone who is willing to put their life and legacy and name and face to sacrifice that

legacy and name and face to sacrifice that for that cause. Is that just the most horrendous loss and grief to have that not reciprocated? It was pretty rough. Before I testified, I will say it was helpful because it was so clear. It was just so clear that I needed to say something. So that patriotism that was sustaining me, it's pretty an idealistic view. Some said I was naive, and I call it more idealistic. But if you don't have a belief that those institutions have the capability of doing the right thing, then I don't think I would have ever said anything. But going into it, I had to at least have some faith that they could do something or maybe would do something. And when they didn't, yes, it was disappointing. I don't think I was as

surprised as most people who are watching. I think I knew three or four days before, and I sort of talk about in the book how that unravels and what word we were getting before the voting. So by the time the voting occurred, I knew pretty much how that was going to end. But yeah, it's a process getting over it and it is difficult to try to maintain faith in those institutions. I'm Jean Marie Laskus. I'm a journalist. I spent my career helping Americans understand the lives of other Americans. Coal miners, gun shop clerks, staffers in the White House mailroom. In my new podcast, Cement City, I tell the story of an entire town. A dying town that you have absolutely no reason to care about. But trust me, you will. Listen to and follow Cement City, an Odyssey Original Podcast in partnership with Cement City Productions. Available now for free on the Odyssey app

and wherever you get your podcasts. When I go back to that day and how we all experienced it, there's the like you were speaking to them being the people who were going to make the decision and the politicians and all of them. But there was another them that was the millions of women and everybody who's ever been a survivor, the millions of people who believe in the ideals of the country, not like what the country's doing, but what we promise to be. I felt like you were speaking to us then.

It felt like you were a mockingjay in that moment. I think that was like Hunger Games time, right? I felt like you were like Katniss, and it was the fucking Hunger Games, and we were all in our houses, and we were tributes also. And regardless of what happened with them, the them that were the millions of us, the message was received,

and it was turned into power and comfort and solidarity. So like even though it didn't work with the them, it worked with the us. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's really what got me through the last many years. So was the other them, yes, the solidarity, but I didn't know when I was sitting in that chair talking to the committee with that big seal of the United States that's just gigantic that you're looking up at.

I didn't know that other people were watching, which is kind of a good thing, because I think I might not have made it to that chair if I had known how many people were watching, which is kind of a good thing because I think I might not have made it to that chair if I had known how many people were actually watching. I mean, they told you in the hallway walking down, right? Yes. I mean, Lord have mercy. Well they knew I was really afraid and didn't want to be on TV that I wanted to have this private closed meeting. Then they said, well, they're going to have to videotape it for the other senators to

watch. And I said, okay. And then they said, so it will be on C-SPAN. And then I told myself, okay, great. Nobody watches C-SPAN and it's a work day. No one's going to see it's fine. I'm already walking. So I just had to keep walking and not really think about it. And then when I got into the room, there was supposed to be one camera, but there were a lot more than that. And until my first break, I didn't realize a lot of people were watching. And on my very first break, I went back to the holding room that they have for you and looked at my phone and there's all these messages like, hey, keep up the good work. You're doing great. And I thought, like, I wonder how they know that I'm doing great. But in retrospect, I guess it's a good thing that other people were watching

because then I was able to connect with the larger community of survivors and the other them. So if it had been a private meeting, maybe this is how it was supposed to go, is that I was destined to then connect with the survivor community instead of with the partisan patriots. Yeah, maybe that's the them that we should be having more faith in. Yes. Maybe those are the ones more worthy of our faith and more able to live up to the integrity is the other them. Totally. I continue to be amazed by, you are so clear in your duty,

and this is the right thing, and I knew I was gonna say something. It was really interesting to read how you thought the whole time that no one would know your name or your face, and it just kind of evolved into now everyone in the world does. But you're so clear in that and you talk about how your friends would say like, you don't owe anyone anything. And I would fall firmly in that

you don't owe anyone anything, Camp. Can we just talk about that? Because I'm fascinated by this, this way of like, well, people have to come forward to move the ball down the court. But then also why do people have to do that? Like why is the onus on the person who has been subjected to violence to write the ship when all the people who are doing it bear no responsibility in that equation. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I talk about this because the same words were said by my therapist and by my boss. You don't owe anyone anything.

Many people said they're going to ruin your life and things like that. But they're going to ruin your life is a little abstract. So I didn't really get that. I just thought, oh, well, that's okay. I'm not gonna see the people. And if they call me the B word or whatever, it'll just be like a tree falling in some forest and I won't know about it.

So I kind of underestimated what that was going to look like. But the, we don't owe anyone anything. It just never resonated with me. I couldn't quite get it. So I never really internalized that. And maybe I should internalize it a little more, but if we don't owe anyone anything, we don't owe each other anything, it just seems then we're not a community. I think a community is we do owe each other something. But also if I was younger, I don't know that I would have felt that way. I'm an adult and I feel like, well, you know, I've had a great life and I'm only one life. So if they ruin one life and it helps a bunch of other people, then yeah, I just couldn't really make sense of the, you don't owe anyone anything.

Wow. Yeah. It's like, do we owe each other everything actually? And to whom do we owe it? Maybe that's it. It's like, it feels so confusing because I don't know that at this point, I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this, but statistically, one of my kids will come to me

and tell me they've been sexually assaulted. I don't know if my advice to them is, let's go through the system. I don't know if my advice to them is, let's go through the system. I don't know. Maybe the truth is we owe each other everything. But I don't know that I tell my children that we're gonna go to the them. Right.

I agree. I don't know that I would tell my children either. And now that they've seen what happened to me, I think they might not. But yeah, I don't might not, but yeah, I don't know that I would go through that system again. I'm not sure it's the right. I don't even know that there is a system

and it seems like there's not really an infrastructure to that system for people to come forward like there is at the workplace. And I'm pretty honest in the book about, well, if this had happened in my workplace, I don't even know what I would have done. It was because it was the Supreme Court for me. There was a specialness about that.

And you had grown up seeing Professor Hill do that. And so that was a different thing than the workplace view. That's interesting because in my head I was thinking okay if the right thing applies here the right thing applies everywhere and you know I've had to really interrogate myself reading your work because I did not report an attack on me in the workplace and it was for a minuscule. Like, it wouldn't even show up on the radar

of what you experienced in terms of what I would have experienced from that. But knowing that my career would not be identified by any of my work, it would be the person who that happened to. And maybe, in a best case scenario, we call her brave for doing that. But she'd be the brave person who had that thing happen to her.

Just like you, brilliant scientist professor, will always be associated with the worst thing that ever happened to you. Right, right. I just wonder if all of that beautiful intent and community duty, we need a place to put that that doesn't re-victimize that. It's like Professor Hill said when she's like, I reject the idea that things will change when more women step up and come forward. It's like things will change, she says, when we provide systems and processes so that people can come forward and be heard and there be accountability.

It's not put more women up in front of the firing squad so things can change. It's stop having a firing squad. Make the costs greater to the people who are perpetrating violence than they are to the people who experience violence, and then that changes. Right now, only one side is paying the cost.

Right. And it's more like recycling shit. The planet's on fire, so you guys just keep recycling your plastic. It's like, so, oh, you have a problem, you're getting assaulted, just keep sending in your tributes. It's your responsibility. It's not the system that has to change. Have you seen any ideas, movement, progress? Is there anything systematically? Or are we actually not citizens of this country? Because that's how I feel. If I believe in duty, I believe in citizenship, I just don't know to whom I'm a citizen

because citizens have equal protection under the law. It's like that quote, I am a woman so I have no country. I agree, I owe everything to everyone, but not to the people who will not even protect my people. Right, right. Yeah, I think I've gone through like a breakup with my country. Ah, God, isn't that the truth? You know, I'm sort of trying to figure out what kind of relationship I can have with

that system going forward. What have you learned about that? Any ideas? going forward. So what have you learned about that? Any ideas? Yeah. I think you speak for a lot of American women in feeling isolated from. Yeah. I think the progress that we need to make, like the very first level of progress would be to at least protect the people who are willing to speak at a hearing after they speak. So I think even when we see other people testifying that are lawyers themselves or DC insiders, we watch these people testify and like the way people are treated, it's treated very poorly instead of appreciated and thanked or protected from retaliation. I think there just has to be some basic protection from retaliation. That would be a good start. There's

a lot more that I would want to see happen, but I think for starters, let's not retaliate against the people who are speaking to the government and sharing their information. Yeah. Yeah. The no systems, it's just like feeding to the wolves. I was struck by how you were talking about how you just always thought that that first day of you testifying was just going to be the initial opportunity to tell your story and that you would have many more opportunities to be able to speak to the people who were trying to gather the information about this. And that that was the one and only time that you had the opportunity to do that. Right. With five minutes of questioning per senator, and they could ask and talk about

whatever they wanted in those five minutes. So I just thought, well, of course, people are going to want to know more, and there will definitely be follow-up, and I'll provide more information, but it didn't work that way. That was it. We saw this very abbreviated, extended investigation and then a rush to the vote and the president having a rally and mocking me in the meantime. That vote, nothing says let's rush someone through other than a vote on a Saturday at Congress. To me, that was like the ultimate, that they're voting on a Saturday

and working on a Saturday to get this vote through. I mean, and just because I object to even the term investigation in terms of it was lending credibility to cover their asses on that. Like it was just for everyone's reference point, Representative Flake at the very end said, I won't vote unless there's an investigation. And what happened was the FBI interviewed 10 people, all of whom were approved in

advance by the White House. So the White House who has nominated this person to the court tells the FBI exactly whom they can talk to, 10 people they speak to. They do not interview Dr. Ford, that's odd, since she is the one with the information. And they had received 4,500 tips about Kavanaugh and they didn't call any of them back. Right.

And they also didn't interview any of the corroborators of your story that you had listed in your letter to the FBI. So that was not an investigation. That was a we can say there's an investigation to give all of these people who are having a little trouble sleeping at night because they know this woman is telling the truth to let them check the box that we did the right thing. But it was horseshit. Totally. Totally. Yeah. So I was calling and the corroborators were calling me like, hey, have they called you or have you been interviewed yet? And, you know, we were still very hopeful and thinking, oh, they're just going to come to us last, so we'll just hang on because it's a one-week investigation and it's only been three days, so everybody just stay organized and hang tight.

We all had our preparations in order, just waiting, assuming that they were coming our way. But you're right, it was just a sham investigation and they went back out and just confirmed with his friends that his friends are his friends, supportive of him and that gave enough cover to the vote. So I think by Wednesday of that week, I knew this isn't going to happen and I need to start just preparing to get over it. But I think the people who were out in the community watching on TV,

I wasn't watching it on TV, were thinking, well, the preliminary votes on Friday, we'll see how that goes, and then maybe Saturday. But by Wednesday, it was already sort of over in my mind, especially then when the president got on TV and had the rally. So. It's just so heartbreaking to be a woman in America because the worst part about it is that you still hope. Like I knew it was like the reason you look so brave, it was like that Atticus Finch, the definition of courage is knowing you're licked before you start and doing it anyway.

I saw you and I knew that that was the case, but I still believed and hoped to the end that something would be different. And so it was such a heartbreak. Hope will kick your ass. Even though I knew, I still hoped. And that's what keeps breaking my heart about this country. Yeah. Well, you're not alone.

In the scores of thousands of letters I got, the people who were writing during the investigation days, they were all hoping as well. Everyone got their hopes up as soon as that investigation was called. The letters that came in that were written on that day all say, oh, this is so great. Now there's going to be an investigation.

And so people were clearly hopeful that that would happen. I love our hope. I just... I do too. I love our hope. I just think it has to be placed with the right people. Our hope is revolutionary. It's just, it has to be placed with the right people. Our hope is revolutionary. It's just, it has to be in each other. And we have to figure out how

to use and find community and power in the other them. It's just, we keep placing our hope in this system because we say, oh, it's broken. We just have to fix it together. But it's not broken. It works exactly the way it's supposed to work. It works to protect the thousands of cavernous. There's a cavernous on every corner. I know 30 cavernous from my past. I know them all.

They talk the same. They cry while calling women emotional. They scream about their beer. He's a caricature. And the system exists to protect the Kavanaghs. It worked perfectly. Right. I think that is one thing we owe ourselves maybe,

is to stay hopeful. Because that's a better space to live a life than to not be hopeful. And I think it's, if nothing else, it's a better space to live a life than to not be hopeful. I think if nothing else, it's a great coping mechanism. I certainly went through dark years as I described in the book, but I think in the end, we do have to just stay hopeful, not in the system, but as you say, in each other, in other human beings, because for every Senator that voted,

I have a thousand letters of human beings saying how much they cared and how much they love survivors and how they've experienced similar things. Do you know what I have hope in about what you did is it just the same thing that Professor Hill did. It goes back to that normalization thing. It's how are you a whistleblower to something that happens to everyone? You're blowing the whistle, but it's happening to everyone. So how is that a thing?

So many whistles. But the thing about it that was crazy is, okay, for example, when at the time that the term sexual harassment was invented, like just because the invention of the term doesn't mean people aren't experiencing it. Like 80% of women being sexually harassed in the workplace at the time that that term was invented. Which means prior to the invention of that term, it was just normal life. It was just the way it was. Yes. And this is the same thing. So her making everyone uncomfortable by saying those words in that fancy

room to those fancy people was like, I'm taking this private, what is normal private life of people, of women, and making you all look at it and say the words and making everybody hear it. We all know Kavanaugh's, we all have been you. And you said, I'm gonna make everyone uncomfortable to take this private thing that is so normalized that you're willing to excuse it on behalf of anyone.

And I'm going to make you all see it. And that is powerful. That is bringing from the shadows the real thing. And it's out there. It's living. It's a living thing now that people can't pretend doesn't exist and they can't pretend the highest levels are unaffected by it. Yeah that's so well said. Because before you spoke I think a lot of people

just thought what you experienced was a high school party. Yes. Sexual harassment was just life and getting pinned down by a bunch of laughing boys, that's just a high school party. We didn't even know we were survivors because it's so ubiquitous. And so why this all comes out sideways later and we're suffering and we don't know

because we have no words for it. We just think that this is the experience. I think it did so much for teenage girls. Yes. Forever. Forever it will change what they can believe that they deserve in terms of safety and their own bodily autonomy. Yeah, I think that would be wonderful. I hope that it has had that impact. And I hear from people that it had that impact for them and their family, and it generated a lot of conversations that families had not had yet with their kids that night or the next night. So I'm glad that that happened. I was living it. I wasn't watching it.

So I have like this almost disparate experience from everyone else. It's a little bit different. So sometimes I have to have people actually tell me what happened and why are people thanking me and why I don't understand what's going on. Like it was a little bit different going through it than watching it. And it's just hard, that's part of just a little bit hard to explain.

But at the beginning I was like, why is everyone thanking me? Didn't they see the vote? I don't understand why people are saying thank you because they must not have watched the end of that movie. It's not the end. No. And also you show us like in terms of doing the hard things, it's contained.

It's like, you are not responsible for the outcome. You showed up and you did your hard thing. The fact that they didn't do their fucking hard thing. We don't told you responsible for the Supreme Court. You gave what you owed us, women, humanity, whatever it was, you gave it all and you did your duty to perfection, to beyond then what happened next had nothing to do with you. Right. Yeah. I still have to like grapple with that, but yes, I do hear what you're saying. The only person responsible for Brett Kavanaugh is Brett Kavanaugh. He's the one responsible for all of this. And then the people who nominated him and voted for him are responsible for the Supreme Court. You

are responsible for 0% of it and we just thank you for pointing and saying because then nobody gets to say they didn't know. They get to know they knew and did the wrong thing. And we get to know that's what they have to live with. Right. And we get to live with seeing that. And I just wonder when you say you didn't know that was your last time, is there anything that you would have wanted to say when there were millions of people listening if you had known that it was your last time to speak in front of all of those people? known that it was your last time to speak in front of all of those people? Gosh, well, you know, the goal when I got to that chair was just to like live through that time. I was so scared. Well done. Just so every question was like, okay, I think I can answer this.

There are things that I prepared to say that I didn't say just because they weren't asked. I assumed some knowledge on their part. I didn't know the audience very well, right? And so I assumed a few things that, like I assumed that they either experienced the collective US trauma of 9-11 or the Challenger explosion or trauma of 9-11 or the Challenger explosion or the JFK assassination. There's been times in history where we've had these collective traumas and people's memories are always so interesting about those days. I remember exactly where I was on 9-11 and who I was with and what I was wearing. And then if you interviewed the people and said, well, what did you eat for breakfast

and what did you eat for dinner? Then at some point they don't know the answer to those questions. They just know very firmly what they do know. I think that's the biggest assumption I made going in is that I wouldn't have to like lay that out about memory that they experienced that themselves. So, and in that context, you were explaining how memory works to trauma survivors. Can you tell us that in the context of survivors?

Because that was so compelling. How memory works and how it's used against people who come forward by saying, oh, if you don't remember that you must not be telling the truth. That was another huge thing your testimony did. My friends, I had friends calling me going, oh my God, like whose bosses gaslit them so much and said, well, you can't be telling the truth because of this and this. And you explaining how memory works was a humongous public service. Yeah. And I'm not even necessarily an expert on that, but because of where I work, I know a few things about it.

So I just kind of offered up what I knew. I didn't think that would be a question. I didn't think how does Memory Work would be a question. It wasn't something I anticipated. I went in there thinking I'm here to help them. Like I'm here as like a collaborator. I didn't think that then it was gonna be like, well, what don't you remember?

Let's sort of drill down on that. Yeah, they really honed in on the things that I didn't remember. And ironically, I'm known as a person with a really good memory. Like I'm kind of the person that remembers what people wore to the prom and who they went with in 10th grade

versus 11th grade versus 12th grade. People ask me like to recall those things for them because for some reason I remember a lot of these things. But I certainly came out of that experience like them making me feel like I had a bad memory or something and yeah, so that was interesting. And does trauma make people, I know you're not, this isn't your area of expertise, but completely, but trauma makes you remember certain things.

They're indelibly. Yes. In the hippocampus. Exactly. There you go. Christine, I think of that maybe three times a day. Every time I hear a group of men laughing. Anyway, it does make you, if I'm correct, remember certain details.

You'll never forget them. They're burned into your memory, which that energy of remembering those things during the trauma makes other things fuzzy. Yes. Right? Yeah. And even in everyday life, a conversation with a neighbor, you don't, you're not taking in like every single piece of the context around the conversation

and what they're wearing and what you're wearing and all of that. We do focus on things. And then in like a heightened state, that just is accentuated more. So on 9-11, when you listen to people's stories, they talk about, and then the mailman came by and just these very specific things that people remember, but that doesn't mean they're going to remember the whole entirety of their three hours of watching that on TV.

They don't remember all of it. Some of it gets encoded really clearly and the rest of it can sometimes be remembered, but sometimes it just was never encoded to begin with. And it's so interesting when people say, well, how is it possible? It's just such a, a lapse in judgment that these people who are doing these trials don't know how trauma works.

That is just, we should really fix that. That's purposeful. They could be trauma informed. They could. That's right. They could have an expert training on that. They sure could. There's nothing keeping them from becoming trained in that area.

And I shouldn't put them all together because there certainly were people on that committee who were more trauma informed than others and understood things more than others. The part of your book about your dad, like that just broke my heart because it's all coming from outside of the world and everything. And I know you say it's okay, it's okay. But I think that is so true for so many people is that sometimes the closest people to us don't know how to be fully loyal to us during those times. Yes. I mean, so yeah, the word okay, when you said you think I'm okay with it, I think that captures it so well. Okay is such a, you know, it's sometimes a word that we, we

criticize, but in this situation, that's exactly what it is. It's okay. You said it's not totally okay. It's okay enough. It's okay enough. It's okay enough. So it's not good or bad. It's okay. It's like a B minus or C plus maybe. Yeah. The family part was very hard. I felt like the best analogy for me was that there was like an earthquake in my social life, in my family life that went through my community in California, my community in DC and elsewhere, and people ended up on one side of the fault line or the other. And just like you can't predict the earthquake, there was no predicting who was going to be on my side afterward. But there were people on my side, so that's good. I wasn't alone.

But other people that I care about a lot were not with me. So I think that might be a universal experience though, that when we go through these most challenging things in our life, that it's never the people that we think would pick us up at two o'clock in the morning or whatever ideas we have about who would be there for us in a crisis. I don't know that we can predict it or that's just my experience. I don't know if you all have had that experience, but there are people that then do step up and you think, wow, I've been maybe overlooking how valuable that friend is and what a good friend

that they would stand up for me and come to me to try to help. It's just not the people that I would maybe put down at my top 10 list or something. I think that's kind of beautiful that we don't know there's something lovely about that. While some people might not be able to help us during certain phases of our life, there are other people that will. Then we can do that too for other people.

Anytime I get myself down about like, I can't believe this person didn't at least come forward and say that he did this or that or I can't believe any of my can't believes, I always say like, let me think about if I've done that to someone. And I try to come up with a thing where, and usually I can find one, where I didn't help someone when I could have. That's just one of the ways I cope with all of it. You are a fascinating, brave, beautiful human being.

You are a fascinating, brave, beautiful human being. Just thank you for catnessing. I'm going to have to go read the book again. I'm going to go read that again. It's you. I'm going to read Untamed again because Untamed, I mentioned it in my Acknowledgements section. Do you think I don't know that? My friends have sent it, my friends who get the arcs of the books. It's a very exciting happening in my life that you put Untamed in the Acknowledgements. It meant a lot to me. I sat in my truck, like when I still had to be a little bit in hiding, and couldn't go inside a

basketball game, but I could couldn't go inside a basketball game, but I could take my kid to a basketball game. So I would just sit in the car and I listened to it in the car. And then when we had to drive, I was like, I have to get home so I can start listening again. I was so caught up. It was so good. It was so good.

That's how the other them, that's how we reach each other, right? The systems have their big things, but we send each other messages in bottles through showing up on a screen in front of that seal, through books, through support groups. There is this constant lifting up of the other them through a million channels, and I'm so grateful that we connected that way. Yes, the other them. I love it. I think that we should get a jersey.

Yeah. Oh, the other them. Well, the message in a bottle from one way back is beautiful and gorgeous. And I'm so thankful that you're gifting the world with that as well. People are gonna love hearing from you again. Thank you, Dr. Ford.

Thank you, thank you so much. Pod Squad, you can do hard things. I don't know if you can do things as hard as Dr. Ford did. Okay, I'm not promising you you can. But. They can, they can. They can? All right, I believe her. I believe you can't. But. They can, they can. They can? All right, I believe her. I believe you, Dr. Ford.

Bye Pod Squad, we love you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, Pod Squad, we just have so much more to say. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna wrap here, but tomorrow, come back. We're gonna drop a bonus episode and we're gonna tell you all the things that are spinning in our brains and hearts After this talk with Christine Blasey Ford

Come back. We shall do more hard things tomorrow If this podcast means something to you it it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey,

or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman and the show is produced by Lauren Legrasso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.