You don’t know what happened in that bedroom in suburban Maryland 35 years ago. I don’t know, either. Hopefully questions and answers in the next few days can help us have a better guess. But a bit off-center from the core dispute here are two questions about silence: the silence for three decades from Christine Blasey Ford, and the silence for two months from Dianne Feinstein.
Some Kavanaugh defenders are making a specious argument to cast doubt the charges by Christine Ford that Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her: That she never mentioned it for 28 years.
The question, Why didn’t you ever say a word about this before now? can be a valid way to cast doubt on the honesty of some accusers in some cases.
In the case of this accusation, this objection is not valid, though. It is perfectly believable, and frankly understandable, that a woman who went through what Ford says she went through would never want to talk about it. It’s a horrible thing to recount. It’s horrible to even say the words of what happened, much less to relive the incident. To want to bury this memory is a very human thing.
It’s also perfectly believable that a professional therapist, probing anxieties, depression, or anger in a patient, would be able to draw out the story years later. I have friends who have come forward for the first time with a story like this years after it happened. Many people probably do.
So there may be plenty of reasons to doubt Ford’s story–conflicting details, Kavanaugh’s denial, et cetera–but “she never mentioned it for 28 years” is not a good reason to assume she is making it up for political purposes.
The silence of Dianne Feinstein is another thing.
In July Feinstein heard this story from Ford. Yet she didn’t act on it. She didn’t ask Kavanaugh about it in committee, in closed session, in written questions, or in a one-on-one meeting. She presumably didn’t ignore the letter. So there are three possible explanations for Feinstein’s silence until now:
- Feinstein found Ford’s charges not credible. Perhaps Feinstein knows something we don’t, and has concluded this accusation isn’t true.
- Feinstein found Ford’s charges not relevant. Perhaps Feinstein believes that whatever happened amounts not to a serious crime of moral turpitude, but to a horrible idiotic youthful mistake.
- Feinstein was always planning on saving the letter for as late as possible for tactical purposes.
There are many reasons to think (3) is true, even if (1) or (2) is also true. For one thing, the Democrats did the exact same thing with Anita Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas. For another, the timing tactics here are simple: if they torpedoed Kavanaugh in July, that would give Republicans too much time to find a replacement nominee.
If explanation (3) is true, that tells us something about Feinstein–she is a dishonest politician playing dirty politics with a deadly serious charge. And if the first two are true, but she’s trotting the document out now, it tells us she’s knowingly smearing a man.
We will learn plenty more in the coming days about the heart of the matter. Long silences by two different women will be a factor. Those silences ought to be considered as two very different things: Totally understandable from Ford, if her accusations are true; Totally dishonest and dirty from Feinstein, almost regardless of her explanation.
