Supreme Court Nominee

Should a person be judged on something done over 40 years ago?

  • Yes

    Votes: 59 39.1%
  • No

    Votes: 17 11.3%
  • Depends

    Votes: 75 49.7%

  • Total voters
    151
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I’m so sorry, @frisson. My mom related a similar story to me the other day. She’s in her mid-70s and hasn’t talked about it since it happened in high school.

The son of a prominent citizen of a neighboring town asked my mom out on a date. He seemed well-respected, star athlete, good grades. On the way to pick up her friends for a blind double date to the local Dairy Freeze and then a football game, he instead drove her out to a country road and tried to rape her.

She fought so hard that she kicked out two windows in the car. She doesn’t remember kicking out the windows — she remembers the horror and anger at the realization of what was happening. My mom was 5’4, all of 100 pounds.

He was so mad, he threatened to leave her there. She dared him to, just so she would “have” to explain to her dad how she got home. He had ripped her dress. She lost a shoe. She was bruised and disheveled.

He drove her home.

She managed to get to her bedroom and start changing into her pajamas before her mom and dad had the chance to see her clothes. She was terrified that people would know she was sexually assaulted. That she would have a “look” to her. She was terrified. She said she felt ashamed.

She just told her parents the date was lousy and never told anyone.

Until she told me, her daughter. I could tell it was painful for her to talk about it.

She was attacked over half a century ago.

Some things in our society haven’t changed at all, it seems.

Huge hugs to you, @frisson. Thank you for sharing. I hope it brings you some comfort. Personally, the experiences shared here have helped me feel less isolated.

I'm in tears for your mom. To have that happen and then to have to put it in the back of your head for so long. So cool that she opened up to you. I hope it was healing and a release for her, to know that someone believed her, listened to her and to have that be her daughter is so wonderful.

Thank you to all the brave women in this thread for sharing your stories. I believe you. I know I'm some random flower on the internet but I do. I stand with you. I'm there for you. I empathize at the deepest level with you.
 
Kavanaugh accuser asks Senate to limit press access for hearing

Coverage is one of a number of issues Ms. Blasey Ford’s lawyers are negotiating with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.


Blasey Ford asks Senate to limit press access for Kavanaugh hearing

Michael Bromwich said in emails sent Tuesday afternoon that he was requesting access for three “robocams,” three specific wire services, photographers from the Associated Press, Reuters and one unspecified service, and a pool reporter for newspapers and magazines. In a follow-up email he specified that the robocams should be operated by “the CSPAN TV pool,” and said he also wanted space for a radio reporter.

Those emails were among several seen by The Washington Times detailing the tense negotiations between Ms. Blasey Ford’s team and committee staff.

Washington Times is regarded as biased, but factual. It walks a very fine line.

“They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation.”

Washington Times - Media Bias/Fact Check
 
I'm in tears for your mom. To have that happen and then to have to put it in the back of your head for so long. So cool that she opened up to you. I hope it was healing and a release for her, to know that someone believed her, listened to her and to have that be her daughter is so wonderful.

Aw, Poppy, thank you. <3

I cried with her. She loved her dad so much, and he was indisputably a very good man. She was terrified it would “disappoint” him. That their relationship would fundamentally change. And it would have. Not for the worse, just ... different. Sad. He would blame himself, too.

Unfortunately, I understand that feeling all too well, too. It’s awful. And heartbreaking.

And traumatizing.

It’s sad, too, that generations of women share such similar experiences. And men, too.
 
Maybe professor Ford didn't quite know how to handle her allegation. (Example: send an accusation to one each Democrat & Republican judiciary representative). Maybe she was naive to think that she could remain anonymous.

I don't fault senator Feinstein as she was trying to honor the request for anonymity. And she sent it to the FBI.

However, the divide that prohibits a fair process lives at the very top. And that is a disappointment. All the posturing, all the rushing, all the withholding, all the pollsters are dictating a sacred process.

Now? We are in free fall. How many of us would be comfortable with the press mining our high school years, our college years. Are there any more mortifying times socially?

Professor Ford I believe has brought forth her experience because it speaks to the the highest character reference in the land. I know I wouldn't have the courage. But if she didn't do it what does that say?

I believe women are scared; like civil rights, women's rights was a hard fought battle. To lose rights, to go backwards, is not only a threat but for some of us it is a memory of desperation. It's almost too much to bear.

Given Kavanaugh's judicial record, juxtaposed to professor Ford's experience, is that at the heart of professor Ford's decision to come forward? Yeah, I think it is.

You can polititicize it all you want but the bottom line is women suffered before they had some rights.

And the other bottom line is I think professor Ford is trying to do the right thing, for women, not some some political party. Although she gets an ear with the democrats.

I can't think of a more core issue at stake than our women, their greatest fears, and their rights!

Take all the Hollywood, big media, fallen politicians, out of it for a second.

I'm very sad that both the professor and the SC nominee are being subjected and reduced to a swirly-gig soap opera.

Big fail to the president, and the whole entire senate for not asking the FBI to look into it. Given that we now have a 24 minute news cycle, this could have been handled so much differently.
--jmo
 
So sorry about your Mother. And the follow up issue is that my Grandmother was a avid supporter of "Women's rights to Choose", she personally had so many friends who had been raped, and ended up pregnant. Harsh choice in those pre Roe vs. Wade days. And before birth control was available.

But, I digress.

If a person had done things in the past, and were truthful, I would be able to defer on this. But, the unequivocal denial...very interesting. I thought that he was not truthful during the interview with his wife, meaning he has an extremely literal definition of "sexual assault", and HE does NOT THINK HE MEETS HIS "DEFINITION", a very narrow interpretation.

I love lawyers, nothing is ever absolute. They can flat out lie, and make it seem like it is the truth.
 
If nothing else people are opening up about their experiences and that can only be a positive.
The weight lifted a bit from sharing.
As for the attorney of Ford 'bristling" I join her in that.
Hiding behind a woman out of fear.Being able to ask questions but not take responsibility for any fall out?
Do they really think women are that easily broken that they can't handle any harshness from a man asking a question?
They need to step up and do their job. IMO
 
This is horrible. I can relate. I was 13. I went to the bathroom in a house where I was invited to watch tv and eat popcorn. When I came out I was shoved against the wall and pushed into a bedroom. I got away only because I kicked and bit and fought. I cannot tell you the day. I cannot tell you the address. I CAN tell you the name of the person and the year and that it was summer. He is dead now. I never talked about it for fear of shame and blame.


I am so sorry this happened to you. I hope you know in your heart that you were not at fault and bear no blame.
 
A longish read. A few excerpts:

In Yale’s Culture of Privilege and Alcohol, Her World Converged With Kavanaugh’s

Last week, more than 30 years after they graduated from Yale, Deborah Ramirez contacted her old friend James Roche.

Something bad had happened to her during a night of drinking in the residence hall their freshmen year, she said, and she wondered if he recalled her mentioning it at the time.
...

At college, Ms. Ramirez put in long hours working at a residential dining hall and cleaning dorm rooms ahead of class reunions, common jobs for students who had to scrape together money for tuition. Fellow student dining hall employees described her as sweet, sunny and hard-working. Jo Miller, one of those students, said she “was a very energetic, very smiley woman.”
...

But she saw herself as an outsider at Yale, Mr. Roche said, where many of her classmates were wealthier and more traveled. Friends from back then described her as not particularly confident in a place full of other high school standouts. Ms. Ramirez declined to be interviewed for this article, but her lawyer, Stan Garnett, noted that “she did not come from race or class privilege or have the advantage other students had when entering the university.”
...

Although he was not a varsity athlete — he was on the junior varsity basketball team and played intramural football, softball and basketball — Judge Kavanaugh hung out with rowdy jocks, many of them members of his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.

On a liberal campus known for its scholarship, the DKEs stood out for their hard partying and, some women students claimed, misogyny. During Judge Kavanaugh’s time there — 15 or so years after women arrived — some fraternity brothers paraded around campus displaying women’s underwear they had filched, drawing criticism.
...

The DKE pledge process was widely seen on campus as degrading. An opinion piece in The Yale Daily News in 1986 said that pledges were forced to walk around campus reading Penthouse magazine aloud and yelling lines like “I’m a butt-hole, sir.”
...

Nearly a dozen people who knew him well or socialized with him said Judge Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker in college. Dr. Swisher said she saw him “very drunk” a number of times. Mr. Roche, his former freshmen year roommate, described his stumbling in at all hours of the night.
...

One night, Ms. Ramirez told The New Yorker, Judge Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drinking game in a dorm suite.

Sitting in a circle with a small group of students, she recalled, people selected who had to take a drink, and Ms. Ramirez said she was chosen frequently. She became drunk, her head “foggy,” she recalled. As the game continued, a male student began playing with a plastic dildo, pointing it around the room.

Suddenly, Ms. Ramirez claimed, she saw a penis in front of her face.

When she remarked that it wasn’t real, the others students began laughing, with one man telling her to “kiss it,” she told The New Yorker in an interview. Then, as she moved to push it away, she alleged, she saw Judge Kavanaugh standing, laughing and pulling up his pants.
...

Neither The New Yorker nor The New York Times, which attempted to verify Ms. Ramirez’s story last week, were able to find witnesses acknowledging the episode. (The Times did not obtain an interview with Ms. Ramirez.) The New Yorker, however, reported that a fellow student, whom the publication did not identify, confirmed having learned of the incident — and Judge Kavanaugh’s alleged role in it — within a day or two after it happened.
 
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bbm

Republicans hire sex-crimes prosecutor to question Ford, schedule Friday vote on Kavanaugh


Perhaps confident that they have the votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as the next justice on the Supreme Court, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have scheduled a Friday vote to move his nomination to a vote by the entire Senate.

The vote, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET, will come the day after the committee hears testimony from Christine Blasey Ford
, a professor at Palo Alto University who has accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when the two were high school students in Maryland.

Rather than face the potentially awkward spectacle of an all-male Republican contingent questioning Ford, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, will turn over the questioning to a woman, a sex-crimes prosecutor he refused to name in advance.

“We have hired a female assistant to go on staff and to ask these questions in a respectful and professional way,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters.​
 
Murkowski, key vote in Kavanaugh confirmation, signals support for accuser, FBI probe

Just days before Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee plan to hold a critical vote on whether to recommend Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the full Senate, a key swing vote Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, seemed to suggest that her support for the nominee is wavering.

“We are now in a place where it’s not about whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is qualified,” Murkowski said in an interview on Monday night. “It is about whether or not a woman who has been a victim at some point in her life is to be believed.”

Asked Tuesday about whether an FBI inquiry into the decades-old allegations against Kavanaugh should occur -- a repeated demand by Democratic lawmakers -- Murkowski replied, “It would sure clear up all the questions, wouldn’t it?"

Murkowski's comments put her at odds with her Republican colleagues in the Senate, including Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who have said the Senate, not the FBI, has the constitutional duty to investigate the Kavanaugh claims.

 
Catching up on the thread — sorry if this was posted already and I missed it.

Deborah Ramirez attorney frustrated with Senate investigation into Brett Kavanaugh allegations

The attorney representing the Boulder woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct took to Twitter and CNN on Tuesday to vent frustrations about his attempts to work with the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We reached out to the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a call to discuss how best to bring them that information and they have refused to meet all scheduled appointments,” Boulder attorney John Clune wrote on Twitter. “We have officially requested an FBI investigation and our client remains adamant that is the appropriate venue for her to discuss her trauma.”

In a pre-recorded interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper aired Tuesday night, Clune said a call with the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled and made earlier in the day, but only members of the “minority party” were on the line; the members of the “majority party” were absent.

“I don’t know what else you can do if they are not going to engage,” Clune said of the committee’s Republican members.

 
Full transcript at link. The headline is a smidgen misleading, imo.

And, tbh, I gotta admit he does have a point about The New York Times initially refusing to run the story.

bbm

Kavanaugh supporter: 'We have all the information we need' on Yale allegation

Travis Lenker (who was a clerk for Judge Kavanaugh on the appellate court): Well, Judge Kavanaugh has said he will do whatever the Senate Judiciary Committee asks him to do. And he's gone through every step of the process that they have put in front of him.

So he's the nominee. It's not for him to comment on what process the Senate should be running. It's their Article 1 advise and consent responsibility that they're executing at this point.

So he's answered all the questions that they have put in front of him. I would say, though, the FBI background investigation really would serve to gather witness statements from other people who were supposedly at the events that are in question.
 
Full transcript at link.

Sen. Coons: Republicans may be going for 'prosecutorial' tone in Kavanaugh hearing

Senator Coons: I'm concerned by press reports that Republicans are hiring a prosecutor specialized in prosecuting sex crimes, and instead of doing their job in questioning the witnesses, will hide behind this prosecutor.

That also implies that they may be going for a tone that is more prosecutorial of Dr. Ford, which I think will simply discourage other victims of sexual abuse from coming forward with their allegations in other contexts.
...

It's striking to me how much the tone has changed. Last week, President Trump, to my surprise, said that he welcomed an open and fair hearing, and in the first couple of days had stayed quiet on this matter. A number of Republican senators, Senators Flake and Murkowski and Collins, have called for there to be a fair and open hearing, where Dr. Ford was heard out.

That tone has now changed sharply. And, as you noted, President Trump is now denouncing the whole process of trying to hear these allegations of sexual assault against Judge Kavanaugh.
...

Frankly, Judy, more importantly, the FBI should be conducting a prompt, but thorough background investigation of all the different allegations and witnesses who've been mentioned or brought forward.

I will remind you that, when Professor Anita Hill was in front of the Judiciary Committee, the then Bush administration directed the FBI to do this. And, in a matter of a few days, they came forward with 20 different witnesses who testified to the committee at that point.

If the Trump administration had followed through and had the FBI do their job, that would already be completed, and the hearing this Thursday would be a much fuller and more appropriate hearing of allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.​
 
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Snipped by me.

Noted: Mitch McConnell describes the specialist prosecutor who was hired as "a female assistant."

jmo

Good catch, @Inthedetails. A "female assistant" will question her instead of the judiciary committee members who were tasked with doing it? Are they going to pass her their questions on handwritten slips of paper or what? Bizarre, imo.
 
Michael Avenatti Locks Twitter After 4Chan User Claims Girlfriend Pranked Him, Posed As Third Kavanaugh Accuser

Michael Avenatti’s twitter was “protected” Tuesday after a user on the internet forum 4Chan posted that his girlfriend was the woman accusing Kavanaugh and his friends of getting her and other girls drunk before trying to sexually assault them as teens. The user said his girlfriend called Avenatti on a burner phone, and that both also pretended to be a person who could corroborate the story, CBS News reported.

Avenatti told CBS News there was not truth to the post, saying, “There’s nothing wrong! I had to go online to look, and I read this post, and I’m laughing. None of that happened. It’s a complete fabrication. There’s zero truth to it. When I say zero truth, I mean zero truth. Not a single thing in that is true.”

Users often post anonymously on 4Chan, and the site has been linked to alt-right and racist speech, as well as conspiracy theories like “QAnon.”
 
Avenatti Says He Wasn’t Duped by 4chan User With Fake Kavanaugh Story | Heavy.com

Be forewarned that the board used in 4chan contains graphic, racist, and otherwise derogatory and offensive language.

In a story originally reported by Heavy, Avenatti tweeted Sunday shortly after The New Yorker published the account of a second woman who came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct while as a freshman at Yale University, that he had a client with a similar charge. Avenatti has not yet named his client but said that she’d come forward in the coming days.

He said she’s “been granted multiple security clearances” and a solid witness. “The GOP and others better be very careful in trying to suggest that she is not credible,” he said. He then went to share that his client has evidence of teens “running trains” on drunk or drugged girls; he’s referring to gang rape, he said, adding these incidents occurred in Washington D.C. in the 1980s.
ETA:
Avenatti Tweeted on Tuesday: “Here is a sampling of emails sent to me over the last 24 hrs (some screenshots were taken yesterday). Trump and Kavanaugh must be so proud. Every time I receive emails like this, it fuels us more – we double our resolve. We will not stop until the truth is known.”

The screenshots are not even close to safe for work. Suffice to say there’s a lot of homophobic-sounding, expletive-laden language rife with threats.

Avenatti also tweeted Tuesday night that Bill Mitchell, host of ‘Your Voice,’ created a fake tweet about Avenatti.

(link to fake tweet posted by Mitchell)
Screen Shot 2018-09-25 at 10.27.06 PM.png

“This is what it has come to now, people like Bill Mitchell creating fake tweets and trying to incite people to hack and attack me. Bill Mitchell is a disgrace and a fraud,” Avenatti tweeted.


 
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next post you can read the questions easily.
Dn0mJm8WsAAX2kI.jpg:large

Solid questions. I wish the FBI would be allowed to ask them. Avenatti probably does, too, as do a growing number of people, regardless of party affiliation.
 
If Dr Ford truly has memory problems with this incident maybe she remembers the attack clearly but not who was present.

Without any corroborating witness's it's a possibility. JMO

Anything's possible, right? To quote the everlasting wisdom of Wayne ... something something something flying monkeys.

Haha. Sorry, I can't remember exactly how it goes.

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