Thank you, Brett Kavanaugh

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When I heard the professor had to testify first, I knew the jig was up. Dr. Christine Blassy Ford was so helpful, careful, and polite. “Is that all right?” she’d ask. “Thank you,” she’d say. A nice woman. She was still hurting; I could see it. As she told her story, despite her degrees and professional accolades, she was still feeling the assault, her girlish bathing suit her only protection against the clawing, drunken fingers of a boy-man. That was you, Brett. You said you didn’t recall anything about it or her. It wasn’t enough to register as a memory. Or maybe you were too drunk to remember. She remembered.

Some on the panel believed her, at least at first. They said she sounded “credible.” Others thought she should get over such a “minor” assault. Boys will be boys and all that. Some thought Ford was a very nice woman who was simply confused and forgetful. This woman has a Ph.D. and two Master’s degrees, the latest in epidemiology. Confused? Forgetful? So much made of how it all came to light, the mishandling of the letter in a woman legislator’s office. All cooked up, some said. As if any woman wants to go on national TV and testify about a sexual assault. 

But by having to testify first, you, Kavanaugh, my lucky boy, had time to prepare your rebuttal. You weren’t nice or polite. You were angry. Indignant at being questioned about your drinking, sick jokes, and faulty memory. You were outraged that your wife and daughter were exposed to this spectacle. 

Your wife. Your daughter. Your sneers made me sick to my stomach. Your frat boy buddies stood by you, probably thinking, there, but for the grace of God, go I. (And God is a guy in this instance. )There was a sham investigation afterward, a preview of things to come. No testimony was allowed from those who knew you back in the days and nights of your worst assaultive, drunken, and boorish behavior. No testimony from those that corroborated the woman’s testimony. It was a replay of the disgusting misogyny I witnessed with Clarence Thomas hearings decades earlier.

But this display of sanctimony had been going on for a long time. As Queen Elizabeth, the first, said, “Those who appear the most sanctified are the worst.” 

My nausea over the hearings ripened into rage. How did this happen? How could it still be happening? I started looking for answers about the time I started writing about a strange woman, a midwife practicing in a small town in 1850. She came to life through the history I read, and a novel was born. 

I named my main character —adding an “i” to make the name French —after a real woman, Jane Anger, who in 1589 wrote an essay called Jane Anger Her Protection of Women. She was sick of men lying about the foul nature of women noting, “men’s tongues sting against nature, and therefore they are unnaturall.” 

So thank you, Brett Kavanaugh, for helping me ripen my rage into the effort it took to research a historical novel rooted in the effects of early abortion law. While I started this book before your confirmation hearings, you gave me a reason to keep going.

Women like me have been dealing with men like you for a very long time.