Christine Blasey Ford Quotes

never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018. Those roles carry too much weight, the expectation of perfection. What I’m finally coming to understand is that being imperfect doesn’t disqualify you from speaking out, finding peace, and healing.

This book is not based on Christine Blasey Ford or her testimony, but it would not have existed without that woman’s bravery, her calm adherence to the facts, and her willingness to relive one of the worst moments of her life to help America save itself from itself. Her actions didn’t work, but they still mattered. And maybe that’s enough, in our fervent hope that the next generation gets it right.

…determined to tell my story so the world can know the scale of the problem and so we can work to make sure that future generations understand that when one person steps forward to speak truth to power it does more than just redeem them or atone for wrongdoing, it adds to a collective whole, a larger wave of fresh outrage and demands for our government, our representatives and everyone to not just #believewomen but to do better.

So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we’ve seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

The Second Medusa meme appeared two years later, and its origins are somewhat more complicated. Ostensibly, it is a photograph of a statue made in 2008 by the Argentine-Italian artist Luciano Garbati. But it is extremely difficult to find any trace of the statue prior to the existence of the meme, which appeared at around the same time as Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault to the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The image is striking and extremely shareable: a statue of Medusa stands alone in front of a completely black background. She is naked, just like Perseus in the Canova and Cellini images, and is lithe, young, strong. Her hair is a mass of snakes, but they are beautiful, not grotesque: they look more like curling dreadlocks. Her expression is calm, her eyes gaze out at us unapologetically. Her arms are by her side and she holds a sword in her left hand. In her right hand is the decapitated head of Perseus, which she holds by the hair. It is an exact reversal of the Canova image. Some versions of the meme came with an accompanying text. ‘Be thankful we only want equality’, it reads, next to Medusa’s head. Below Perseus’ decapitated neck, it continues, ‘and not payback.

For Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony triggered this narrative;

drank

And then I, along with the rest of America, listened with horror and incandescent fury to the brave, stalwart testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, as she begged the Senate to reconsider their Supreme Court Justice nominee and make a different choice, and I decided to write a story about rage. And dragons. But mostly about rage.

The threat of “Lock her up”—so chilling to women who heard it hurled at Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Christine Blasey Ford—is the threat that what looks like law will become the mechanism for undoing the law. For the millions of American women who witnessed Ford’s testimony and Kavanaugh’s response, the icy realization that male entitlement, threats, and fury could still outrun and overmaster the truth, even in a process that purported to surface the truth, was another earthquake in the Trump years. Law or the trappings of law could be used to silence and sideline women. That isn’t a fight about equality; it’s a fear of retribution.

In the past years as the United States watched the rise of the #MeToo movement and the public hearing of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, our culture has had many weighty conversations around sexual consent. In the aftermath, I asked myself, what would it take for our culture to find women’s claims to be truthful and legitimate? How are we allowing societal norms to shame us into abandoning the gifts of God to which we have been called? Where are we too righteous, as Joseph was initially, to find mercy for any #MeToo? How do we believe and listen to those who have been impregnated with the stories that still live within their bodies? Must women carry Messiahs in their wombs before we see or value them as women, worthy of honor, regardless?

My life has rarely been clear. I’m not organized. I don’t like making decisions. I arrive at work and figure out my lesson plan when I get there. And I’ve mostly gotten away with it. I’m too old to change now.

I thought I was writing a story bout rage. I wasn't. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory and trauma. It's about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It's about memories we don't understand, and can't put into context, until we learn more about the world. And I thought I was writing about a bunch of fire-breathing, powerful women. And while those women are certainly in this book, it isn't about them. It's about a world upended by trauma and shamed into silence. And that silence grows, and becomes toxic, and infects every aspect of life. Perhaps this sounds familiar to you now -- times being what they are. This book is not based on Christine Blasey Ford or her testimony, but it would not have existed without that woman's bravery, her calm adherence to the facts, and her willingness to relive one of the worst moments of her life to help America save itself from itself. Her actions didn't work, but they still mattered. And maybe that's enough, in our fervent hope that the next generation gets it right.

Far from the accepted belief that unfounded allegations will ruin a man's career--that indeed, as Trump tweeted, "There is no recovery for someone falsely accused"--the exact opposite is true. Men's careers recover all the time following accusations of abuse and/or sexual violence against women. Hell, men's careers recover following convictions for these things. Male power has always been valued and protected more than women's bodies, no matter what level of abuse they may have been accused of.

There is nothing and no one privileged white men won't do and fuck over to affirm their power. Their depth of entitlement should no longer be astonishing, yet it continues to stun in its audacity.

But anger belongs to men, and so Dr. Blasey Ford could not appear before the world and show what the rage of abuse and trauma really looks like. That was a privilege reserved for Brett Kavanaugh, like so many of the privileges he's enjoyed before it.