WaPo: “Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband.”
This overly strains credulity.
She would have told her girlfriends immediately. This is exactly the kind of story any girl would share with her friends at the time within a nanosecond of seeing them or being within reach of a telephone.
One has to be suspicious of her career background in psychology.
So much of it is junk science. How many lives and how much money was wasted for decades on Freudian psychoanalysis?
She says the incident damaged her for years afterward. Yet she never mentioned it to a girlfriend?
Too much of psychological therapy is searching backward to identify events which then can be dwelled upon and mentally embellished over time into excuses that serve as a substitute for taking appropriate responsibility oneself for the course of one’s life.
Perhaps what happened: Drunk kids at a pool party (she says she was wearing a one-piece swimsuit). Two start to make out, fall on the bed, a third being goofy jumps on them. The girl runs out after they all fall down.
Years later, she embellishes and then weaponizes the event in couples therapy either to attack her husband on some point or to defend herself from criticism her husband has made. She blows it up in her own mind so much for use in present purposes that she believes something traumatic happened to her.
This is totally plausible, and the best response is to say the event is not relevant, not to attack her. High School antics, drunk, and misremembered. Let's move on. But to start terrorizing her will backfire.
More from WaPo:
“After so many years, Ford said she does not remember some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda...Ford said she does not remember how the gathering came together the night of the incident. She said she often spent time in the summer at the Columbia Country Club pool in Chevy Chase, where in those pre-cellphone days, teenagers learned about gatherings via word of mouth. She also doesn’t recall who owned the house or how she got there.”
This simply isn’t credible for an event that she says derailed her life for several years.
She would know exactly where and when it occurred. (She says she only had one beer, that the two boys were drunk but she was not.)
On the other hand, if it was some event that only much later she embellished and promoted into some meaningful event that she grabbed onto as an excuse to explain some failings in life on her part, then it would make sense that she doesn’t know the details such as when or where it occurred.
What she knows is the emotion that she feels now, perhaps even needs to feel for present purposes, and searching the past for a basis for this feeling has identified this hazy incident as a justification for the present emotion.