Good read from my From my friend Alexis.
Indications that Christine Ford’s Accusation against Judge Kavanaugh is Bogus
First red flag is the crass political opportunism of her timing. If Kavanaugh did something so egregious to Christine Ford that it has, as she claims, deeply affected her entire life—why did she sit on it for 37 years, and not report the event, ever, to any authorities? Until—that is—the moment that her prey—I mean, Brett Kavanaugh—stands at the the brink of what will undoubtedly be the greatest opportunity of his life? And then there she is, tearful—no longer the 15-year-old girl but now a 54 year old woman—here to drag his name through the mud over a ‘recovered memory’.
The phenomenon of recovered memories has long been understood to hold little objective validity; and Ford’s is a perfect example of the genre. It’s a narrative not so much remembered as recreated by her 30 years after the supposed fact, of an event for which she has zero evidence, witnesses or corroboration...an event she herself forgot and then ‘retrieved’ under the influence of psychotherapy, whose details she misremembers in a foggy or absent way—and yet she’s ready to finger, with certainty, Brett Kavanaugh, her target.
As a psychologist with 25 years of experience, I pay attention both to people’s words—their verbal content—and their body language. The involuntary communication of the body—not just posture and broad general movements, but such things as skin pallor or reddening, glistening, fleeting expressions, eye glassiness (these change very rapidly and, being completely involuntary, are infallible communicators of mental state and emotions); and longer-term habitual tightness and slackness of muscles, which give people their characteristic facial appearance, movement style, and posture—are the most reliable and truthful of the forms of communication.
From my observations of her body language and voice, my hypothesis is that Dr. Ford has indeed been the victim of sexual trauma of some sort (this is why she’s believable to many—people pick up on her sincerity)—but most probably NOT by Judge Kavanaugh, and not at the time or circumstance of her false ‘recovered memory’.
Due to the trauma of this or these event/s, the initial memory was suppressed. When triggered later in life by (inevitable) issues in her marriage and the questioning of her therapist, she created a ‘recovered memory’ to explain away the deeply repressed imprint of the trauma in her psyche and her body.
1) First of all: every psychologist knows that ‘recovered memories’ are never to be taken as literal truth. If an event was so traumatic as to have caused amnesia (as, in Dr. Ford’s reported case, over DECADES)—that is, to have been entirely suppressed, only to be unearthed, or ‘recovered’, under the leading questions of a therapist...what emerges is an overall felt bodily experience with attendant emotions. What we usually say is that the EMOTIONS are true. The story explaining them—the narrative the damaged psyche fabricates to make sense of them—is probably not; its details and particulars are understood to be a useful fiction, similar to the way the sleeping mind produces dreams as fictionalized reframing of troubling material.
Repressed memory from trauma severe enough to lead to amnesia, almost exclusively results from injuries to the psyche of a child who was abused before having an ego and intellect developed enough to process this, and most probably by a person she trusted.
I.e., a party when you were 15 years old and groped by a friend on a bed—would not produce this.
[We’ll get to the reactions attempted-party-rape of a teenager could plausibly cause in a minute—and Dr. Ford does NOT exhibit these AT ALL.]
However, a 3-year-old child held down on a bed with her mouth covered, by a man much larger and stronger than her and by whom she’s afraid of being ‘inadvertently killed’—a man she knows and trusted (because rarely, in the environment she was raised in, would a 3-year-old girl be alone on a bed with strange men)—this would be a terrifying incident.
The confusion in a young mind, of being molested by someone she is perhaps dependent on and trusts, creates a situation in which the ego, to protect its fragile integrity, will, upon ‘recovering’ the memory, CHANGE THE PERPETRATOR in the narrative to make it more ego syntonic—that is to say, to change the ‘remembered’ assaulter from beloved uncle, brother or father to a negatively-associated ‘other’.
We know that the Kavanaugh family were negatively associated for Dr. Ford from years ago, when Brett Kavanaugh’s mother (also a judge) adjudicated against Ford’s family in a mortgage dispute.
We also know that she, and her entire family, are leftist activists and staunch anti-Trumpers and anti-Conservatives. So for a multitude of reasons, Brett Kavanaugh represents ‘the enemy’ for Christine Ford. If you have to pin the blame for your unhappy inner feelings on someone, what better time and target than a soon-to-be-confirmed conservative judge selected by President Trump?
She could hardly have a more transparent agenda—whether conscious or unconscious.
2) The Body Never Lies. Take a look at Christine Ford— any current photo, anywhere you find one, or any video. She’s a middle-aged woman of high prestige and status, a respected professor, a ‘dr’ of psychology, a woman with wrinkles and life experience long holding a position of authority. Remember this; and look at her face, her eyes. Ironically, this is part of why people are so anxious to believe her, and find her so disarmingly ‘sympathetic’: SHE LOOKS LIKE A LITTLE GIRL.
This is what makes her touchingly ‘sincere’ and ‘innocent’: those perplexed and child-like eyes. It’s her habitual look, which by now, despite the wrinkles, is embedded in her appearance. She has the eyes of an innocent, frightened 3-year-old. Her eyes say, “I don’t understand what’s happening! Why is it happening to me?” Severe trauma causes us to get fixated at the age in which it happened, as if we’re stuck there until rescued; we can’t get past it (and tend to read the same, unresolved trauma into future events where it doesn’t exist). Christine Ford’s face reveals a 3-year-old girl hiding (but still visible) in a grown woman’s body.
Now listen to her voice. Is that the voice of a professor, a doctor of psychology, a woman carrying years of importance and authority? No. It’s the voice of a tremulous, uncertain, frightened little girl.
3) What about the ‘trauma’ of the “attempted rape”?
[Taking another pause for breath here for a moment.]
There are two ways women typically react to situations such as Ford describes. The vastly more common response (to being groped at a party among the same group of friends she’s been partying with—by her account—all summer long)—if one of these friends was more than usually drunk and hands-y and there was a fear that he would take it too far (although she was effectively protected from rape by the one-piece swimming suit under her clothes, the presence of other people in the room, the fact that parents would at any time be walking in—either the owners of the home or her own parents who evidently came to pick her up a short time after...
...She reports a fear that he would take it too far...BUT THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN.
Let’s be very clear about this. NO RAPE ACTUALLY HAPPENED. [This is even—a huge stretch—ASSUMING THAT EVERY DETAIL IN HER NARRATIVE IS TRUE. Which—as explained above—most probably it isn’t; in addition to the reasons given above about the utter unreliability of ‘recovered memories’ and the several decades of amnesia about the entire event; there is the fact that not one single witness corroborates even the occurance of such a party; and the fact that Ford’s accounts of it keep shifting, key facts are missing or don’t add up, and her ‘memories’ about the evening have huge gaps.]
Again: for one reason or another (the reason really doesn’t matter) NO RAPE HAPPENED. Not even finger rape or object rape or even clothing removed or exposure of personal parts of the body or skin-to-skin contact. No violence to her person; no threats, no hitting, no shaking, no bruising. No shouting at her, no insults, no degradation, no harsh language.
She doesn’t report unwanted kissing. No tongue in the mouth. No forcing her hand or mouth to do anything to him. No undressing or exposure on his part. In short: NOTHING.
Seriously. Even if we take her every word as truth—NOTHING HAPPENED. Nothing happened that doesn’t happen at parties and in the backs of cars between boys and girls every night of the week. It’s the old story of a boy wanting more than a girl wants; and in the end, in this case—if he did want more (which no one but him can even know)—he didn’t get his wish. So, score one for the girl, if anything.
According to her story, her main complaint is that she had a FEAR that she MIGHT be raped or “accidentally killed” (another stretch)...but in any event, neither of these things happened. Not. Even. Close.
I’ve been in plenty of situations like the one she describes, as a teenager, and so has everyone else I know. Everyone at the party, by her account, was rough-housing and tumbling around—everyone with everyone; if she didn’t want that, what in heaven was she doing there? Had I been 15 years old and in some older boy’s home whose parents weren’t there, with several older boys who were falling-down drunk and not another girl in sight...I’d have gotten my butt out of there. What was she at this drunken party for? Where were her parents (let alone the home-owners)? Why was she, at 15 years old, hanging out with sh-t-faced older boys and, herself, drinking beer?
By her own accounts to friends and on social media, Christine Ford was no shrinking violet, no naive virgin. She reportedly told friends that she’d had dozens of sexual partners before graduating high school, and regrets having been “an alcoholic”. It’s hard to comport this with the idea that she was traumatized—to the point of 30 years amnesia and it later being the event that caused problems in her marriage—over being groped once on a bed, fully clothed, by a teenage boy she’s known for a long time who’s so drunk he falls off; and by him pressing his fully-clothed pelvis on hers.
So—coming back to the normal reactions to this alleged “attempted rape” (an ‘attempt’ not substantiated even by her own narrative): by far the most common response to an event like this is...none. Maybe grousing the next day to your girlfriends, at the most. Maybe deciding you’ve been a fool and resolving hereafter to show better judgment.
What Christine Ford alleges to have happened that night was, in the context of her age, her general behavior, and the social mores of her world and time, a non-event.
4) What about the reactions of women who are in fact traumatized by a sexual assault? There’s one thing that’s common among everyone: a heightened, detailed memory of everything that happened, including every detail even of trivia surrounding the event. The smell of the air. The music playing in the background—down to the words of the songs. The pattern on the wallpaper, the texture of the sheet, the creaking of the bed. The day, the time, the weather, everyone who was there, exactly where she was, how she got there, how she got out, what she was wearing; who he was, what he looked like, what he was wearing, what everybody said. The details of a traumatic event are ineradicably seared into a victim’s memory no matter how much she wishes they’d fade out.
This is NOT exhibited by Christine Ford. Far from it. She not only is vague about what YEAR the alleged event took place let alone the day or time; she also doesn’t remember who was there; how she got there; how she got home; whether or not she called her parents; where her girlfriends were...the most basic of data.
And this is further contrasted by the fact, as Michelle Malkin points out, that Ford’s expertise is in some kind of precise statistical analysis—a narrow field characterized by extreme attention to detail.
5) Let’s look at her accused “attacker”, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Basic character doesn’t change across a life. Kavanaugh has been in the public eye, and worked with women as colleagues, friends, students, lawclerks, etc over the span of decades—and the reports of his courtesy, propriety, encouragement and respect toward them are consistent.
Following his recent testimony—after being grilled for hours a day during several weeks and then interrogated like a criminal over an absurd, alleged, egregious attack—the left are now criticizing Kavanaugh for his expressions of frustration and anger.
The perversity of this is like something straight out of The Trial by Kafka.
For those who know anything about psychology, the anger is confirmation of his innocence. And for further confirmation, look not only at his anger; look at his face—he’s pallid, splotchy, sweaty, flushed; his skin is breaking out; his characteristic self-composure is fracturing into open expressions of pain, outrage, and hurt. Recent photos of Kavanaugh show a man straining to hold up under extreme stress and incrementally falling apart; indeed, his body is telling the story that, on an emotional level, he is the one who’s been raped. Or at the very least, on a very deep level assaulted.
Perhaps we’re not supposed to notice that. Maybe men—or straight white men—are just supposed to take it. In any case, his body and the effects on his central nervous system show the response of a person who has been falsely accused; who has been shamed, degraded, dishonored, attacked; and who’s being examined under a magnifying glass in view of all the world, and his every response criticized and used as further evidence against him.
This is different from the reaction of a guilty person who knows he’s been caught; or the barely disguised glee of the psychopath who’s secretly (but his body reveals it) proud of having done something transgressive and, so far, gotten away with it.
Interestingly, Kavanaugh also (like his accuser, Christine Ford) has a surprisingly boyish look. In his case—quite ironically, under the circumstances—this soft, puerile quality reflects (I hypothesize) an inhibited, somewhat repressed sexuality. His characterological profile is the opposite of a sexual aggressor. Just look at that face. Women know. This is no swashbuckling pirate.
