Dr. Christine Blasey Ford Speaks Out
March 19, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Hello, you all. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we have the epitome of We Can Do Hard Things. You will all know her as one of our absolute heroes, and I’m sure one of yours. Her name is Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. How is that possible that we have her here? We know her as a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University, and a clinical professor and consulting statistician at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
On September 27th, 2018, dr. Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding her sexual assault in connection with the committee’s consideration of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s lifetime confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. Following her testimony, Ford and her family endured constant intimidation, harassment and death threats, forcing them to move out of their home, living in various secure locales with guards. Time Magazine included Dr. Ford on its shortlist for Person of the Year in 2018. In 2019, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Time 100. Dr. Ford’s memoir, which I absolutely loved and finished in one day, it’s called One Way Back and it’s available now.
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you so much, well, for everything.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Thank you so much for having me. As a longtime fan of this podcast, I’m so happy to be here.
Amanda Doyle:
Is going to be hard to not call you Dr. Ford. So, forgive me if I do that. But in thinking about this conversation, I was thinking about how Professor Anita Hill, when she watched your testimony, she said you didn’t feel far away from us, in some fancy important room that you felt like you were here with us and we were with you. And she said that watching it, she felt a spiritual solidarity with you, and that is what we all felt watching it. You were with us and we were with you. And in that moment where you raised your hand and you were such a human person, and you closed your eyes and you spoke your truth, you were speaking your truth, but you were also speaking our truth. Your job was to say the truth and whatever they did with it was their business, but you were making sure the world had to hear it.
And when we watched it, we knew the world wouldn’t be the same, because it never is after the world is forced to hear the truth. Thank you for changing the world that way for us, and thank you for One Way Back. It was so beautiful. One of the reasons I think we have that spiritual solidarity is because of the horrendous ubiquity of what you described that day. Over half of women experience sexual violence. So, when we saw your story, we knew it. It was yours, but we knew it. And when we saw him, we knew him from our own lives. And so, what is it about how commonplace that phenomenon is that conflates it with being normal? And was that part of how you told yourself this story for so long before it finally came out? Did it feel like something that was normal because it was common?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Well, before my day on TV, there was this three month period of wrangling with how I was going to report the assault and to who. So, that three months was quite a journey. And at that time, I didn’t really identify as an assault survivor. I kept calling it an attack, and I thought of myself as more of a whistleblower or someone who was just weighing in on a really important job applicant, to a really important job that having grown up in Washington, DC was the cream of the crop job for only the best of us could aspire to that job. And so, I felt compelled by sort of a higher calling that I, no matter what, had to say something. And then afterward, I started getting a lot of correspondence from people, particularly survivors. And then, I started to identify as a survivor and feel connected to this huge community.
It’s an epidemic. I think 25% of the people who wrote to me wrote their story in a letter and shared it. And many of them were sharing it for the first time and had never told anyone. And I also, regarding Anita, I don’t know that I would’ve been compelled if she hadn’t already done that because I probably wouldn’t have thought it was an option, we wouldn’t have thought of that as an option. So, maybe I would’ve written a email or something, but I don’t know that I would’ve ever ended up on TV at a hearing if it weren’t for her. So, she broke that barrier and then made me realize, well, if she did that, I should do that. I should definitely say something, whether it’s in a private or public way, and that took a while to figure out
Amanda Doyle:
In that figuring out, what was fascinating to me in reading your book is that, that was not clear at all. I mean, your lawyers, they believed in you. They were champions of you and were working for free.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
Told you not to. They said, “We can’t let you stand in front of an oncoming train.”
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
So, how did you receive that from the people who were there advising you? I mean, that would’ve scared the hell out of me. How do you go from that to, “Yes, and I’m going to do it anyway.”
Christine Blasey Ford:
So, that was a long process as well, starting with when Justice Kennedy resigned in the early summer, I started wrangling with it without lawyers for a long time. And I was sure that I was going to do something, I just didn’t know how. And so, I met with my congress person and talked to her, and then retained lawyers. And the lawyers would work with me on it, a plan to come forward, and we sort of laid out a plan of how we would communicate with the judiciary committee. And then, right before Brett’s initial hearings, they advised that they didn’t think it was a good idea, that the blow back would be really hard. It would be hard on me, it would be just difficult and it wouldn’t change the outcome.
That was rough news to hear. Although I had been, myself, pretty ambivalent all summer. One day like, “Yes, we’re doing this,” and the next day like, “No, I’m scared. I don’t really want to.” Kind of back and forth. And so, I was really upset when they told me that. But they said, “If you really want to do it, we will keep fighting. We just don’t think that it is the correct thing for you and your life.” So, yeah, it was hard.
Glennon Doyle:
I wanted to ask you, I had this shift in understanding of the world and the country while watching your process, which is, when you were first testifying, [inaudible 00:08:28], we were wearing our Trust Women shirts everywhere. We’d wash them, put them on the next, everything was Trust Women, Trust Women. Believe women. And what I understood for the first time while watching you testify and watching the world’s reaction, and then watching the lack of change afterwards, was that that is not our problem. Everybody believed you. If they said they didn’t believe you, they were lying. Everybody believed you. It’s just that it didn’t matter enough to make any change. Right?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
I just feel like that was such a huge paradigm shift for me. Like, oh, it’s not about belief, it’s actually about caring enough to do anything about what we know is true.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right, because I guess what were they going to do? And apparently, they struggled for a couple of days with what they were going to do. According to my attorneys, the fact that it took them a couple of days to start DARVO-ing and retaliating, it was because they did believe and they needed to figure out their strategy and how to have political cover for their votes.
Glennon Doyle:
So, I’ve heard you say, always extremely kindly and with such deep generosity and understanding, but you have talked about, when a woman says, “I was assaulted, I was raped, I was harassed,” a fascinating reaction comes from people, which is, “I believe you.” Why, Christine, do people say, “I believe you,” to a woman who is reporting her assault, when they don’t say, “I believe you,” to a man when he’s reporting that his car got stolen?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Exactly. That is exactly, to me, the interesting thing. I can’t think of anything else that we say in conversations where the response is, “I believe you.” So, when someone says to me, “I believe you,” I recognize that their intention is really nice. It’s just, it’s the same as if I just said, “My name is Christine,” and they say, “I believe you.” And the inverse of that is that if they said, “I don’t believe you,” I’m not sure I really care that much either. So…
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Christine Blasey Ford:
It just doesn’t really hit me in the right way. But I always say, “Thank you so much,” because I know that the intent is very supportive. But, yeah, the I believe you, I just think is an interesting linguistic situation where that’s our response to these stories.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It goes back to what you were saying, Glennon, Professor Hill said the same thing as you when she looked out. She said, “I’m looking at this panel and they believe me, but they just aren’t willing to do anything about it.” And so, I think the reason people say I believe you is that’s supposed to be your reward. That’s supposed to be-
Christine Blasey Ford:
That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
… all you ask for. This horrible injustice happened to you, and congratulations, I believe you because I’m not going to take an additional step, which is holding any kind of accountability for the perpetrator of the violence. Your reward is belief, and you should be thrilled with that.
Amanda Doyle:
And I’m a good person because I believe you, because women in general are untrustworthy. So, if I believe you, what’s in question here is your believability.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right. I don’t think we say it for anything else other than sexual assault or maybe domestic violence. I just don’t think it’s something that we say, other than in those situations. When someone tells me that they’ve been assaulted and I get a lot of correspondence from people who have been, I say, “I’m so sorry, are you okay?” Is usually what, and I don’t know that that’s much better, but that’s just kind of what comes out for me when someone decides to disclose something that personal.
Glennon Doyle:
You talk a lot about, you felt like it was your duty as a citizen to come forward. Can you tell us about that? What does that feel like, and duty to whom, and citizenship of what? What is that, that responsibility?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah. So, in all this reflection over the last five years or so, I keep thinking, I wonder if I had not grown up in Washington, DC, going on all those field trips to the Supreme Court and to Congress and having that be our just grandeur of our location of where we lived, and we were all in awe of those places. And we also had very strict rules about how to behave in those settings and how to be respectful, and it becomes part of your identity when you grow up there. Although, certainly, there’s people who are extremely patriotic that live in other parts of the country, but I think in Washington, DC, it’s really the core of the neighborhood.
So, I talk about in the book that my first thought was, “Oh no. Once I say something, people are going to find out a lot of things about me.” Nevertheless, I’m going to have to say something. And reading your book, Glennon, was actually really helpful when I was getting over a lot of these things in the aftermath, that you knew you were going to have to do something difficult and you don’t exactly know how it’s going to play out and what you’re going to do and how it’s going to work.
And so, I really resonated when I was listening to your book, and it seemed like your story was almost my story, right, even though there weren’t anything alike in the context. But that idea that something has happened that’s going to change your life forever and it’s going to affect other people around you, and it’s going to happen to happen, but you just don’t know yet exactly how. So, for me, the compelling part was a higher power of patriotism, which unfortunately clashes with partisanship, right?
Amanda Doyle:
How do you reconcile that patriotism? Because patriotism can be viewed as a belief in the integrity of institutions, in the best possible version of the institutions we have, with the failure of the institutions, both in Professor Hill’s case and in yours, to maintain the integrity of those institutions. I mean, for someone who is willing to put their life and legacy and name and face, to sacrifice that for that cause, is that just the most horrendous loss and grief to have that not reciprocated?
Christine Blasey Ford:
It was pretty rough. Before I testified, I will say it was helpful because it was so clear. It was just so clear that I needed to say something. And so, that patriotism that was sustaining me, and it’s pretty an idealistic view. Some said that I was naive and I call it more idealistic, but if you don’t have a belief that those institutions have the capability of doing the right thing, then I don’t think I would’ve ever said anything.
But going into it, I had to at least have some faith that they could do something or maybe would do something. And when they didn’t, yes, it was disappointing. I don’t think I was as surprised as most people who are watching, just I think I knew three or four days before, and I sort of talk about in the book how that unravels and what word we were getting before the voting. So, by the time the voting occurred, I knew pretty much how that was going to end. But, yeah, it’s a process getting over it, and it is difficult to try to maintain faith in those institutions.
Glennon Doyle:
When I go back to that day and how we all experienced it, there’s the like you were speaking to them, being the people who were going to make the decision, politicians and all of them. But there was another them that was the millions of women and everybody who’s ever been a survivor, the millions of people who believe in the ideals of the country, not what the country’s doing, but what we promised to be.
I felt like you were speaking to us them. It felt like you were a mocking jay in that moment. I think that was Hunger Games time, right? I felt like you were like Katniss and it was the fucking hunger games, and we were all in our houses and we were tributes also. And regardless of what happened with them, the them that were the millions of us, the message was received, and it was turned into power and comfort and solidarity. So, even though it didn’t work with the them, it worked with the us.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, that’s really what got me through the last many years. So, was the other them, yes, the solidarity. But I didn’t know, when I was sitting in that chair talking to the committee with that big seal of the United States, that’s just gigantic that you’re looking up at, I didn’t know that other people were watching. Which is kind of a good thing, because I think I might not have made it to that chair if I had known how many people were actually watching.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, they told you in the hallway walking down, right?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, Lord have mercy.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Well, they knew I was really afraid and didn’t want to be on TV, that I wanted to have this private, closed meeting. Then they said, “Well, they’re going to have to videotape it for the other senators to watch.” And I said, “Okay.” And then they said, “So, it will be on C-SPAN.” And then I told myself, “Okay, great. Nobody watches C-SPAN, and it’s a workday, no one’s going to see it. It’s fine.” And I’m already walking. So, I just had to keep walking and not really think about it. And then when I got into the room, there was supposed to be one camera, but there were a lot more than that.
And until my first break, I didn’t realize a lot of people were watching. And on my very first break, I went back to the holding room that they have for you and looked at my phone and there’s all these messages like, “Hey, keep up the good work. You’re doing great.” And I thought, “I wonder how they know that I’m doing great?” But in retrospect, I guess it’s a good thing that other people were watching because then I was able to connect with the larger community of survivors and the other of them. So, if it had been a meeting, maybe this is how it was supposed to go, is that I was destined to then connect with the survivor community instead of with the partisan patriots.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Maybe that’s the them that we should be having more faith in.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
Maybe those are the ones more worthy of our faith and more able to live up to the integrity, is the other them.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Totally.
Amanda Doyle:
I continue to be amazed by, you are so clear in your duty and this is the right thing and I knew I was going to say something. It was really interesting to read how you thought the whole time that no one would know your name or your face, and it just kind of evolved into now everyone in the world does. But you’re so clear in that, and you talk about how your friends would say, “You don’t owe anyone anything.” And I would fall firmly in that you don’t owe anyone anything camp.
Can we just talk about that? Because I’m fascinated by this way of like, well, people have to come forward to move the ball down the court. But then also, why do people have to do that? Why is the onus on the person who has been subjected to violence to right the ship, when all the people who are doing it bear no responsibility in that equation? What are your thoughts on that?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah, I talk about this because the same words were said by my therapist and by my boss, “You don’t owe anyone anything.” And many people said they’re going to ruin your life and things like that. But they’re going to ruin your life is a little abstract, so I didn’t really get that. I just thought, “Oh, well, that’s okay. I’m not going to see the people, and if they call me the B word or whatever, it’ll just be like a tree falling in some forest and I won’t know about it.” So, I kind of underestimated what that was going to look like.
But the we don’t owe anyone anything, it just never resonated with me. I couldn’t quite get it. So, I never really internalized that. And maybe I should internalize it a little more, but if we don’t owe anyone anything, if we don’t owe each other anything, it just seems then we’re not a community, I think. A community is, we do owe each other something. But also, if I was younger, I don’t know that I would’ve felt that way. I’m an adult and I feel like, well, I’ve had a great life and I’m only one life. So, if they ruin one life and it helps a bunch of other people, then, yeah, I just couldn’t really make sense of the you don’t owe anyone anything.
Amanda Doyle:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like, do we owe each other everything actually, and to whom do we owe it? Maybe that’s it. It’s like, it feels so confusing because I don’t know that at this point, I mean, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but statistically, one of my kids will come to me and tell me they’ve been sexually assaulted. I don’t know if my advice to them is, “Let’s go through the system.” I don’t know.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Maybe the truth is we owe each other everything. But I don’t know that I tell my children that we’re going to go to the them.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right. I agree. I don’t know that I would tell my children either. And now that they’ve seen what happened to me, I think they might not. But, yeah, I don’t know that I would go through that system again. I’m not sure it’s the right… I don’t even know that there is a system, and it seems like there’s not really an infrastructure to that system for people to come forward like there is at the workplace. And I’m pretty honest in the book about, well, if this had happened in my workplace, I don’t even know what I would’ve done.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Christine Blasey Ford:
It was because it was the Supreme Court for me.
Amanda Doyle:
There was a specialness about that, and you had grown up seeing Professor Hill do that. And so, that was a different thing than the workplace for you. That’s interesting, because in my head, I was thinking, “Okay, if the right thing applies here, the right thing applies everywhere.” And I’ve had to really interrogate myself reading your work because I did not report an attack on me in the workplace, and it was for a minuscule. It wouldn’t even show up on the radar of what you experienced in terms of what I would have experienced from that.
But knowing that my career would not be identified by any of my work, it would be the person who that happened to. And maybe, in a best case scenario, we call her brave for doing that. But she’d be the brave person who had that thing happen to her, just like you, brilliant scientist, professor, will always be associated with the worst thing that ever happened to you.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right, right.
Amanda Doyle:
And I just wonder if all of that beautiful intent and community duty, we need a place to put that, that doesn’t re-victimize that. It’s like Professor Hill said, when she’s like, “I reject the idea that things will change when more women step up and come forward.”
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like, things will change, she says, when we provide systems and processes so that people can come forward and be heard and there be accountability. It’s not, put more women up in front of the firing squad so things can change. It’s, stop having a firing squad. Make the costs greater to the people who are perpetrating violence than they are to the people who experience violence, and then that changes. But right now, only one side is paying the cost.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s more like recycling shit. The planet’s on fire, so you guys just keep recycling your plastic. It’s like so, “Oh, you have a problem? You’re getting assaulted? Just keep sending in your tributes.” It’s your responsibility. It’s not the system that has to change. Have you seen any, any ideas, movement, progress? Is there anything systematically, or are we actually not citizens of this country? Because that’s how I feel. If I believe in duty, I believe in citizenship, I just don’t know to whom I’m a citizen, because citizens have equal protection under the law. It’s like that quote, “I am a woman, so I have no country.” I agree, I owe everything to everyone, but not to the people who will not even protect my people.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right, right. Yeah. I think I’ve gone through a breakup with my country.
Amanda Doyle:
God, isn’t that the truth?
Christine Blasey Ford:
I’m sort of trying to figure out what kind of relationship I can have with that system going forward.
Amanda Doyle:
What have you learned about that?
Glennon Doyle:
Any ideas?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. I think you speak for a lot of American women in feeling…
Christine Blasey Ford:
Isolated from… Yeah. I think that the progress that we need to make, the very first level of progress would be to at least protect the people who are willing to speak at a hearing after they speak. So, I think even when we see other people testifying that are lawyers themselves or DC insiders, we watch these people testify, and the way people are treated, it’s treated very poorly instead of appreciated, and thanked or protected from retaliation. I think there just has to be some basic protection from retaliation. That would be a good start. There’s a lot more that I would want to see happen, but I think for starters, let’s not retaliate against the people who are speaking to the government and sharing their information.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. The no systems, just like feeding to the wolves. I was struck by how you were talking about how you just always thought that that first day of you testifying was just going to be the initial opportunity to tell your story, and that you would have many more opportunities to be able to speak to the people who were trying to gather the information about this. And that that was the one and only time that you had the opportunity to do that.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right, with five minutes of questioning per senator, and they could ask and talk about whatever they wanted in those five minutes. So, I just thought, well, of course people are going to want to know more, and there will definitely be follow up and I’ll provide more information. But it didn’t work that way. That was it. And we saw this very abbreviated extended investigation, and then a rush to the vote and the president having a rally and mocking me in the meantime. So, but that vote, I mean, nothing says, “Let’s rush someone through,” other than a vote on a Saturday at Congress. To me, that was the ultimate, that they’re voting on a Saturday and working on a Saturday to get the vote through.
Amanda Doyle:
I mean, and just because I object to even the term investigation-
Christine Blasey Ford:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
… in terms of it was lending credibility to cover their asses on that.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
It was, just for everyone’s reference point, Representative Flake at the very end said, “I won’t vote unless there’s an investigation.” And what happened was, the FBI interviewed 10 people, all of whom were approved in advance by the White House. So, the White House who has nominated this person to the court tells the FBI exactly whom they can talk to, 10 people they speak to. They do not interview Dr. Ford. That’s odd, since she is the one with the information. And they had received 4,500 tips about Kavanaugh, and they didn’t call any of them back.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
And they also didn’t interview any of the corroborators of your story that you had listed in your letter to the FBI. So, that was not an investigation. That was a, “We can say there’s an investigation,” to give all of these people who are having a little trouble sleeping at night because they know this woman is telling the truth, to let them check the box that we did the right thing. But it was horseshit.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Totally, totally. Yeah. So, I was calling, and the corroborators were calling me like, “Hey, have they called you, or have you been interviewed yet?” And we were still very hopeful and thinking, “Oh, they’re just going to come to us last, so we’ll just hang on,” because it’s a one-week investigation and it’s only been three days. So, everybody just stay organized and hang tight. And we all had our preparations in order, just waiting, assuming that they were coming our way.
But you’re right, it was just a sham investigation, and they went back out and just confirmed with his friends that his friends are his friends, supportive of him, and that gave enough cover to the vote. So I think, by Wednesday of that week, I knew this isn’t going to happen and I need to start just preparing to get over it. But I think the people who were out in the community watching on TV, I wasn’t watching it on TV, were thinking, “Well, the preliminary vote’s on Friday, we’ll see how that goes, and then maybe Saturday.” But by Wednesday, it was already sort of over in my mind, especially then when the president got on TV and had the rally.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s just so heartbreaking to be a woman in America, because the worst part about it is that you still hope. I knew, it was like, the reason you look so brave, it was like that Atticus Finch, the definition of courage is knowing you’re licked before you start and doing it anyway. I saw you and I knew that that was the case, but I still believed and hoped to the end that something would be different. And so, it was such a heartbreak.
Glennon Doyle:
Hope will kick your ass.
Amanda Doyle:
Even though I knew, I still hoped, and that’s what keeps breaking my heart about this country.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes. Well, you’re not alone. In the scores of thousands of letters I got, the people who were writing during the investigation days, they were all hoping as well. Everyone got their hopes up as soon as that investigation was called. The letters that came in that were written on that day all say, “Oh, this is so great. Now there’s going to be an investigation.” And so, people were clearly hopeful that that would happen.
Glennon Doyle:
I love our hope. I just…
Christine Blasey Ford:
I do too.
Glennon Doyle:
I love our hope. I just think it has to be placed with the right people. Our hope is revolutionary. It’s just, it has to be in each other, and we have to figure out how to use and find community and power in the other them. It’s just, we keep placing our hope in the system because we say, “Oh, it’s broken.” We just have to fix it together, but it’s not broken. It works exactly the way it’s supposed to work. It works to protect the thousands of Kavanaughs. There’s a Kavanaugh on every corner. I know 30 Kavanaughs from my past. I know them all. They talk the same. They cry while calling women emotional. They scream about their beer. He’s a caricature. And the system exists to protect the Kavanaughs. It worked perfectly,
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right. I think that is one thing we owe ourselves, maybe, is to stay hopeful, because that’s a better space to live a life than to not be hopeful. And I think, if nothing else, it’s a great coping mechanism. I certainly went through dark years, as I described in the book, but I think in the end, we do have to just stay hopeful. Not in the system, but as you say, in each other, in other human beings. Because for every senator that voted, I have a thousand letters of human beings saying how much they cared and how much they love survivors and how they’ve experienced similar things.
Amanda Doyle:
Do you know what I have hope in about what you did is, it’s just the same thing that Professor Hill did, it goes back to that normalization thing. It’s, how are you a whistleblower to something that happens to everyone? You’re blowing the whistle, but it’s happening to everyone. So, how is that a thing?
Glennon Doyle:
So many whistles.
Amanda Doyle:
But the thing about it that was crazy is, okay, for example, when at the time that the term sexual harassment was invented, just because the invention of the term doesn’t mean people aren’t experiencing it, like 80% of women being sexually harassed in the workplace at the time that that term was invented. Which means, prior to the invention of that term, it was just normal life.
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Christine Blasey Ford:
It was just the way it was, yes.
Amanda Doyle:
And this is the same thing. So, her making everyone uncomfortable by saying those words in that fancy room to those fancy people was like, “I’m taking this private, what is normal private life of people, of women, and making you all look at it and say the words and making everybody hear it.” We all know Kavanaughs, we all have been you, and you said, “I’m going to make everyone uncomfortable to take this private thing that is so normalized, that you’re willing to excuse it on behalf of anyone, and I’m going to make you all see it.” And that is powerful. That is bringing from the shadows the real thing. And it’s out there, it’s living. It’s a living thing now that people can’t pretend doesn’t exist, and they can’t pretend the highest levels are unaffected by it.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah, that’s so well said.
Glennon Doyle:
Because before you spoke, I think a lot of people just thought what you experienced was a high school party.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Sexual harassment was just life, and getting pinned down by a bunch of laughing boys, that’s just a high school party. We didn’t even know we were survivors because it’s so ubiquitous. And so, why, this all comes out sideways later and we’re suffering and we don’t know because we have no words for it. We just think that this is the experience. I think it did so much for teenage girls.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Forever. Forever it will change what they can believe that they deserve in terms of safety in their own bodily autonomy.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah, I think that would be wonderful. I hope that it has had that impact. And I hear from people that it had that impact for them and their family, and it generated a lot of conversations that families had not had yet with their kids that night or the next night. So, I’m glad that that happened. I was living it, I wasn’t watching it, so I have this almost disparate experience from everyone else. It’s a little bit different.
So sometimes, I have to have people actually tell me what happened and why are people thanking me, and I don’t understand what’s going on. It was a little bit different going through it than watching it. And that part is just a little bit hard to explain. But at the beginning, I was like, “Why is everyone thanking me? Didn’t they see the vote? I don’t understand why people are saying thank you because they must not have watched the end of that movie.”
Amanda Doyle:
It’s not the end.
Glennon Doyle:
No, and also, you show us, in terms of doing the hard things, it’s contained. It’s like, you are not responsible for the outcome. You showed up and you did your hard thing. The fact that they didn’t do their fucking hard thing, we don’t hold you responsible for the Supreme Court. You gave what you owed us women, humanity, whatever it was, you gave it all, and you did your duty to perfection, to beyond. Then what happened next had nothing to do with you.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Right. Yeah. I still have to grapple with that. But yes, I do hear what you’re saying.
Amanda Doyle:
The only person responsible for Brett Kavanaugh is Brett Kavanaugh. He’s the one responsible for all of this. And then, the people who nominated him and voted for him are responsible for the Supreme Court. You are responsible for 0% of it, and we just thank you for pointing and saying, because then nobody gets to say they didn’t know. They get to know they knew and did the wrong thing.
Glennon Doyle:
And we get to know that they know.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what they have to live with, right?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes, that’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
And we get to live with seeing that. And I just wonder, when you say you didn’t know that was your last time, is there anything that you would have wanted to say when there were millions of people listening, if you had known that it was your last time to speak in front of all of those people?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Gosh. Well, the goal when I got to that chair was just to live through that time.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Christine Blasey Ford:
I was so scared.
Amanda Doyle:
We can understand that.
Glennon Doyle:
Well done.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Just so every question was like, okay, I think I can answer this. There are things that I prepared to say that I didn’t say just because they weren’t asked. I assumed some knowledge on their part. I didn’t know the audience very well, right? And so, I assumed a few things that… I assumed that they either experienced the collective US trauma of 9/11 or the Challenger explosion or the JFK assassination. There’s been times in history where we’ve had these collective traumas and people’s memories are always so interesting about those days.
“I remember exactly where I was on 9/11 and who I was with and what I was wearing.” And then, if you interviewed the people and said, “Well, what did you eat for breakfast, and what did you eat for dinner?” Then, at some point, they don’t know the answer to those questions. They just know very firmly what they do know. I think that’s the biggest assumption I made going in, is that I wouldn’t have to lay that out about memory, that they experienced that themselves.
Amanda Doyle:
And in that context, you were explaining how memory works to trauma survivors. Can you tell us that in the context of survivors? Because that was so compelling.
Glennon Doyle:
How memory works and how it’s used against people who come forward, by saying, “Oh, if you don’t remember that, you must not be telling the truth.” That was another huge thing your testimony did. My friends, I had friends calling me going, “Oh my God,” whose bosses gaslit them so much and said, “Well, you can’t be telling the truth because of this and this,” and you explaining how memory works was a humongous public service.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah, and I’m not even necessarily an expert on that, but because of where I work, I know a few things about it, so I just kind of offered up what I knew. I didn’t think that would be a question. I didn’t think, how does memory work would be a question. It wasn’t something I anticipated. I went in there thinking, “I’m here to help them. I’m here as a collaborator.” I didn’t think that then it was going to be like, “Well, what don’t you remember? Let’s sort of drill down on that.”
Yeah, they really honed in on the things that I didn’t remember. And ironically, I’m known as a person with a really good memory. I’m kind of the person that remembers what people wore to the prom and who they went with in 10th grade versus 11th grade versus 12th grade. People ask me to recall those things for them, because for some reason, I remember a lot of these things. But I certainly came out of that experience, them making me feel like I had a bad memory or something. Yeah, so that was interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
And does trauma make people, I know this isn’t your area of expertise completely, but trauma makes you remember certain things there, indelibly?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes. Indelibly.
Amanda Doyle:
In the hippocampus.
Glennon Doyle:
In the hippocampus.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Exactly. There you go.
Glennon Doyle:
Christine, I think of that maybe three times a day. Every time I hear a group of men laughing. Anyway. It does make you, if I’m correct, remember certain details. You’ll never forget them, they’re burned into your memory, which, that energy of remembering those things during the trauma makes other things fuzzy.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Right?
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah. And even in everyday life, a conversation with a neighbor, you’re not taking in every single piece of the context around the conversation and what they’re wearing and what you’re wearing and all of that. We do focus on things. And then, in a heightened state, that just is accentuated more. So, on 9/11 when you listen to people’s stories, they talk about, “and then the mailman came by,” and just these very specific things that people remember. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to remember the whole entirety of their three hours of watching that on TV. They don’t remember all of it. Some of it gets encoded really clearly and the rest of it can sometimes be remembered, but sometimes it just was never encoded to begin with.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s so interesting when people say, “Well, how is it, it’s just such a lapse in judgment that these people who are doing these trials don’t know how trauma works? That is just, we should really fix that.”That’s purposeful. They could be trauma informed.”
Christine Blasey Ford:
They could, that’s right. They could have an expert training on that.
Glennon Doyle:
They sure could.
Christine Blasey Ford:
There’s nothing keeping them from becoming trained in that area. And I shouldn’t put them all together because there certainly were people on that committee who were more trauma informed than others and understood things more than others.
Amanda Doyle:
The part of your book about your dad, that just broke my heart because it’s all coming from outside of the world and everything, and I know you say it’s okay, it’s okay. But I think that is so true for so many people, is that sometimes the closest people to us don’t know how to be fully loyal to us during those times.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yes. I mean, so, yeah, the word okay, when you said you think I’m okay with it, I think that captures it so well. Okay is such a, it’s sometimes a word that we criticize, but in this situation, that’s exactly what it is. It’s okay.
Glennon Doyle:
You said it’s not totally okay. It’s okay enough. It’s okay enough.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Yeah, it’s okay enough. So, it’s not good or bad, and it’s okay. It’s like a B- or a C+, maybe. Yeah, the family part was very hard. I felt like the best analogy for me was that there was an earthquake in my social life and my family life that went through my community in California, my community in DC and elsewhere, and people ended up on one side of the fault line or the other. And just like you can’t predict the earthquake, there was no predicting who was going to be on my side afterward. But there were people on my side, so that’s good. I wasn’t alone.
But other people that I care about a lot were not with me. So, I think that might be a universal experience though, that when we go through these most challenging things in our life, that it’s never the people that we think would pick us up at 2:00 in the morning or whatever ideas we have about who would be there for us in a crisis. I don’t know that we can predict it, or that’s just my experience. I don’t know if you all have had that experience. But there are people that then do step up and you think, “Wow, I’ve been maybe overlooking how valuable that friend is, and what a good friend that they would stand up for me and come to me to try to help.” It’s just not the people that I would maybe put down on my top 10 list or something.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Christine Blasey Ford:
And I think that’s kind of beautiful that we don’t know. There’s something lovely about that, that while some people might not be able to help us during certain phases of our life, there are other people that will, and then we can do that too for other people. Anytime I get myself down about like, “I can’t believe this person didn’t at least come forward and say that he did this or that, or I can’t believe…” Any of my can’t believes, I always say, “Let me think about if I’ve done that to someone,” and I try to come up with a thing where, and usually I can find one, where I didn’t help someone when I could have. That’s just one of the ways I cope with all of it.
Glennon Doyle:
You are a fascinating, brave, beautiful human being. Just, thank you for, Katnissing.
Christine Blasey Ford:
I’m going to have to go read the book again. I’m going to go read that again.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s you.
Christine Blasey Ford:
I have to read Untamed again, because Untamed, I mention it in my acknowledgement section
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think I don’t… Do you think I don’t know that? My friends have sent it. My friends who get the arcs of the books, it’s very exciting happening in my life that you put Untamed in the acknowledgements. It meant a lot to me.
Christine Blasey Ford:
I sat in my truck, when I still had to be a little bit in hiding and couldn’t go inside a basketball game, but I could take my kid to a basketball game, so I would just sit in the car and I listened to it in the car. And then when we had to drive, I was like, “I have to get home so I can start listening again.” I was so caught up. It was so good, it was so good.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how the other them, that’s how we reach each other, right? The systems have their big things, but we send each other messages in bottles through showing up on a screen in front of that seal, through books, through support groups. There is this constant lifting up of the other them through a million channels, and I’m so grateful that we connected that way. It just…
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Christine Blasey Ford:
The other them, I love it. I think that we should get a jersey.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, the other them. Well, the message in a bottle from One Way Back is beautiful and gorgeous, and I’m so thankful that you’re gifting the world with that as well. People are going to love hearing from you again.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you, Dr. Ford.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Pod Squad, you can do hard things. I don’t know if you can do things as hard as Dr. Ford did, okay? I’m not promising you you can. But-
Christine Blasey Ford:
They can. They can.
Glennon Doyle:
… They can? All right. I believe her. I believe you, Dr. Ford.
Bye, Pod Squad. We love you.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank you so much.
Christine Blasey Ford:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, Pod Squad. We just have so much more to say. So, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to wrap here, but tomorrow, come back. We’re going to drop a bonus episode and we’re going to tell you all the things that are spinning in our brains and hearts after this talk with Christine Blasey Ford. Come back. We shall do more hard things tomorrow. Bye.