Oh, really? Brit Hume's daughter? In that case, I'd be willing to bet Fox News was responsible for this letter, and the woman who claimed it was her idea is lying.
She's not the only one who admitted that. (see Part 4)
But this is the best post of Hume's:
She "never heard anything untoward about him." What a great accolade. And she signed the letter. (Also, they "graduated same year" - they did not go to the same school.)
I wasn't going to go that far.
Also...
Actually, I do believe you can find enough women to sign. But not because they know him that well or even know what allegations negations they're signing! They sign because they all belong to the same community of rich, white families.
And maybe because they "never heard anything untoward about him."
I'd be very surprised if it does.And so, a woman considered coming forward to the Senate Judiciary Committee. We’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end well for her. We do not know who she is, or what her precise claims were, or how credible they might be, or whether she had reported the episode contemporaneously, or whether there were other witnesses.
[...]
What we can gather from this chain of events is that at some point this summer, the woman changed her mind—as the New Yorker put it, “after the interactions with Eshoo’s and Feinstein’s offices, the woman decided not to speak about the matter publicly.” We can litigate until the end of time whether Senate Democrats should have been given the letter sooner and who was in the best position to evaluate the weight of her claims. The better question is why a woman making claims about a sexual attack would change her mind about levying them.
[...]
The entire vast apparatus of the institution will be brought to bear against her, and that is the same apparatus that she must report to and hope to be believed by, all while knowing she must continue to work within it. Asking that any one woman do such a thing isn’t just a call for moral heroism. It’s also irrational.
[...]
It’s particularly irrational when the man in question is in the process of being confirmed to a Supreme Court seat with political stakes that are beyond high. The system that has gotten Brett Kavanaugh to this point has done so by scrambling powerful former clerks to defend him, and positioning powerful Republican lawyers to classify his emails, and standing together to simultaneously claim that it believes the Kozinski accusers and also believes they are political operatives sent to embarrass him. Why would we think that this is a system into which we could input a complicated allegation of sexual misconduct and get out anything rational or fact-based in return?
[...]
Almost anyone who has played any part in the #MeToo movement might say with confidence that the cost of coming forward [for a woman accusing a man of sexual assault] is crippling. And indeed, as soon as the New Yorker published its story, Kavanaugh defenders were quick to say that the woman, still unnamed, was a drunk and a liar. Had I been asked to advise this woman, who, according to the New Yorker, is already in trauma, and according to CNN has sought medical help for it, I would have told her to stand down. I would have told her that neither politics nor journalism are institutions that can evaluate and adjudicate facts about systems in which powerful men use their power to harm women. I would have told her that she would be risking considerable peril to her personal reputation, even as she would be lauded as a hero. I would have also told her that powerful men have about a three-month rehabilitation period through which they must live, after which they can be swept up once again in the slipstream of their own fame and success. The women of #MeToo, though, are never quite welcome in the slipstream again. And if you closely observe how one of the most intimate and frightening moments of this anonymous woman’s life is currently being tossed around for political gain, I suspect you might come to agree with me.
The real tragedy is that we do not need this woman’s story to understand who the current Supreme Court nominee is. Because here is what we do know about Judge Kavanaugh: We know that he clerked for and had a yearslong close relationship with a serial abuser of women and claims he knew nothing about it. He claims he doesn’t recall being on a hypersexualized and misogynistic email list and claims he didn’t bother to search to determine whether he was. He claims that when the serial abuser of women for whom he clerked was revealed to be a serial abuser of women, he believed the victims and yet called the abuser, because he was worried about the abuser’s mental health. Worrying more about the accused judge than the accusers one claims to believe is the system protecting the system. This is why women don’t come forward.
[...]
We know that he was part of a group of young men who saw fit to write a creepy racist and misogynistic email chain—and to pledge to keep it secret. We also know that the “neutral” George W. Bush lawyer who vetted Kavanaugh’s papers (and also represents the disgraced judge for whom Kavanaugh once clerked) deemed one of those emails classified, even though it contained no national security or political secrets. Withholding that email was the system protecting the system. That is why women don’t come forward.
[...]
The system keeps asking why women in trauma didn’t come forward earlier or later or publicly or privately or anonymously or with evidence or without evidence. The system is why women don’t talk, and even when they do, why things don’t change.
[...]
When she received a Mirror Award this summer for her reporting on Charlie Rose, my colleague Irin Carmon said this in her speech: “The stories that we have been doing are about a system. The system has lawyers and a good reputation. It has publicists. It has a perfectly reasonable explanation about what happened. It has powerful friends that will ask if it’s really worth ruining the career of a good man based on what one women says, what four women say, what 35 women say. Indeed, the system is sitting in this room. Some more than others. The system is still powerful men getting stories killed that I believe will one day see the light of day.”
Slate
UPDATE:
A very interesting account of the Kozinski Gag List emails Kavanaugh pretended to know nothing about...or didn't recall knowing anything about.*
UPDATE 9/16: The woman is identified and goes public with her story.
Christine Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.
[...]
As the story snowballed [ed: and reporters began to start sniffing around her], Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.
“These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”
NYT
I believe her, too. I bet Kavanaugh's backers are rushing to find the other people at that party.
Bingo.
*UPDATE: Correction: It was the other guy who claimed he couldn't recall. Kavanaugh has always denied it.
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