How to Do the Right Thing

Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir provides essential guidance for the disillusioned.

Henri Privat-Livemont’s La Vague (The Wave) via Artvee.

“The strange part was that it didn’t feel like I hadn’t been heard. It felt like I had been believed, but then the response was a proverbial shrug.” — Christine Blasey Ford, One Way Back

When Christine Blasey Ford was preparing to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee that then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, she caused her lawyers no end of frustration. As they reviewed questions she might be asked, she kept saying things like “Why would they say that?” and “Why can't we just be honest and nice?” She didn’t understand why she was being advised to stage her parents behind her during her testimony—it seemed as absurd as bringing them to her Ph.D. dissertation defense. She had only belatedly relented on hiring lawyers at all. Why would she need them? She didn’t do anything wrong.

“I didn’t think I needed strategy. Though I would later be described as naive, I think the more accurate word is idealistic. I’d grown up believing in the political process. I thought that if the people on the committee had taken this very esteemed job in public service, they wanted to do the right thing,” Ford writes in her memoir, One Way Back.

This is the painful truth at the heart of Ford’s memoir. Again and again, she makes the same mistake: having faith in institutions—Congress, the legal system, the press—and the professionals who run them. Again and again, she is disappointed.

One Way Back isn’t about the trauma of sexual assault—Ford had long moved past it by the time of her testimony. It’s not about the trauma of not being believed. It’s about the trauma of being believed and discovering that it doesn’t matter. The trauma of discovering that if the truth threatens powerful people, it can easily be ignored.

In that way, Ford articulates the Alice-in-Wonderland journey that many of us have been on for the past eight years. We’ve been blinking at our screens in disbelief, marveling at how much liars and scoundrels can get away with, waiting for the adults in the room to stop the insanity. We always knew that privilege and corruption exist, but we—OK, I—thought there were some safeguards in place, and that most leaders of government and industry were professionals with a somewhat functioning moral compass.

I breathlessly followed the Mueller investigation (remember that?) and both Trump impeachment trials. Like everyone else, I sat on my couch on January 6 and watched Trump order an insurrection. I watched Republican Congress members have a very human response in real-time, condemning the attacks that threatened democracy and their own safety. As awful as January 6 was, it appeared for a brief moment that some sanity had been restored. But no.

Earlier this week, I felt a budding hope that Trump’s first criminal trial would finally right the scales. Then came the Supreme Court arguments, where the conservative justices, including Kavanaugh, appeared to take seriously the argument that a president can commit crimes with impunity.

Reading One Way Back has helped me process this. The despair and disillusionment I’m feeling? Ford has had that on steroids, and she offers hard-earned wisdom.

Ford’s confusion began with the reaction of people purportedly on her side. When she first shared the information about Kavanaugh with her Democratic House representative, Anna Eschoo, the legislator warned her not to tell anyone else and promised she wouldn’t either. “I was a bit baffled. I hadn’t gone to Eshoo just to have a confidante, after all. I of course wanted my name protected, but I also expected something to come of my disclosure. Now it felt like I’d tried to hand off the football, but it had just been passed right back to me,” she writes.

Ford was relieved when Eschoo offered to share her story with a friend on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Ford assumed Feinstein would handle it from there. Instead, Feinstein sat on the information for weeks.

After Ford testified, it initially appeared that her honest-and-polite strategy prevailed. Ford was respectful and thoughtful. Kavanaugh was angry and unhinged. Immediately after the testimony, polls revealed that most people believed Ford. Even many Republicans showed respect. Recall that Trump called Ford a credible witness and a “very fine woman.” But, as with January 6, this real-time human response happened because the politicians hadn’t yet been fed their lines; their operatives hadn’t yet constructed the counter-narrative.

After the FBI investigation was announced, Ford waited in her hotel room—her family had to go into hiding once the harassment and death threats started. She had her documents neatly organized—notes from the therapy sessions where she’d described the attack several years earlier, affidavits from the people she’d told throughout the years, text threads showing she’d tried to come forward with the information months before she testified. She had the receipts proving that she had not cooked up the story about Kavanaugh at the last minute to derail his nomination.

No one from the FBI ever came. When Ford’s lawyers told her the investigation was over, she was flummoxed. “The committee said no further corroboration had been found, but had they really looked for further corroboration if they hadn’t even interviewed the existing corroborators? Or, for that matter, me?” she writes.

Ford later learned that the FBI also ignored thousands of tips about Kavanaugh called into the agency’s tip line. Some people, however, did get the government’s attention. The judiciary committee published a memo amplifying the voices of people casting doubt on Ford’s character—ex-boyfriends, college acquaintances, and a person whose name was redacted claiming she'd seen a photo of Ford with liberal philanthropist George Soros, implying that she was part of a left-wing conspiracy. The photo was never produced, yet it was considered relevant enough to remain in the government memo.

After Trump’s first impeachment, when it appeared he might face real consequences for his wrongdoings, Ford’s friends asked her if that process might entail more universal retroactive justice. The response from her Washington contacts: Not a chance. “It was initially hard to hear, but I appreciated the transparency. I now know the difficulty of asking a bureaucratic organization to disrupt itself when everyone involved—even the people on my side—want to just keep the processes going as they are,” she writes.

Meanwhile, Ford’s life was destroyed. She and her family had to go into hiding, and she drained her bank account on hotels and rental homes and a 24/7 security team. She has been bombarded with messages from people threatening to kill her and enact revenge on her sons. She stopped teaching for a year, and distanced herself from friends so they wouldn't be targets. Ford essentially lived under house arrest for years—the pandemic lockdowns were a relief for her.

Still, Ford says she’d do it all again, and she hopes the book will not discourage others from coming forward with information that they think is important.

On that front, I’m not sure she succeeds. But for those of us fortunate enough to not confront this particular choice, she does offer a helpful way to process the insanity of these times.

Ford finds hope in two places. First, the letters she receives from sexual assault survivors and other people who wrote to thank her for taking a stand. The book contains a picture of Ford in her dining room, surrounded by boxes of their letters, and it’s dedicated to them. The picture is an encouraging reminder that while there are a lot of awful people in the world—Ford gets their letters, too—the nice, reasonable ones probably outnumber them (or at least that’s what I still believe).

Ford also finds excellent mentors, and she’s surprised to discover that her best guides are not members of the D.C. establishment but activists half her age. She jokes with Parkland survivor and gun-control advocate David Hogg about a picture of the two of them with forced smiles—Hogg says they’ll catch more hell if seen enjoying themselves. (“There was no fun allowed for people like us,” they agree.) She talks to a terrified Aly Raisman, one of the gymnasts abused by Larry Nassar, the night before her testimony and then watches her push past the fear and take the stand.

“I remember being struck by the ages of the senators in the room when I gave my testimony to the Judiciary Committee. So many of them were so old. Then I think about the youngness of the people who have given me hope on this journey,” she writes. “Younger generations are doing the work of meaning-making in the face of injustice and outrage. They inspire me and give me hope that I thought I'd lost."

I’ve spent the past eight years in a cycle of hope, despair and flatlining—my mood swinging with each piece of good or bad news. Natural responses to the state of the world, but One Way Back reminds me that these emotions themselves are pointless. Trying to determine whether or not justice will prevail is a parlor game. You can’t know. You just have to do your part to ensure that, however things turn out, you know that you did the right thing.

“Maybe it’s the scientist in me, but I’d like to believe that we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in years to come,” Ford writes. “If it takes countless survivors to tell their story despite personal risks and consequences on an individual level—all of us slowly stacking on top of one another until there is finally a collective response—I’m proud to have contributed.”

After Kavanaugh was confirmed and the smear campaigns against Ford began in earnest, she was confused about why the opposition was working so tirelessly to discredit her.

A member of her public relations team (another group she had to hire) explained: “You’re sort of a symbol now, so the other side has to destroy it.”

“All I did was tell the truth, and he still got the job,” I said. “Why are they destroying me?”

“They’re destroying a symbol of you. Because a symbol is too important, too unifying, too dangerous.”

Ford’s project to keep her attacker off the U.S. Supreme Court failed. But, whether she wanted to or not, she did become a symbol. I hope her opponents were correct to fear her.

How do you stay grounded amid … everything?