I was listening to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) on Fox News tear into the Feinstein staff, widely expected to be the source of the leak of Ford's "anonymous" complaint, as "unfair" to Ford. Let's be clear: the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing and the subsequent FBI investigation did little more than exacerbate the partisan divide and changed nobody's minds.
I've personally been the target of anonymous smears during my career, academic and professional. There is no due process, no right to respond, to face one's accusers. The rationalization is that HR and management fear your "retaliation" against premeditated personal attacks behind one's back. This is not paranoia; for example, while I worked in California, my boss was away when the switchboard connected a confused Oracle Support duty manager, one I had never personally interacted with, thinking I was my boss, screaming lies about me. In one case, it was alleged that I had been verbally abusive with a female Support analyst (cursing, etc.) that led her to break down emotionally at work and her boss had to send her home. This had no basis in reality; I had sometimes had to deal with inexperienced analysts and escalated issues to more experienced analysts. It may well be the case that going over an analyst's head is not good professionally, but it wasn't personal. I was working for a company that annually paid for Oracle to support sometimes buggy software; time is money. I've never lost my cool with incompetent analysts, even when they threatened to close my problem ticket when I argued their line of inquiry was not productive/relevant to my issue. When I worked for Oracle Consulting as a senior principal (the highest non-managerial rank), my practice manager told me a Support duty manager had called him to call for my termination, even volunteering to help my manager recruit my replacement. Again, this was someone who had never met or talked to me, someone who sided with his lying subordinates probably scapegoating me for their gross incompetence. That's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not paranoia.
Just to give one minor example: my best post-academic job was at a Chicago area marketing research firm, eventually acquired by Equifax. The company's technical co-founder, my then boss, left for another company, and he recommended me to replace him. That never happened because a number of mainframe programmers (to be transitioned to more of a microsystem/Unix platform) thought I was the ax-man for company management and I would replace them with fresh college graduates; they threatened to resign collectively if I was named PC's replacement. The fact of the matter is company management NEVER discussed hiring with me; I had never made any comment to anyone regarding personnel matters; in fact, I knew company management was more concerned about retaining the programmers' industry knowledge than issues in retraining. The decision against me was bad for the company; in fact, the one person they particularly wanted to keep left anyway.
Did Ms. Ford suffer an attack by someone, by anyone over 30 years ago? Possibly. But here's what we know: she never told her family or friends, she never recorded her experience in a diary; she didn't recall salient facts and everyone she has cited as a witness has denied it. She never told her college roommate or a man she lived with for several years. When Kavanaugh was first nominated in 2003 to the federal judiciary, Democrats, angry about his role in the Clinton impeachment process, held up his nomination for 3 years--and Ms. Ford did not come forward legally or politically against Kavanaugh, some 20-odd years after the alleged assault. It would take until 2012 or 2013 under certain controversial therapy sessions where these "repressed memories" first emerged. There seem to be inconsistencies of details (including whether Kavanaugh was identified). And let's point out that Kavanaugh was listed as a potential Romney SCOTUS pick during the 2012 election campaign. Not to mention Ford did not make her therapists' notes part of the public record; why?
When Ford, a registered Democrat, came out "confidentially" in letters this summer to Sen. Feinstein and her Congressman, it wasn't a search for law and order. As progressives repeatedly point out, there is no statue of limitations on a sexual assault charge in Maryland. How is anyone, never mind Justice Kavanaugh, supposed to be able to defend himself against a vague charge about time, place, and details? Unlike Ford, Kavanaugh kept detailed records on his social calendar, which doesn't dovetail with Ford's vague recollections.
But here's where I've taken a different approach than most critics, because Ford earned her credentials as a psychologist with an earned doctorate. Psychology is one of my reference disciplines in the MIS field. Almost anyone familiar with the academic discipline knows that memories are not like snapshots in a photo album; in fact, they can be fused with imaginative elements that can seem very real. There are people who can convince themselves they've been abducted by space aliens or are the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The point I'm getting to is that Ford, unless she's utterly incompetent as an academic psychologist, is well aware of the frail nature of human memory, of the fact that women who were convinced of the identity of their rapists were later contradicted by DNA evidence. She's absolutely convinced it was Kavanaugh, but at best, she only met Kavanaugh in passing, and her high school friends have denied ever meeting Kavanaugh. There are a few of Kavanaugh's high school friends who resembled him. There were late notes indicating at least 2 men surfaced claiming they, not Kavanaugh, were involved in the purported assault. Yet despite Ford's own academic training which should have tempered her likely mistaken identification of Kavanaugh, she stubbornly insisted otherwise. Never mind the fact that the people who know and have dated Kavanaugh have no recollection of sexual predator behavior. It's, of course, impossible to prove a negative; I never expected an A student would cheat in my classes, but it happened. Could Kavanaugh have some Jekyll-Hyde personality? Improbable, but if so, the burden of proof is on the law, and there's no prosecutor in Maryland who would touch the case given the lack of evidence and dubious recollection of basic facts.
So why was Ford obsessed with Kavanaugh? I don't know, and I'm not going to speculate. Maybe she had a crush on him as an upper-class high school athlete, and he wasn't interesting in dating a freshman girl.
