Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the renewed media attention on Christine Blasey Ford, call out a defense of hormonal birth control from the Washington Post, and cover more media misses.
Christine Blasey Ford Returns to the Spotlight
Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who in 2018 accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of having sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, is once again making the media rounds as journalists commend her for her bravery and question why anyone has doubts about her story.
As a refresher: Ford rose to prominence in September 2018 when she testified before the Senate Judiciary committee during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he had sexually assaulted her while drunk at a high-school party in the ‘80s.
“I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming,” she testified at the hearing, saying Kavanaugh held her on a bed and tried to remove her clothes.
Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who was hired by Senate Judiciary Republicans to question Kavanaugh and Ford during the hearing, expressed skepticism of Ford’s account in a memo released at the time.
“In the legal context, here is my bottom line: A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove,” she wrote. “But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.”
Among the discrepancies Mitchell points to are that Ford had “not offered a consistent account” of when the alleged assault happened, having flip-flopped between several different years in the ’80s, and also that she had no memory of key details of the night in question, such as how she got home from the alleged party.
Now, Ford is out with a memoir in which she stands behind the accusation and says the justice was not a “good person.” (Kavanaugh, for his part, has vehemently denied the allegations.)
Ford’s memoir, One Way Back, received reviews from the Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The Atlantic review says Ford “did not realize that, in the testimony itself, she had brought data to a gunfight.”
“The professor had prepared for the occasion as if it was a lecture, marshaling details and context, aiming for clarity,” the review reads. “Kavanaugh spoke after Ford, and the gulf between the two testimonies was, in retrospect, an omen. She offered evidence. He offered grievance. She spoke science. He spoke politics. She was piecing together fragments of a story, parts of which she had forgotten. He was controlling the narrative.”
The review finds Ford “offers a model of resilience.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times called the memoir a “poetic” response to Senator Chuck Grassley’s “414-page, maddening memo on the investigation.”
And over at the Washington Post, readers are told the memoir is unlikely to change the mind of those who didn’t believe Ford back in 2018, though it “might wiggle your mind a little bit.”
“Because it’s impossible to picture why someone would lie to achieve the kind of fame that has been bestowed upon Ford. It’s hard enough to picture why someone would put themself through that nightmare to tell the truth,” the review says.
On CBS Sunday Morning, host Tracy Smith said Ford “knows just what it takes to summon up your courage and hurl yourself off a cliff.”
The View co-host Sara Haines was seemingly surprised that anyone doesn’t believe Ford’s claims.
“You’ve been called a highly credible witness . . . but even today, some people remain skeptical of your story,” Haines said.
Meanwhile, co-host Joy Behar called on men to “step up.”
“They need to understand, they have to step up to help us,” Behar said of men. “We can’t do this ourselves. I notice, I watch when people were clapping. Some of the men did not clap in this audience.”
NPR’s Terry Gross asked Ford how she was able to write her memoir without “re-traumatizing” herself.
“I did re-traumatize myself, having to go back through everything and relive it. And I tried to write a book a couple of years after the testimony and just really wasn’t able to engage in the material. And when I looked at what I had written, I didn’t think it was something that would be very useful anyway. So I abandoned that project for a while and then took it back up once I felt a lot better five years later,” she said.
Ford went on to say that her testimony before the Senate committee and its aftermath were in fact “more difficult” for her than the original assault.
As National Review previously reported, Ford’s story has come under increased scrutiny in the time since her testimony.
Ford’s lifelong best friend Leland Keyser, whom Ford said attended the party in question, told Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly for their 2019 book, “I don’t have any confidence in the story. . . . [The details] just didn’t make any sense.”
Nonetheless, the pair write in The Education of Brett Kavanaugh that the allegations “rang true.”
In Ford’s telling, she was 15 years old when 17-year-old Kavanaugh assaulted her upstairs at a small gathering at which three other boys, Kavanaugh’s friends, and Keyser were present.
Keyser maintained she has no recollection of ever meeting Kavanaugh, though Pogrebin and Kelly dismissed this in their book by questioning the accuracy of Keyser’s memory because she developed substance-abuse problems later in life.
And while the authors claimed Ford “has no apparent political motivation to bring down Kavanaugh,” she had participated in a local Women’s March protesting Trump administration policies just one year before her testimony and had donated to progressive Democrats.
Kavanaugh “will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him,” Ford’s lawyer Debra Katz said in a speech at the University of Baltimore’s Feminist Legal Theory Conference in April 2019. “That was part of what motivated Christine.”
Ford also seemingly misled members of Congress in claiming that she had a fear of flying so great that she needed the Senate hearing delayed several days in case she needed to travel to Washington, D.C., by car — despite having flown to several locations for surfing, including Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Pacific islands, and French Polynesia.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Washington Post reports, “Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion.”
“Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence,” the report reads. “While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) — is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.”
The story goes on to fault “far-right conservatives” for the rise in “misinformation” around birth control.
“Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators,” it reads.
Brittany Martinez, the founder of Evie Magazine, responded to the story, and its mention of the magazine, in a post on X.
“The problems with hormonal birth control have been studied, documented, and reported on extensively. They’re not even disputed by the manufacturers who put the laundry list of warnings in the packaging,” she wrote.
She goes on to say the paper failed to include a portion of her statement in which she explains her championing of publishing important subjects that impact women’s lives, including “1) the racist origins of the birth control pill; 2) the women who were abused (and died) during trials without informed consent; 3) the fact that only men testified at the Nelson pill hearings about its safety and effects; 4) the proven damage the birth control pill has done to women’s bodies; and 5) how it can alter brain chemistry and influence the choice of sexual partners.”
Media Misses
- The Scientific American is apparently averse to using the word “mother,” having instead shared in a post on X about a study of “more than 100 birthing parents” which “showed that pregnancy and birth cause changes in brain circuits that may be involved in empathy and bonding with the child.” The post, however, includes a link to a story on its website which does in fact say the study centered on 100 new mothers.
- NBC News’s Chuck Todd had an on-air meltdown on Sunday over the hiring of former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor. “Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation,” he told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. “There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this.” This despite the liberals at the network seemingly having no issue with the hiring of Jen Psaki or Symone Sanders-Townsend. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were similarly critical of McDaniel’s hiring. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but, if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons,” Scarborough said on Morning Joe. Brzezinski said, “We hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor.”
- Retired NBCUniversal senior executive Mike Sington posted and then deleted a message saying Barron Trump is “fair game now” that he has turned 18. Sington later deleted the post on X, telling Newsweek, “I posted he was ‘fair game’ now, meaning, as an adult, he’s ‘fair game’ for criticism from the press.””Someone pointed out to me ‘fair game’ could mean fair game to be harmed. I don’t wish physical harm on anyone, so I took it down. I listen to the comments and criticism I receive,” he explained. Even Chelsea Clinton stepped in to defend Barron Trump, saying he has an unimpeachable right to privacy.