Christine Blasey Ford Says She 'Can't Live In This Country' If Kavanaugh Is Confirmed

Christine Ford’s husband has spoken out about the Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation

Christine Blasey Ford moved 3,000 miles away from the Maryland suburb where Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted her in high school. Recently, she’s considered moving even further. Ford’s husband Russell opened up to The Washington Post about the trauma his wife faced as a teen, the turmoil she’s dealing with now, and the ways their lives have been completely upended since Ford stepped forward with her accusation.

Last week, CNN released a letter that Ford wrote to Senator Dianne Feinstein about Kavanaugh. In it, she said that the Supreme Court nominee once pushed her into a bedroom at a high school party, locked the door, turned the music up, jumped on top of her, and attempted to take off her clothes. When she tried to yell for help, Kavanaugh allegedly put his hand over her mouth. The Supreme Court nominee has denied these allegations.

That awful, traumatic incident has been a secret Ford wrestled with for more than thirty years. And now it’s finally coming to a head. Russell told the Post that his wife first began to get nervous about her alleged attacker being nominated to the Supreme Court after Donald Trump became president. She was able to take a small breath of relief when Neil M. Gorsuch was nominated instead.

Then, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement, Ford considered moving her family out of the United States. “She was like, ‘I can’t deal with this. If he becomes the nominee, then I’m moving to another country. I cannot live in this country if he’s in the Supreme Court,’” Russell recalled. “She wanted out.”

Ford has since stepped into the public with her accusation. The response has been an unfortunate backlash of disbelief and victim shaming. Perhaps most disturbingly, Trump took to Twitter to dismiss Ford’s accusation because she didn’t report it at the time. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents,” he wrote.

The Ford family is feeling the weight of it all. They’ve received death threats. Ford’s email has been hacked. They had to move into a hotel for a period of time while their kids stayed with friends. Russell tried to explain to his children what was going on by saying: “Mommy had a story about a Supreme Court nominee, and now it’s broken into the news, and we can’t stay in the house anymore.”

Meanwhile, Ford is trying to decide if she’s going to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was difficult enough to come forward with her story in the first place. “It is upsetting to discuss sexual assault and its repercussions, yet I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything,” she wrote in her letter to Feinstein.

There are people out there who are making light of what Kavanaugh allegedly did. They say that he was in high school, that it wasn’t a big deal, that it was roughhousing. Even the President of the United States has further victimized her. Ford’s husband has an important response to all of that.

“I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong,” he says. “If they don’t have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard.”