After Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination suddenly was imperiled by a Bay Area professor’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her, Ivanka Trump jumped into White House personnel manager mode and urged her father to withdraw support for the judge, Vanity Fair is reporting.

The allegation from Palo Alto college professor Christine Blasey Ford threw Donald Trump and his White House “into a #MeToo crisis at a moment when they can’t afford to antagonize women voters ahead of the midterms,” Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman reported.

For that reason, Trump’s oldest daughter and senior White House advisor has urged him to “cut bait” and drop Kavanaugh, Sherman wrote.

Sherman added that White House staffers are worried that more damaging information about Kavanaugh could come out. They also wonder whether Blasey Ford’s account of the alleged incident some 30 years ago, when she and Kavanaugh were prep school students outside Washington, D.C., could be verified by other women she may have told contemporaneously.

Rebecca White, Blasey Ford’s Palo Alto neighbor and good friend, told this news organization that Ford revealed the alleged assault — without naming Kavanaugh — in late 2017 during the height of the #MeToo movement and long before Kavanaugh was a Supreme Court nominee.

Blasey Ford opened up about the alleged incident while responding to White’s story on Facebook about being raped as a teenager.

“She reached out to me afterward, supporting me and my story and that she had something happen to her when she was really young and that the guy was a federal judge,” White said. “She said she had been assaulted. She said hers had been violent as well, physically scary, fighting for her life.”

Blasey Ford also told White that the judge was a “super powerful guy” who might one day “be a contender for a Supreme Court position.”

On Wednesday, NBC reported that a former classmate of Blasey Ford’s at the elite Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland wrote on Facebook that she recalled hearing about the alleged assault when she was at the school, though she said she has no first-hand information to corroborate the accuser’s claims.

“Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me,” wrote the woman, Cristina Miranda King, who now works as a performing arts curator in Mexico City. “I did not know her personally but I remember her. This incident did happen.”

Blasey Ford first shared her allegation about Kavanaugh in a letter she sent to her congresswoman, Democrat Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto, in late July. But she initially declined to go public with her accusations, according to Feinstein’s office and other congressional sources.

Blasey Ford broke her silence in an an interview with the Washington Post over the weekend. Blasey Ford alleged that Kavanaugh was “stumbling drunk” at a high school party she attended at a private home outside Washington, D.C. Blasey Ford said Kavanaugh pushed her down on a bed, groped her and attempted to remove her clothing. She also said he put his hand over her mouth as she screamed.

At the time, Blasey Ford was a 15-year-old at Holton-Arms School, while Kavanaugh was a 17-year-old at nearby Georgetown Prep. Kavanaugh strongly denies that the incident took place.

Given that #MeToo New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow helped break the story about the existence of Blasey Ford’s letter to Eshoo, White House staffers also worry that Farrow could drop a bombshell report about Kavanaugh, Sherman wrote. However, Sherman noted there’s no evidence that Farrow would have much more to write about.

In any case, Blasey Ford’s allegations have thrown the White House into turmoil, Sherman said.

“Everyone thought Kavanaugh was a slam dunk,” an outside adviser to the White House told Sherman.

The allegation has pushed Trump to be unusually measured in his response. In the past, Trump has denounced the women who have accused him of sexual harassment and assault, or the woman who have accused male friends and political allies of sexual misconduct.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Trump defended Kavanaugh as “an outstanding man,” including while visiting hurricane-ravaged North Carolina, the New York Times reported. But the president thus far refrained from directly assailing Blasey Ford, the Times reported.

On Wednesday, Trump said he thought the judge was being treated “very, very tough” and said “it’s a very unfair what’s going on.”

Still, Trump suggested he might be listening to Ivanka Trump and is at least leaving open the possibility of replacing Kavanaugh as his Supreme Court nominee — depending on what Blasey Ford says if she testifies before the Senate, according to the Times.

“Look, if (Blasey Ford) shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and we’ll have to make a decision,” Trump said.

The threat of losing the House and Senate has helped convince Trump “not to go scorched-earth on Blasey Ford,” Sherman reported. Trump can’t afford to anger women voters and increase the chances that Republicans could lose both houses in Congress, Sherman wrote.

If Democrats took control of the House and Senate, Trump’s chances of being impeached also would increase, a prospect that worries both him and Ivanka Trump, as was reported last week.