Lasharon Bell

Ms. Garber has successfully captured the essence of what is at stake for American social mores as Republicans, traditionally vocal champions of respectable social behavior, abandon all pretext in order to defend the interests of their only remaining constituency: privileged white males who would dearly love to bar the clubhouse door.



Sue Prent

St. Albans, Vt.

You wrote in your article on Mr. Kavanaugh’s nomination: “But those claims have also been met, revealingly, with a collective shrug by people who see themselves in him but cannot see themselves in her.”

I am writing to say that I see myself in her, in Christine Blasey Ford. Nearly the exact same thing happened to me in May 1980 with a boy/man who did not rise to the public stage. I confronted him with his actions in 2010 and he truly did not understand what I was talking about. It was revealing of his character. He is currently a disabled alcoholic who was never able to overcome his dysfunctional family.

The issue for me isn’t whether or not Judge Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ms. Ford when they were teenagers. I just watched The Breakfast Club to refresh my memory of those days. What happened between Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Blasey Ford, or me and the boy who assaulted me, was not unusual for the time.

Something that was not seen as abnormal cannot be now held up to the scrutiny that this issue is receiving. It’s grossly unfair to Judge Kavanaugh and to the country. We have bigger and broader problems. Furthermore, Judge Kavanaugh is a sitting United States Circuit Judge and deserves our respect for his service. We must ask why would Blasey Ford would come forward now and why publicly?

Additionally, finding a man in his 50s who hasn’t done something similar to what Judge Kavanaugh is accused of doing will be nearly impossible. That doesn’t mean I’m shrugging. It doesn’t mean I’m accepting. It’s simply a fact. The assault on me by the boy from my high school wasn’t the only similar assault that occurred in my life; I experienced five others from age 17 to 30. However, it was the most serious and the most scary. What about Ford? Doesn’t she too have other similar experiences of sexual assault in her young adulthood?

What I learned from my assault was to be more careful and clear in my communication. Yes, it was an onus and a burden that I had to bear that hopefully fewer young women will have to experience.

Nowadays, with my daughters of 18 and 24, certainly boys/men should be held accountable. That’s what my mother’s experiences (she was a Delta Airline stewardess in the 1950s whose head stewardess told her to be “more friendly” to the pilots; my mother kept a copy of the memo in her files) and my experiences have done for women in America. Combined, my mother’s and my experiences would disallow countless men from public office. But this isn’t news, is it? To hold Judge Kavanaugh accountable in this way is not fair. It was a private matter between him and Ford and should have been handled in that manner.