WASHINGTON—Poised and precise, mostly cheery but sometimes tearful, she said she would never forget his laughter during the sexual assault she alleged he committed.

Incensed and wounded, combative and partisan, he said he has never assaulted anyone — and that he was the victim of a smear campaign to destroy his life as revenge for the election of Donald Trump.

Striking divergent tones while offering incompatible stories, California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford and Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh waged an extraordinary credibility battle in a congressional hearing room in Washington on Thursday.

Kavanaugh’s nomination for a critical court seat hung in the balance. And the daylong hearing seemed even bigger than that, a moment of reckoning for the two parties and for the country.

For Republicans and Democrats, the hearing was a precarious political challenge that had the potential to swing the November congressional elections. For many American women, it was a deeply personal test of how far America has come in its handling of sexual assault allegations.

Blasey Ford’s words were widely described as credible, even by some Republicans, and famous and average women around the country declared her a hero. But Kavanaugh’s subsequent words appeared to persuade some Republicans that he was worth standing behind, and it was not immediately clear how the duelling testimony would affect his chances of confirmation.

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Key swing Republican senators remained publicly undecided an hour after the hearing. Trump, who on Wednesday offered a vigorous defence of Kavanaugh and an impassioned lament about accusations against powerful men, declared his support once more after the hearing.

“Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him,” Trump said on Twitter. “His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting. Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct and resist. The Senate must vote!”

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the hearing, planned to hold a vote on Friday as scheduled, two Republican senators said late Thursday. It was not clear if or when the full Senate would vote after that.

Blasey Ford likely made the vote more difficult for Trump’s party, earning trust with a display of composure and eloquence in the face of a Republican prosecutor’s efforts to poke holes in her story. Kavanaugh’s highly unusual performance was more polarizing.

His future in deep doubt after Blasey Ford’s testimony, Kavanaugh, a federal judge and former lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, discarded the measured opening statement he had submitted earlier in the week and made a statement that adopted the brawling tone of a Trump rally speech.

Bashing Democrats and “the left,” Kavanaugh described his confirmation process as a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” intended “to blow me up and take me down” as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

Kavanaugh choked up, too, as he talked about his father, his daughter and his elite private high school’s “disaster” of a yearbook. But he was more belligerent than sad, aggressively challenging the Democrats who questioned him and attempting to turn their questions about his teenage drinking around on them.

It was an extraordinary display of partisanship from a federal judge. At an earlier hearing, just two weeks ago, Kavanaugh had said of judges, “We stay out of politics.”

Kavanaugh directed his ire at Democrats rather than Blasey Ford, for whom he said his 10-year-old daughter had offered to pray. Declining to say she was lying about her whole story, he said it was possible that she “may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time,” just not him.

Blasey Ford, a psychology professor in California, told the committee she was “one hundred per cent” certain that Kavanaugh was the person who assaulted her in 1982. Asked what she remembered most vividly about the attack, which she alleged was perpetrated by Kavanaugh with the aid of a friend of his, Mark Judge, she smiled ruefully, choking up.

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. “The uproarious laughter between the two. And their having fun at my expense.”

At other moments, Blasey Ford smiled easily, bantering with both the Republican committee chairman who had made it clear that he did not believe her and with the prosecutor the Republicans hired to question her.

The Republicans were wary of repeating the optics disaster of the 1991 hearing in which their all-male group of committee members badgered a lawyer, Anita Hill, who was accusing their court nominee at the time, Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment. With no Republican women on the committee in 2018 either, they turned to Arizona attorney Rachel Mitchell.

She did not appear to have much success, though Blasey Ford apologetically acknowledged that she does not remember certain details of the day in question, like how she got to and from the house where she said she encountered Kavanaugh.

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When Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked how she was so sure it was Kavanaugh who attacked her, Blasey Ford returned to the language of an academic psychologist.

“The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now. Just basic memory functions. And also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes — that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus so the trauma-related experience then is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift,” she said.

In her opening statement, Blasey Ford said she wished she had not had to come forward. She noted later that she had first tried to raise the alarm about Kavanaugh before Trump named him as the nominee.

“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” she said. “I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”

Blasey Ford alleged that the assault occurred at a small gathering, a kind of pre-party, when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17. She said Kavanaugh and Judge, who subsequently acknowledged being an alcoholic, were obviously inebriated.

Kavanaugh, she alleged, locked her in a room, climbed on top of her on a bed, ran his hands over her body, grinded his hips into her, groped her, tried to take off her clothes, and put his hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming. Asked what she does not forget, she said, “The stairwell. The living room. The bedroom. The bed on the right side of the room. As you walk into the room there was a bed to the right. The bathroom in close proximity. The laughter, the uproarious laughter. And the multiple attempts to escape, and the final ability to do so.”

The reviews for her testimony were overwhelmingly positive. Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News legal analyst and former judge Trump likes, said Blasey Ford’s appearance had been a “disaster for the White House.” Mitchell, he said, had “fortified,” rather than damaged, Blasey Ford’s credibility, allowing her to offer “amiable, rational, emotional, attractive, reasonable explanations at almost every opportunity.”

But many Republicans were heartened by Kavanaugh’s fiery opening remarks, about which Fox reported that Trump was very happy. Napolitano himself said the situation for the White House had become less gloomy.

Kavanaugh was by turns assertive and evasive. Unequivocal about his character, he was frequently indirect in response to questions about his drinking, using qualified language, lengthy stories or explanations that many observers thought were implausible.

Asked if he had ever passed out from drinking, he said, “I’ve gone to sleep, but I’ve never blacked out.” Asked what he meant in his high school yearbook when he said he was part of the “Beach Week Ralph Club,” he acknowledged that “ralph” meant vomiting — but suggested he was talking about his stomach problems handling spicy food, not excessive drinking. Asked what he meant in the yearbook by the word “boofed,” widely thought to be sexual slang, he said, “That refers to flatulence.”

At several other points, Kavanaugh acknowledged, “I like beer.” He rejected the claims of classmates who said he had become “sloppy” or unpleasant when intoxicated.

Kavanaugh faces two other accusations of sexual assault. One is from Deborah Ramirez, a Yale University classmate who alleges he caused her to touch his penis without consent during the 1983-1984 school year. The other is from Julie Swetnick, a woman who alleges she saw him have unwanted sexual conduct with girls at Washington-area parties between 1981 and 1983.

The Republican senators originally intended to have Mitchell question Kavanaugh as well as Blasey Ford. Amid Republican unhappiness with a Mitchell performance they viewed as too gentle toward Blasey Ford, several of them instead decided to address Kavanaugh on their own.

Several of them defended him at length. Sen. Orrin Hatch’s voice rose to an indignant squeal when he said they were dealing with “uncorroborated, unsubstantiated claims from his teenage years.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, describing Kavanaugh as a “victim,” said the way Democrats handled the accusations was “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”

“What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020!” Graham shouted. Addressing Democrats who argued that this was a job interview for Kavanaugh, Graham said, “This is not a job interview. This is hell.”

Kavanaugh occasionally lapsed into self-pity. He said he loves teaching, “but thanks to what some of you on this (Democratic) side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to teach again.” He said he loves coaching girls’ basketball, “but thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to coach again.”

The hearing, expected to be watched by millions of people, was a traumatic trigger for many women who have experienced sexual assault themselves. The organization that runs the U.S. National Sexual Assault Hotline said phone calls were up 147 per cent. Women called into radio shows and the C-SPAN public affairs channel to describe their own experiences.

A 76-year-old C-SPAN caller described how she was molested in the second grade.

“This brings back so much pain,” she said.

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