Abigail Disney

Opinion contributor

I knew Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony would hurt. I knew that because, like so many women, I have my own sexual assault story.

What I did not know was what Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony would do to me. Much to my surprise, I found myself spiraling into rage, hurt, anxiety and pure sadness. I did not know his story would be even more familiar to me than hers. I suspect that anyone who grew up in a home with a raging alcoholic father knows what I am talking about.

When Ford started, we heard meekness. I was a little taken aback by how girlish her voice was. She had to be asked to pull the microphone closer to her face. She apologized for the things she could not remember.

Kavanaugh, on the other hand, strode in and confidently repositioned his name plate, reaching aggressively across the table as though to establish his territory. He read a long, prepared statement and he read it loudly. He was indignant. He was embittered; he was petty and partisan. He pushed back on hostile questions with anger and disrespect. He talked over people, interrupted people and even as on the one hand he asserted boldly, on the other he also dodged and averted question after question after question.

More than anything, he made it clear that he was being wronged.

Niceness can co-exist with being terrifying

It is true, I am inclined to believe the accuser. The world being what it is, the idea that a privileged white boy at an all-boys high school drank too much, caroused irresponsibly, and got overly aggressive in getting the sex he felt entitled to is a story too often told.

As the mother of sons, though, I also have to acknowledge that if they had been wrongly accused, whether that accuser was confused or a malevolent, they’d have been right to be angry, loud and hostile. I would have encouraged them to demand the benefit of the doubt. Who wouldn’t?

But something more was driving my reaction to Kavanaugh. For all my partisan emotion, he was resonating on a level that went well past the political. What was resonating in the pit of my stomach was his rage.

It was the same as my father's rage.

I grew up in a house of rage. My parents were both alcoholics. While I would not describe myself as abused, exactly, I would say that I was often terrified. Terror, I can tell you, is an awful thing to feel at 6, at 10, at 16. And for anyone raised in a house with an angry alcoholic, that terror is twinned with the kind of unpredictability that leaves a child never free to relax, to experiment, to feel entirely safe.

You question your own sense of reality. The whole world is telling you how great your father is. How can this be possible?

What I wished I could convey to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week was what I wished I could convey to the world when my father raged — that there is nothing inconsistent about a Boy Scout demeanor co-existing in the same man who could also be terrifying. My father, Roy E. Disney (Walt's nephew), was also known to be a nice, decent, good man, and he was. Had he been a federal judge, I am sure the American Bar Association would have recommended him highly as well. I am sure 65 women would have signed a letter testifying to his niceness. I am sure all would have seemed well from the curb in front of our house.

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My dad had an inside face and an outside face. He did not rage often, and he did not strike us often. But when he raged, he was the image of Brett Kavanaugh in that committee room. Red face, pursed lips, narrowed eyes — he was the image of a man who believed something was being taken from him that was his birthright.

The biggest crimes that set my father off tended to be thought crimes. Insubordination. Attitude problems. Tone of voice. Failure to obey quickly enough. Disrespect. He took these crimes as assaults on his rank, as attempts to take from him his rightful status as father, law-giver, leader and man.

As a man — a white, well-to-do man with a big job and lots of people working for him — he had seldom encountered a person or a circumstance that dared refute his idea of his high stature. The world reinforced his sense of entitlement and reflected him back to himself at twice his natural size.

He was not a bad person. And there was no shame in his addiction. It was a disease. Sadly, the disease is one that does more than just attack your pancreas or your liver. It lodges inside of your personality. It weaves its way into your life and feeds on your weaknesses like the hungriest of parasites. It changes you, and if you spend years battling it, and even if you succeed, you are never again that sweet young guy who tried his first beer. You’ve been weathered and warped by it, and not always in ways that you or anyone who loves you can articulate or accommodate.

My father stopped drinking in middle age. He did what those in Alcoholics Anonymous call “white-knuckling it.” He found a therapist who prescribed him Antabuse, which made him violently ill if he drank. But because he never looked at the issues underlying his new addiction, both predating it and caused by it, he was the same man, only slightly less volatile — a “dry drunk.”

No human being is above scrubbing a toilet

One of the most important first steps on my journey to being able to name and understand what I had been through as a child of alcoholics was, oddly enough, a TV movie about Betty Ford. At the time, I could not have told you why I was so moved by the movie, but watching this high-profile woman living a high-stakes life, being told the truth in a loving way by her loving family and accepting help, was enough to leave me in a sobbing puddle on the floor. The moment that sticks with me is when, at the beginning of her rehab program she, the first lady of the United States, is handed a bucket and a brush and told to scrub the toilet. She is at first appalled, but quickly comes to see the wisdom in it.

None of us is too good or too important to scrub a toilet. Being willing to acknowledge that such work is beneath no human being is an enormous step toward change — not just for an alcoholic, but for anyone living under the hypnotic misimpressions that entitlement tends to foment in powerful people. And this is why powerful people tend more often to maintain a high functioning drinking habit, or simply dry themselves out without changing. And dry people are very, very angry people.

I know that I am in no position to diagnose Judge Kavanaugh. I don’t know the nuances of his private life. It would be unfair to suggest that my feelings are anything more than just that, feelings. But when I tweeted about how much Kavanaugh reminded me of my own alcoholic father, in came a deluge of replies and retweets and likes from thousands of men and women who had also spent their childhoods tiptoeing around lest they wake the beast. I was far from alone in naming what I was seeing, and the tone of relief and gratitude in the replies I was getting told me that I was not way off the mark in what I had recognized.

We need cool humility, not rage and partisanship

I can’t and won’t tell you that Brett Kavanaugh is an alcoholic. Or even a high-functioning drunk. Or a dry drunk. Even if I did, I would insist there is no shame in it anyway.

Alcoholism is not disqualifying. But Judge Kavanaugh’s rage on the day of that hearing sure resembled my father’s when his power and entitlement felt threatened. It was a rage that went well past what was appropriate for a man seeking one of the most coveted jobs on earth.

There’s a reason we all know the expression “sober as a judge,” not “dry as a judge.” We all — liberal or conservative or anything in between — hope for dispassion, cool-headedness, enough humility to listen, a lack of susceptibility to personal preconceptions, and enough even-handedness to foster a climate of justice.

It was Kavanaugh’s rage that set me and so many others off. And it was his rage that was disqualifying.

Abigail Disney is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and a philanthropist. Follow her on Twitter @AbigailDisney