Last Thursday, millions of Americans watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about one night in high school, when she alleges that current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during a house party.

For the approximately 20 percent of Americans who are survivors of sexual assault, Dr. Ford’s testimony resonated on a deeply personal level. But the pool of people who could truly relate to what Dr. Ford endured last week — testifying about the worst day of their life in front the Senate and a television audience of millions — is infinitesimally small.

Throughout the past 18 months, several Congressional committees — including the same Senate Judiciary Committee that questioned Kavanaugh last week — have been investigating sexual abuse within Olympic sports, including how USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University enabled the sexual predation by former doctor Larry Nassar for decades. The latest hearing is taking place on Wednesday, with three Olympic governing bodies testifying in front of the Senate about sexual abuse in their sports, all while the Kavanaugh vote is still pending.

For the handful of survivors who have already testified in front of Congress and watched them work together in a bipartisan nature to attempt to hold institutions accountable, witnessing the treatment of Dr. Ford by some of these same lawmakers has been extremely confusing, deflating, and even enraging.


In March 2017, Jessica Howard, a three-time national champion in rhythmic gymnastics, testified in front of the Judiciary Committee about Nassar’s abuse. Like Dr. Ford, she was 15 years old when she was first assaulted. Like Dr. Ford, she remembers many explicit details about the sexual assault, but her memory also has some gaping holes — for example, she can’t remember how she got to and from the Karolyi Ranch, where the abuse occurred. Dr. Ford told the committee she too couldn’t remember how she got home from the party the night she was attacked, an answer to which several Republican lawmakers scoffed.

“Watching on Thursday, it did feel very personal,” Howard told ThinkProgress this week. She vividly remembers sitting in a Senate hearing room, feeling almost paralyzed by the political power she was facing, and by the pressure she felt to accurately relay every detail she could remember the assaults that started almost 20 years ago.

“If they had told me what it would have been like before I did it, I don’t know if I would have been able to do it,” Howard said.

She knew her words had to not only accurately reflect her story, but it had to accurately reflect her story in a way that would hopefully change things — that would inspire Congress to pass a bill to help protect child athletes.

“It was very simple. But it didn’t feel simple in the moment,” she said. “It felt like an overwhelming, almost impossible task to relay that message to people of that stature.”


Howard, at least, was surrounded by other sister survivors, and faced a committee that was working on bipartisan terms at the time. So she simply can’t fathom how much harder it must have been for Dr. Ford, who was so brazenly caught in a game of partisan warfare.

“I mean that’s just beyond comprehension,” Howard said. “I’m amazed by her.”

Morgan McCaul, an 18-year-old fellow Nassar survivor, is equally in awe of Dr. Ford. While McCaul didn’t testify in front of the judiciary committee like Howard, she has attended other Senate hearings related to the Nassar case, and testified in front of the Michigan House of Representatives — a contentious affair, in which legislators chastised her for not knowing minute details of criminal law, even though she was there to fight for an expansion of civil laws.

“It compounds that feeling of helplessness and connection with Dr. Ford to have been in that room and felt that hostile energy,” said McCaul, who was one of Nassar’s last victims before the Indianapolis Star investigation into Nassar’s abuse was published in 2016.

“My case was the consequence of reports not being taken seriously, so to see that same rhetoric of not believing survivors — I’m the living, breathing result of people not taking action,” McCaul said. “It’s hard to swallow.”

McCaul has been closely following the proceedings, and is terrified that despite Dr. Ford’s bravery, some of the very senators who are supposed to be fighting on behalf of her and her sister survivors are going to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, anyway. That’s an incredibly difficult reality for her to process.

“That would invalidate my identity as a survivor,” McCaul said. “It is baffling on a moral level.”

In early 2018, Congress passed the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act, a bill which makes members of amateur sports organizations (including Olympic sports) mandatory reporters of sexual abuse, and requires all organizations to implement standard protections for athletes. This bill was the direct result of the testimony by Howard and her fellow survivors.


This is why it’s so hard for her to understand how the same Senators that supported that bill are treating another survivor’s story with such disdain.

“I know with my experience with that committee, they treated us with respect and deference, and just they knew what happened to us was wrong, plain and simple,” Howard said.

“So I just can’t make myself believe these guys don’t care.”

McCaul, however, is less surprised by what is currently happening in Congress. Because of her experience with Michigan lawmakers, she has a more jaded view of the system overall, and she knows that what little justice Nassar survivors have extracted in the last year is still very much the exception, not the rule.

“I think we got really fortunate because [the Protecting Young Victims Act] did pass, and the way that they have held [Olympic institutions] accountable has been promising. But our situation is an anomaly in a lot of ways,” McCaul said.

“We need to continue pressing for that treatment for all survivors who come forward.”