Professor who accused the supreme court nominee of sexual assault has been forced out of her home by threats, lawyers say

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Before she chose to go public with her story, Christine Blasey Ford was best known as a university professor, who lived in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and two teenage sons.

Now, the woman who has accused the supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has been forced out of her home by threats and harassment, her lawyers say.

Ford has seen her life “turned upside down” and has effectively gone into hiding after going public with allegations that Kavanaugh assaulted her in the 1980s when they were both teenagers, according to her attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks.

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“In the 36 hours since her name became public, Dr Ford has received a stunning amount of support from her community and from fellow citizens across our country. At the same time, however, her worst fears have materialized. She has been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats. As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home,” they wrote in a letter to the Senate judiciary committee chairman, Chuck Grassley.

“Her email has been hacked, and she has been impersonated online.”

Ford, 51, is a professor of psychology and a statistician at Palo Alto University who also teaches at Stanford.

She went public with an interview in the Washington Post on Sunday, saying that at a party in Maryland in the 1980s, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes while putting his hand over her mouth to stop her screams.

“Since that time, she has been dealing with hate mail, harassment, death threats. So she’s been spending her time trying to figure out how to put her life back together, how to protect herself and her family,” Banks told CNN on Tuesday night.

Play Video 1:40 Lawyer for Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault accuser speaks out – video

“She has been deflecting death threats and harassment and trying to care for her family and determine where they are going to sleep at night.”

Still, the attorney said Ford does not regret bringing the allegation, which has put Kavanaugh’s confirmation process for the supreme court in doubt.

“I think that she felt strongly that this was the right thing to do. She had to weigh the risks to herself and her family in doing so. And so, I think she feels that it was her civic duty to come forward,” Banks said. “She’s under a tremendous amount of pressure right now and is going to work to try to put her life back together and move forward.”

A Twitter account affiliated with the far right posted Ford’s address on Tuesday morning, calling for “peaceful protests” at her home and labeling her allegation a “hoax” by the “deranged left”, according to the Post. Another account posted an overhead photo of her home.

“No one believes you,” read one message Ford received, a source close to her told the newspaper. “Karma is a [expletive] and it will be visiting you very very soon.”

“From what I’ve heard, you have six months to live, you disgusting slime,” another message said, according to the New York Times.

Neighbors told ABC7 News that Ford’s sons had also received death threats.

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Ford grew up in Montgomery county, Maryland, where she crossed paths with Kavanaugh, and attended high school at Holton-Arms, a private girls school.

Nearly 600 women who attended the school have written a letter of support for Ford, published on Tuesday.

Ford moved to Silicon Valley, where friends and colleagues described her as an honest and rigorous academic.

Helena Chmura Kraemer, a professor emeritus at Stanford who has worked closely with Ford, told the Mercury News she has worked on topics including depression in young adults and post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and specializes in designing statistical models to accurately reflect data from academic research.

“We’re the people who look at the data and say: ‘That’s not what the data is saying,’” she said. “In some ways, she’s a professional truth teller.”