As women, we could not help but be moved by the accounts of Ford and Ramirez, and understand why they made such a lasting impact. As reporters, we had a responsibility to test those predilections. We had to offer Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt, venturing to empathize with his suffering if he were falsely accused.

As mothers of daughters, we were prone to believe and support the women who spoke up. As mothers of sons, we had to imagine what it would be like if the men we loved were wrongly charged with these offenses.

As people, our gut reaction was that the allegations of Ford and Ramirez from the past rang true. As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.

Ultimately, we combined our notebooks with our common sense and came to believe an utterly human narrative: that Ford and Ramirez were mistreated by Kavanaugh when he was a teenager, and that Kavanaugh over the next 35 years became a better person.

We come to this complicated, seemingly contradictory, and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion based on the facts as we found them.

Unproven as it is, we found that the account of Christine Blasey Ford—to use Martha’s phrase—“rings true.” Ford’s social circle overlapped with that of Kavanaugh as a high-school student. She dated his good friend Chris Garrett. Her good friend Leland Keyser dated Mark Judge. Judge and Kavanaugh, whom Ford recalled being together in the room where she was allegedly assaulted, were close friends. They were often seen together at parties, and their tendency to drink beer, sometimes to excess, was well known.

None of that means that Ford was, in fact, assaulted by Kavanaugh. But it does mean that she has a baseline level of credibility as an accuser.

Her credibility is affirmed in other ways, too. We have seen no evidence of Ford fabricating stories, either recently or historically. Multiple people attest to her honesty. Last August, she passed a polygraph test focused on her Kavanaugh memories. Her former boyfriend Brian Merrick said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he hadn’t known of her fear of flying or of tight spaces when they dated in the 1990s, raising questions for Republicans about the anxiety issues Ford has attributed in part to the alleged assault. But Merrick also said in the affidavit and in a later interview that he has never doubted Ford’s truthfulness.

Experts on memory and sex crimes say that Ford’s spotty recollections of the alleged assault are in line with those of a typical victim: clear on the basic elements of the violation and its perpetrator (especially given that, in this case, that person was alleged to be an acquaintance), and hazy on ancillary elements like the exact location and the transportation that got her there and back. Victims also often keep their experiences to themselves.