Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
If you, like me, were forced to read (or pretend to read) The Great Gatsby in high school, there’s a good chance you or someone you know has complained about the unpleasantness of the book’s characters. The critic Kathryn Schulz offers a representative example, writing in a 2013 article for New York magazine: “None of [The Great Gatsby’s] characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable.”
With the sole exception of Christine Blasey Ford, the same can be said about the characters we’ve met in the uproar that’s taken place in the past few weeks around the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Start with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. The sexual assault allegations first came to the public eye thanks to her office’s announcement on Sept. 13 — after Kavanaugh’s scheduled hearings had ended — that she had a letter detailing unspecified accusations against Judge Kavanaugh that she had turned over to law enforcement. The next day, Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer detailed the allegations in The New Yorker; two days later, Ford revealed herself as Kavanaugh’s accuser.
Why did Ford choose to come forward when so many abuse victims do not? We don’t need to guess. She told us in testimony: “I had resigned myself to remaining quiet … Once the press started reporting on the existence of the letter I had sent to Senator Feinstein, I faced mounting pressure. Reporters appeared at my home and at my workplace, demanding information about the letter in the presence of my graduate students. They called my bosses and co-workers, and left me many messages, making it clear that my name would inevitably be released to the media.”
Look carefully at what Ford has said here: She elected to remain silent to avoid the consequences for herself and her family of going public — and yet Feinstein revealed the existence of the letter anyway, forcing her to go public. Worse, she did this after explicitly promising not to. Here’s Ford again: “In a letter dated August 31st, Senator Feinstein wrote that she would not share the letter without my explicit consent, and I appreciated this commitment. Sexual assault victims should be able to decide for themselves when and whether their private experience is made public.”
That Feinstein would break a promise in a last-ditch effort to stop a judicial nominee who is likely to get through anyway speaks volumes about her character, and none of what it says is good. This is not to mention that she announced the allegations after the confirmation hearings had concluded and hid the letter’s existence from Senate Republicans, thereby turning horrifying sexual assault charges into a political weapon.
It makes sense that a Democratic lawmaker would bring up charges against a Republican nominee, and we should not treat the charges as political claims. Nevertheless, Feinstein’s treatment of these charges has made it much more likely that people will read the charges as political, whether they should or not, thereby making it harder for any sort of justice to actually be obtained.
There is, of course, Kavanaugh himself, who may have done more to damage his credibility than Ford could ever have done on her own. Judges are supposed to be people of sound mind who can handle serious debate over important issues. Yet when Kavanaugh showed up at his hearing, he had what I can only describe as a tantrum and made several claims that nobody could possibly believe.
A “devil’s triangle” is a drinking game? “Renate Alumnius” refers to just being friends with a woman named Renate? Despite the huge number of his associates who recall him being frequently drunk and belligerent, he never even blacked out once? It’s hard to see why he would even bother with lies like these, except to rub it in the face of ordinary Americans that the powerful can do anything and get away with it.
Then there’s Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, a rampant drinker and someone who seems to be enslaved to his sexuality instead of ruling it himself. There’s also Ed Whelan, the conservative figure who unleashed a galaxy-brain Twitter thread on how Dr. Ford had confused Kavanaugh with an innocent man — a man whom Whelan named and clearly accused of sexual assault.
The America that the Kavanaugh hearings have brought to light is not somewhere any of us should want to live. It is a place where those who suffer assault are victimized again and again, even by those who claim to be on their side. It is a place where truth and justice are bent entirely to political opportunism, and a place where the innocent are blamed for what they do not do while the guilty lie under oath and get away with it.
As Elizabeth Bruenig wrote in The Washington Post, it’s made us all feel like we’re back in high school: It’s ugly, it’s stupid, everything is sexual rumor, and we’re all stuck reading about these awful characters. But we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the stupid, teenaged past.
John-Paul Teti is a senior computer science major. He can be reached at jp@jpteti.com.
