Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Monday, October 01, 2018

Rachel Mitchell's Analysis

As posted by the Washington Post. Interesting parts:
Dr. Ford has struggled to identify Judge Kavanaugh as the assailant by name.

• No name was given in her 2012 marriage therapy notes.
• No name was given in her 2013 individual therapy notes.
• Dr. Ford’s husband claims to recall that she identified Judge Kavanaugh by name in 2012. At that point, Judge Kavanaugh’s name was widely reported in the press as a potential Supreme Court nominee if Governor Romney won the presidential election.

When speaking with her husband, Dr. Ford changed her description of the incident to become less specific.

• Dr. Ford testified that she told her husband about a “sexual assault” before they were married.
• But she told the Washington Post that she informed her husband that she was the victim of “physical abuse” at the beginning of their marriage.
• She testified that, both times, she was referring to the same incident.

This bit is interesting since not all physical abuse is sexual assault.
Perhaps most importantly, she does not remember how she got from the party back to her house.

o Her inability to remember this detail raises significant questions.
o She told the Washington Post that the party took place near the Columbia Country Club. The Club is more than 7 miles from her childhood home as the crow flies, and she testified that it was a roughly 20-minute drive from her childhood home.
o She also agreed for the first time in her testimony that she was driven somewhere that night, either to the party or from the party or both.

This is actually quite significant. "As the crow flies" means that the club is 7 miles if you drew a straight line from her home to the club. Since that's not possible, the 20-minute drive is significant. Assuming that the vehicle could not go over 35 MPH due to local street speed limits (something we can find out). 35mph/1/3hour= 10.5 miles. By foot, with the average person walking 3MPH, that's a 3-hour walk. Certainly, if she had walked home she would have remembered that long walk. Furthermore; I'm quite certain that her parents (if home) would have wondered why their 15 YO daughter arrived home well after midnight. Hence the testimony that she had been driven becomes pretty important. Who drove her home?
o But she has no memory of who drove her or when. Nor has anyone come forward to identify him or herself as the driver.

o Given that this all took place before cell phones, arranging a ride home would not have been easy. Indeed, she stated that she ran out of the house after coming downstairs and did not state that she made a phone call from the house before she did, or that she called anyone else thereafter.

Dr. Ford has not offered a consistent account of the alleged assault.

• According to her letter to Senator Feinstein, Dr. Ford heard Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge talking to other partygoers downstairs while she was hiding in the bathroom after the alleged assault. But according to her testimony, she could not hear them talking to anyone.

Dr. Ford could not remember if she was being audio- or video-recorded when she took the polygraph. And she could not remember whether the polygraph occurred the same day as her grandmother’s funeral or the day after her grandmother’s funeral. o It would also have been inappropriate to administer a polygraph to someone who was grieving.
There is a photograph of Ford taking the polygraph. The camera was in plain view of her. Also, the point about polygraphs being done while someone is grieving is one reason why polygraphs are inadmissible in court.