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Excerpts from Christine Blasey Ford's testimony

September 28, 2018 at 5:49AM
Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. (Michale Reynolds/Pool Photo via AP)
Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. (Michale Reynolds/Pool Photo via AP) (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

"I am here not because I want to be. I'm terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school."

"Once he was selected and it seemed like he was popular and it was a sure vote, I was calculating daily the risk/benefit for me of coming forward, and wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway and that I would just be personally annihilated."

"Apart from the assault itself, these last couple of weeks have been the hardest of my life. I have had to relive my trauma in front of the entire world. … I have been accused of acting out of partisan political motives. … I am a fiercely independent person and I am no one's pawn."

"It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court. My responsibility is to tell the truth."

"I truly wish I could be more helpful with more detailed answers to all of the questions that have and will be asked about how I got to the party and where it took place and so forth. I don't have all the answers, and I don't remember as much as I would like to. But the details that — about that night that bring me here today are the ones I will never forget. They have been seared into my memory, and have haunted me episodically as an adult."

Asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., how she could be sure that it was Kavanaugh who had put his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming: "The same way that I'm sure that I'm talking to you right now. Basic memory function."

Asked for the most vivid memory from the night of the alleged attack: "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. Laughter — the uproarious laughter between the two. They were laughing with each other. ... I was underneath one of them while the two laughed."

"I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most."

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Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, Ford said, "were extremely inebriated. They had clearly been drinking prior [to the gathering], and the other people at the party had not."

"Brett's assault on me drastically altered my life. For a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone these details. I did not want to tell my parents that I, at age 15, was in a house without any parents present, drinking beer with boys. I convinced myself that because Brett did not rape me, I should just move on and just pretend that it didn't happen."

Asked how certain she was that her attacker was Kavanaugh: "100 percent."

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In this photo taken Monday, March 6, 2017, in San Francisco, released confidential files by The University of California of a sexual misconduct case, like this one against UC Santa Cruz Latin Studies professor Hector Perla is shown. Perla was accused of raping a student during a wine-tasting outing in June 2015. Some of the files are so heavily redacted that on many pages no words are visible. Perla is one of 113 UC employees found to have violated the system's sexual misconduct policies in rece

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