Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest, a special edition of the Slate Political Gab Fest for September 17th, 2018, the Kavanaugh in Crisis Edition.

I am David Plotz of Atlas Obscura. I am in Washington, D.C. Emily Bazelon of The New York Times Magazine joins me from New Haven.

How are you, Emily? I am fine. I'm so glad to talk to you about this because we already were

tweeting about it to each other. I know. It's very exciting. So we do not have John Dickerson

with us, but that's okay. He will provide calm refereeing at a distance and we'll just feel, we'll channel him. But we are coming to you, of course, on this Monday because there's so much news around the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, which is put perhaps in peril or certainly into uncertainty this week when more details came out about

an accusation of attempted rape, assault were made by a former high school friend or a high

school acquaintance of Kavanaugh's who is named Christine Blaise Ford.

I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right.

I hope I am.

She is a professor in California and she says that as a high school student in the suburbs

of Washington in the early 1980s, she was forcibly restrained by Kavanaugh and a friend

of his, Mark Judge, who's a conservative

writer, and they held her down, or Kavanaugh held her down in a room while he and Judge

were drunk and turned up music so that other people would not hear the sounds that she might

be making and attempted to remove her clothes and assault her, although they did not succeed. Cavanaugh. And put his hand over her mouth

when she tried to protest, which is like a strikingly awful detail. That is a strikingly awful

detail. And Cavanagh and Judge have both denied it. Cavanagh said today, I've never done anything like what the accuser describes to her or to anyone.

Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday.

And Ford had brought this to the attention of the committee through various intermediaries earlier, but is now, as I understand it, Emily

expressed a willingness to testify publicly about it. Right. I mean, the big thing that changed

between last week and Sunday was that Ford came forward. Previously, the accusation had been

anonymous. And when it was unanimous, it seemed impossible for the Judiciary Committee to act on it.

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