:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61636131/trump_mock.0.jpg)
President Donald Trump mocked a woman in front of an audience of thousands for coming forward to report sexual assault.
At a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, on Tuesday night, Trump made fun of Christine Blasey Ford, who testified at a hearing last week that Brett Kavanaugh, now a nominee to the Supreme Court, sexually assaulted her when they were in high school in the 1980s.
“What neighborhood was it? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it — I don’t know. But I had one beer, that’s the only thing I remember,” he said, imitating Ford’s testimony at the hearing as his audience laughed and cheered.
BREAKING: President Trump mocks Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, during a rally in Mississippi. https://t.co/yjrqDceYv6 pic.twitter.com/iv22aHRwhn
— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 3, 2018
Trump’s comments quickly made headlines — he had encouraged not just those in attendance at the rally, but in effect the entire nation, to make light of Ford’s testimony.
The moment was a distressingly perfect example of the hazards facing people who choose to speak out about sexual assault. Survivors who are open about their experiences face public shaming, victim-blaming, and disbelief, often based on widespread misunderstanding of memory and trauma.
Nowhere has this been more evident, recently, than in the responses to the allegations against Kavanaugh made by Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick, all of which he has denied. And now, the president himself has added to the obstacles survivors face with the message, delivered loud and clear, that their accounts are worthy of ridicule.
Trump — and Senate Republicans — are perpetuating myths about sexual assault
At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Ford testified that she was “100 percent” sure that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. She said she remembered going up “a narrow set of stairs” to use the bathroom while at a small gathering of people, and being pushed from behind into a bedroom. Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge entered the room behind her, she said, and locked the door — then Kavanaugh climbed on top of her. “I believed he was going to rape me,” she said.
What Ford remembers most, she said, is that Kavanaugh and Judge were laughing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” She did not recall the exact date of the party, or who drove her there or home.
In making fun of Ford’s testimony, Trump questioned why she couldn’t remember certain details. But, as Vox’s Brian Resnick has written, people often forget some details of a traumatic event — and that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
“One of the most replicated findings in the emotion and memory literature is that people tend to remember central features of events that were important to them,” Linda Levine, who studies the intersection of memory and emotion at the University of California Irvine, told Resnick. “They make more errors in remembering peripheral details that were less important to them.”
As Resnick notes, people do misremember things. But there’s a difference between carefully investigating Ford’s account — a process she has welcomed — and mocking her for lapses in memory that are completely normal.
She’s not the only one of Kavanaugh’s accusers to face public ridicule and disbelief, stoked by people at the highest levels of the US government. On Tuesday, the same day Trump made his comments about Ford, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a statement by a man who said he had dated Julie Swetnick in 1993.
Swetnick has said in an affidavit released last week that she was at parties where Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge plotted to drug girls and “gang rape” them. She says Judge and Kavanaugh were present at a party where she was raped, but that she cannot be sure if they participated. Swetnick’s account has been the focus of scrutiny since news emerged of her previous legal troubles, including a restraining order filed against her by an ex-boyfriend in 2001 (the case was dismissed less than two weeks later).
But on Tuesday, Elise Viebeck of the Washington Post reports, Republicans took that scrutiny a step further when they released a statement by Dennis Ketterer, a TV meteorologist who says that when he and Swetnick dated, she told him she enjoyed group sex and had first engaged in it in high school. Ketterer said that Swetnick had never mentioned Kavanaugh or a history of sexual assault to him. He said they dated for a “couple of weeks.”
Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee posted the statement on their website and released it to journalists — a highly unusual step, Viebeck notes, for “a statement that included such explicit and unconfirmed details about a member of the public.”
Swetnick’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called the statement “bogus and outrageous.”
“At the same time the committee refuses to provide documents, they don’t hesitate to provide this piece of garbage,” he told the Post.
If senators have questions about Swetnick’s credibility, that’s an appropriate subject for the FBI investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh.
But whether or not someone enjoys group sex has no bearing on whether that person was raped — legislators in many states have recognized that someone’s sexual history is not relevant to their testimony of sexual assault, and have passed rape shield laws to protect complainants from pointless scrutiny into their sexual past. Those laws only apply in court, however, not in whether Senate Republicans can disclose information that comes to them.
It’s also worth noting that Swetnick might not have told someone she dated for a “couple of weeks” everything about her past. There’s no reason to think she would have disclosed her allegations against Kavanaugh to him, especially given how difficult it can be for survivors to talk about their experiences.
Swetnick’s account of her own history certainly carries more weight than that of someone who only knew her for a short time. But in America today, the word of a woman is still treated as less valuable than the word of a man, even if the subject in question is the woman’s life.
The shaming of Ford and Swetnick could harm other survivors
Most survivors of sexual assault already choose not to report what happened to them. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, drawing on federal data, reports that just 310 of every 1,000 rapes are reported to police.
“Part of this is the result of sexual assault victims fearing the repercussions of speaking out,” Vox’s German Lopez writes, “the shaming, stigma, and retaliation, not to mention the difficulty of potentially reliving a traumatic event over and over in the course of an investigation.”
Ford, Ramirez, and Swetnick have already faced shaming, stigma, and retaliation for coming forward with allegations against Kavanaugh — Ford and her family were forced to leave their home because of death threats. And now, that stigma is coming, not just from ordinary people or from the media, but from our country’s leaders.
With his comments about Christine Ford at his rally, Trump is not just sending the message that survivors with imperfect memories should be disbelieved. He’s sending the message that they deserve to be actively mocked. And while it was already difficult for Americans, especially women, to speak openly about their experiences with sexual assault, it will become even more difficult now that the president of the United States has officially sanctioned their public humiliation.
When our president and senators participate in the shaming of people who come forward as survivors — when they lead this shaming — survivors everywhere learn that it’s not safe to speak up. If they finally do get the courage to speak, years later, then the same leaders can ask, as they asked of Ford, “Why didn’t she come forward sooner?” And the cycle begins again.
This is how rape culture perpetuates itself. Women stay silent, men stay in power, and the few with the courage to speak up are soon drowned out by a chorus of laughter.
