Democrats plan at Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to use the high school yearbooks of embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, which they say imply he and his prep school pals regularly got drunk and boasted of sexual conquests, to discredit what they call his “choir boy defense” against sex-assault charges leveled by Christine Blasey Ford.
But Ford, whose story suffers from significant gaps in her memory, wasn’t exactly a choir girl. In fact, congressional sources say her own yearbooks, among other things, present a potential issue for her and her character, and Republicans are prepared to cite them in questioning her story through the female sex-crimes expert they’ve hired.
A committee staffer told RealClearInvestigations, “We have her yearbooks,” which had been mysteriously scrubbed from the Web prior to Ford coming out with her allegations. “She will not make a good witness."
The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noted that the annual class books feature a photo of an underage Ford attending at least one party, alongside a caption boasting of girls passing out from binge drinking. Her yearbooks also openly reference sexually promiscuous behavior by the girls, including targeting boys at Kavanaugh’s alma mater, Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in the affluent Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. Ford attended neighboring Holton-Arms School, an all-girls academy.
While congressional sources say Ford's yearbooks could be an exhibit at the hearing, longtime Capitol Hill watchers caution that going after her reputation could backfire on Republicans.
“That’s a minefield, especially given the #MeToo movement,” one said.
A spokesman for Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley’s office declined to comment.
Other evidence indicates Ford, a popular cheerleader at the time, was immersed in an alcohol-fueled party culture and no stranger to “keg parties” in the D.C. area — or the "bar scene" along the Maryland and Delaware coast. In fact, Ford was known as a "party girl” on the Delaware shore during summer breaks, another source with direct knowledge of the congressional investigation said.
One report, moreover, recounts how Ford once got caught in "a romantic triangle" at Dewey Beach that ended with the two men getting into a fistfight over her.
At Holton-Arms, the source added, she was known by classmates, and even some parents, by a sexually derogatory nickname playing off her maiden name Blasey, suggesting she was promiscuous.
“She was not the wholesome Catholic girl they’re trying to portray her as,” the source said, making her claims of victimization at the hands of Kavanaugh "harder to believe."
Ford and her attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But they have cast a much different narrative, suggesting Kavanaugh and other boys from Georgetown Prep aggressively targeted Ford and other reluctant girls from her school while plying them with alcohol. Specifically, Ford alleges Kavanaugh and another older boy took advantage of her at a house party somewhere in the Chevy Chase or Bethesda area of Maryland in the early 1980s.
She says she has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from the alleged attack, which she says involved an inebriated Kavanaugh forcefully groping her on a bed over her clothes while clapping his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming for help. She added that she has had to seek therapy and other medical treatment to deal with “panic attacks” and “anxiety” from the incident, which she did not report to authorities.
Ford cannot remember key details from that night, including the location of the house or the date of the party, while claiming to have consumed just “one beer” there. She says she told no one about the “assault” at the time, not even her close girlfriend, who she says was with her at the party, or her mother.
Ford claims the reason she didn’t tell her parents about almost being “raped" is that she didn’t want to get "in trouble" for drinking at a party.
“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,” she said.
But classmates said the former cheerleader, who was known as “Chrissy," was part of the underage drinking tradition that was no secret among Maryland prep schools in the early 1980s, when the drinking age was 18.
Her own school yearbooks (in which parents took out paid ads) celebrated “boys [and] beer” and pictured beer bottles and beer cans and scenes of boys and girls drinking at parties. One published a photo of Ford and other girls at a Halloween party alongside a caption boasting of “pass[ing] out” after playing “Quarters” and other binge-drinking games. Her father, Ralph Blasey, was president of the local country club.
Neither her parents nor her two siblings have come out to voice support for Ford, and they did not sign a family letter of support for her and her claims circulated by her husband.
The Holton-Arms yearbooks in question, which cover her sophomore, junior and senior years, are titled "Scribe ’82," "Scribe ’83" and "Scribe ’84."
Among other things, the annual books objectified men and even talked about hiring male strippers, including one in a “gold G-string," for sweet 16 parties. They also featured the young Holton coeds dressed as Playboy bunnies and posing seductively atop desks, school-uniform skirts hiked up.
One section, “While the Parents Were Out,” talked about partying with boys at area house parties where kids got so drunk they “ruined" their parents' “heirloom Persian rugs” with vomit.
“The tenth grade taught us how to party,” the girls bragged in another section. And, “Loss of consciousness is often an integral part of the party scene.”
A caption on another page talked about girls having “their choice of men” at the neighboring boys schools, including Georgetown Prep: “No longer confining ourselves to the walls of Landon and Prep, we plunged into the waters of St. John and Gonzaga with much success."
Jay Martin, who went to school in the area at the time, asserted that Holton-Arms girls back in the 1980s were hardly innocent “victims" of Georgetown Prep boys.
“I am her age,” he said of Ford. “I went to high school next to Prep and knew lots of Holton-Arms girls. This is pure false memory syndrome.”
Added Martin: “One of my best women friends had Kavanaugh ask her out [and] she said he was ‘one of the nice ones.’ His mom was a judge. I mean, seriously?”
