What I didn't tell them were the details of my story. That it happened in Peru. My friend and I were staying at a small guest house in a surfing town on the northern coast. We'd been there for a few days, enough time to become friendly with the owner, his wife, and their small child. So when I ducked into our room one afternoon to get something -- what, I can't remember -- and found that man suddenly in the room with me, I was taken off guard. He quickly pinned me against a wall, one hand on my breast, the other clutching the machete he had been using just minutes before to hack away at overgrown shrubs around the property. He told me that my eyes were the color of the sea. He pushed his hips against mine. Without thinking, I used all of my strength to shove him away. The rest is a blur. I know that somehow I ran from the room and found my friend, but I don't remember how we left, who packed my things, or how we got to the bus that would take us from that town. All those details are gone. His face, his smell, and that machete are not.
Will It Matter?
As the Kavanaugh hearings went on, more and more students became invested in watching them. Some asked to listen on headphones while we worked, some just wanted to talk about what they'd heard. As each class began, I addressed the fact that I'd been crying all day -- no point in pretending, teenagers notice everything -- and explained why. As I talked, I noted certain students around the room crumpling. Bodies pulled in on themselves, heads lowered. Some students shyly wiped away tears. A few of them asked to leave the room to get some air.
One student, bubbly and cheerful as she entered, became despondent when her peers told her about what was happening in Washington. Unable to listen to the descriptions of the hearing, she swiveled so that her body was facing away from the circle and put her head down on a table. I waited for a quiet moment to sit down next to her. Without any pretense and in a no-nonsense monotone, she informed me that she was just one of a group of girls who had been assaulted by a senior boy the previous year. She was unwilling to tell her parents, fearful that they'd never let her out of the house alone again. While I was sitting with her, our school security officer came into the classroom to get her so she could be interviewed by someone already investigating the case. The timing was impeccable.
The hardest part of that day wasn't sharing my story or opening up to groups of teenagers about the intimate details of my past. It was listening as my students argued about whether or not Dr. Ford's testimony would even matter. In their comments, I heard echoes of my own internal struggle. The experience of watching Anita Hill being picked apart and ultimately dismissed by those male senators in front of the entire nation had a powerful effect on my burgeoning seventh-grade sense of how to conduct myself as a woman: that even though I now had a name for what I, too, might experience -- sexual harassment -- if I called that thing out or made too much of a fuss, I would be the one who paid the price.
One of my students came up to me after class and told me that, though her stepbrother had assaulted her when she was younger, no one in her family believed her. She assured me that she was fine now because she had moved away and didn't have to see him anymore. As she was telling me this, I couldn't help imagining her, 10 or 20 years down the line, reflecting with startled pain on the way her own family dismissed her, the way the people charged with her love and care wouldn't or couldn't believe her.
Those Laughing Faces
At a rally in Mississippi on October 2nd, President Trump made a point of mocking Dr. Ford's testimony, joking about whether or not she had really consumed only one beer and highlighting her inability to remember certain details of the night she claimed that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her. What fascinated me was not the obvious cruelty of his series of low blows, but the beaming smiles and laughter of the men and women in that crowd of supporters in Southhaven, Mississippi.
I couldn't help but wonder how many of them, beneath that veneer of laughter, had felt a twinge of something familiar in the pit of their stomach as they listened to Ford's testimony. How many of the men in that crowd had given a passing thought to that one beer-soaked night in high school they barely remembered, the one that might have been the single most painful night of someone else's life? How many of those laughing women were secretly reminded of something painful buried deep in their own pasts? How many of them would not or could not dredge up experiences long suppressed, fearful of the personal toll that such a reckoning might take? How many of them would be shocked to know about assaults suffered by their own children?
I wish I could say that, while the hearings consumed the nation, I stood in front of my students and made powerful speeches about moving forward with hope and courage, about telling the truth and respecting one another. I did try, but I have no faith that I did a particularly good job of it.
Instead, in a sometimes halting, sometimes teary voice I talked about consent, about kindness, about how compassion and empathy can be transformative. I told them that I would listen, even when it seemed like no one else would. I believed what I was saying and yet there was still that enormous emotional weight in my chest, the weight of Anita Hill's legacy, of Dr. Ford's testimony, of a lifetime of unwanted encounters, of the rapes and attempted rapes of loved ones and friends, of the stories my students shared with me during the hearings, as well as in the years that preceded them. It was a weight that made it hard to speak, let alone lead my students. In the end, I ran out of words and fell back on silence.
Ultimately, of course, Christine Blasey Ford's testimony, though deemed credible by those on both sides of the political aisle, didn't alter the course of Judge Kavanaugh's trajectory. He will sit on that hallowed bench, the residue of those hearings fading into an inconvenient stain on the CV of an otherwise charmed life. For those of us still struggling to move forward, the memory of the hearings, and all it represented, will be seared, as Dr. Ford might have put it, into the hippocampus, never to fade.
Belle Chesler, a TomDispatch regular, is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Copyright 2018 Belle Chesler
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