Brett Kavanaugh and the Third Explanation

June 30, 2022

A coin toss only has two outcomes: heads or tails. But every coin has a third side: the edge.

During Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Senate confirmation to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, he shockingly stood accused of sexual assault by Ms. Christine Blasey-Ford, a research psychologist and university professor. The assault, as recounted by Blasey-Ford during her sworn testimony in congressional chambers, had occurred four decades earlier during a lightly attended house party one night, when her and Kavanaugh were both high school students. She claimed that Kavanaugh, along with a second boy, first pushed her into a bedroom and then onto a bed, where a “very inebriated” Kavanaugh forcibly held her down as he groped her. When she tried to scream, she testified, Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand, at which point she feared she might suffocate. It was only when the other boy happened to jump onto the bed (a second time) that both Blasey-Ford and Kavanaugh fell to the floor, at which point she broke free and escaped into a nearby bathroom, where she locked the door. According to Blasey-Ford, both boys then walked down a nearby flight of stairs, “laughing and… pinballing off the walls on the way down.”

Watching her emotional testimony, it was hard not to believe Blasey-Ford’s stirring account. Indeed, it was painfully clear she was telling the truth… as she saw it.

Kavanaugh, in response afterwards, immediately launched into a fiery self-defense. Betraying a boyish rage that seemed uncouth for a soon-to-be Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh nevertheless still managed to convincingly, and categorically, deny Blasey-Ford’s allegations. Watching his emotional testimony, it was hard not to believe Kavanaugh’s denials.

With both accounts at seeming loggerheads, and with the purported events taking place in the long-since past with no evidence or eyewitnesses to support Blasey-Ford’s allegations, the situation came down as either/or, heads or tails. One of them, therefore, had to be lying.

Yet that was never the case at all.

Within Blasey-Ford’s testimony there were subtle clues pointing to a third explanation. The first clue wasn’t in Blasey-Ford’s testimony at all; it was her emotional state. “I am terrified,” she declared near the start of her opening statement, suggesting an anxiety far beyond the typical nervousness of a “normal” individual in similar circumstances. Then, at other points during her testimony, she gave good reason to suspect a distinct emotional fragility, as she repeatedly mentioned “fear” or “fears” or of being “terrified,” as if all throughout her life Blasey-Ford struggled with emotional containment. Indeed, during the hearing itself she seemed at times to be on the verge of mentally collapsing to the floor, as if the emotional strain was almost too much to bear. This all suggested an acute psychological sensitivity.

The second clue was the disparity of detail. While Blasey-Ford could not state exactly where the event took place nor when, nor how she got there and how she got home, she could instead provide a wealth of peculiar details of the assault itself. As a trained psychologist, Blasey-Ford should’ve been able to speak at length about this disparity, though she did not. But that’s not to suggest she was deliberately trying to bolster her case by avoiding the various weaknesses in her story, which she did address. Rather, it was more that she herself should’ve recognized long ago that her memory of the alleged event clearly had major gaps.

 The third and most important clue were all those odd details themselves. In fact, they weren’t just odd, they were descriptively odd. Nearly all of them had a dream-like quality or amusement park-like feel, as if she’d gotten lost in the House of Mirrors or the Funhouse during a nightmare and went to Congress to relay the details. She recalled “narrow” or “very narrow” stairs, locked doors, music being turned up louder, feelings of compression and suffocation and paralysis, the boys “drunkenly laughing,” the other boy jumping onto the bed (twice) as if he were an ape, bodies toppling to the floor, the two boys laughing and “pinballing” off stairwell walls. All these unusual details became so prominent that it grew apparent that Blasey-Ford wasn’t recounting an event that had actually happened. She was instead retelling scenes and sensations from a nightmare—a nightmare she eventually came to believe as real.

While seemingly strange, this phenomenon isn’t all that uncommon. When I was a teenager, I had a series of vivid dreams about my motorcycle. Just after one particularly intense dream, I even thought to go check on it inside the shed. But when I opened the shed door, I didn’t find any motorcycle inside. Because I didn’t have a motorcycle. In fact, I’ve never had a motorcycle. Yet for a short while I was firmly convinced I had a motorcycle.

Similar in process but more extreme in belief, many people firmly believe that they’ve been victims of some kind of wild but implausible trauma. Alien abduction is the classic case. Ordinarily, such abductees believe that aliens have come during the night to whisk them off while they’re asleep, either for examination or experimentation. For these “victims,” these episodes are so vivid that, rather than accept the mundane reality of having merely suffered a nightmare, they instead remain fully convinced aliens from outer space have traveled to Earth to study them. This as well hints at the mind’s susceptibility to the power of suggestion, as abductee accounts typically manifest when alien themes emerge in popular culture. Similarly, other forms of implausible trauma also manifest when relevant themes emerge: satanic ritual abuse during the occult trend in music and movies during the 1980’s; the torrent of child sexual abuse allegations that emerged from now-debunked regression therapy. Indeed, Michael Shermer, noted skeptic and author of Why People Believe Weird Things, himself admits to having temporarily believed in an implausible delusion during an extreme-stress episode. While competing in a bicycling marathon, at one point he became 100% convinced that his “support crew were aliens from another planet and that they were going to kill me.” Shermer would later blame the origin of this short-term belief on the 1960’s tv show, The Invaders.

In Blasey-Ford’s case, from her testimony it appears she eventually came to believe in a confabulation: a memory gap-filling amalgam of real events with fictional details believed true. So what really happened four decades ago at a lightly attended house party one night was that Christine Blasey-Ford and Brett Kavanaugh both showed up, but that no attack nor attempted rape ever occurred. Then, at some point later on, Blasey-Ford suffered a nightmare about being attacked. Eventually, after years of emotional stress, Blasey-Ford’s own brain neatly coalesced this mix of real events and unreal dreams into a bedrock belief.

Is it so hard to accept that Blasey-Ford believes in an erroneous mix of dream and reality? Considering her obvious emotional fragility, Kavanaugh’s vehement and convincing denials, the fact that the human brain is capable of fooling itself, and the lack of key details and evidence in Blasey-Ford’s account, her mistaken belief is the only plausible explanation.

In October 2024, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released “Unworthy of Reliance,” a 32-page report detailing the FBI’s supplemental background investigations stemming from Blasey-Ford’s allegations. Rather than detailing the results of these investigations, Senator Whitehouse instead derides the process underlying the FBI’s subsequent efforts. Despite the FBI ultimately interviewing ten witnesses, Whitehouse fails to address which witnesses were interviewed and just how corroboratory their testimony proved to be. Instead, Whitehouse hypocritically lambastes—often in triplicate—the Trump White House for not allowing the FBI to engage in a full-fledged fishing expedition, when at the outset the Senate Judiciary Committee agreed, on a bipartisan basis, to both limit the scope of the investigation and to give the FBI a mere seven days to complete its work.