Asked at Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing if the sexual assault she experienced as a teenager could be a case of mistaken identity, Christine Blasey Ford said, “absolutely not.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), top Democrat on the committee, asked Ford how she knew that it was Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh who covered her mouth to silence her while trying to remove her clothing at a high school gathering.
“The same way I’m sure I’m talking to you right now,” Ford, a psychologist, said. “Basic memory functions. And also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus so the trauma-related experience is locked there whereas other details kind of drift.”
Republicans, including conservative activist Ed Whelan, have postulated that a Kavanaugh lookalike could have committed the assault. Two men also went to the committee to claim that they, not Kavanaugh, were the ones who assaulted Ford.
