Christine Blasey Ford Says of Kavanaugh Testimony: 'I'm Absolutely Sure That I Would Do It Again'

Anita Hill (left), Christine Blasey Ford.Photo: Craig Barritt/Getty; Jim Gensheimer

Despite the death threats and nationwide attention that came in the wake of her 2018 testimony against Supreme Court JusticeBrett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford says she would “absolutely” do it all over again.

Watching Ford’s testimony, Hill, 65, says in the podcast that she felt a “spiritual solidarity that is hard to articulate.”

“The stress of the situation was such that I really had to let go of what the outcome was going to be really early on in the process,” Ford says. “I just could not get caught up in whatever the outcome was going to be.”

In 2018, Ford, a research psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University,testified under oath(while “terrified,” in her words) to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee, had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in the 1980s.

She said he allegedly pinned her down to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford And Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Testify To Senate Judiciary Committee.Melina Mara-Pool/Getty Images

Two other women accused Kavanaugh of decades-old drunken and sexual misconduct when he was a student at the private, all-boys Georgetown Prep outside Washington, D.C., and then at Yale University.

Kavanaugh, who wassworn inas a Supreme Court justice in October 2018, has forcefully denied all the allegations.

Ford’s friend Jim Gensheimer told PEOPLEin an earlier interviewthat the professor had been the target of death threats following her testimony and her family had to leave their house, with friends taking in her teenage sons so they can stay in school.

Speaking to Hill on the podcast released Monday, Ford says the summer in which the allegations were made public was “24/7 stressful.”

“The afterward, when you are experiencing the retaliation and the smearing and the ongoing media, you feel like you are being investigated and that you are being evaluated for the Supreme Court. That was just so unnecessary and damaging to my family,” Ford says.

Still, she says she would do it all over again, despite how much it has upended her life.

“I’m absolutely sure that I would do it again,” Ford says. “And that’s not to say that it hasn’t been really, really, really hard and that I’m still not as okay as I would like to be, three years out of the situation. I certainly wish I was doing better than I am. But I do firmly believe that I would do it again.”

Ford continues: “I think that there’s a difference between the hypothetical of, ‘Would you speak up?’ versus the reality of holding that information, keeping it to yourself and the discomfort around that. That’s not a comfortable way to live your life either — to not say anything.”

source: people.com