Summarising Ford. vs Kavanaugh.

This will be the last post about the Kavanaugh sexual assault nomination for some time (barring dramatic new revelations). But I thought it might be helpful to organise our thinking about the possible scenarios on what actually happened between the nominee and Prof. Ford. So here are 3 scenarios under which Ford's accusation is accurate, and 3 where Kavanaugh is innocent of wrongdoing (in ascending order of plausibility).

Scenarios under which Kavanaugh is innocent:

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1. Ford just made up the whole thing (probably for ideological reasons). She lied to both her husband and the therapist (back in 2012) in order to "plant" some useful evidence. In 2012, Kavanaugh was already a potential SCOTUS appointee, and Ford was already planning to ambush him should he be nominated.

2. Mistaken identity. The encounter happened roughly as Ford claims, but she has the identity of the perpetrator wrong. Perhaps it was really Mark Judge and not Kavanaugh, or someone else who attended the party. This becomes more plausible if Ford was more inebriated than she now claims. Mistaken identity has occurred in some real-world rape cases where a defendant was wrongly convicted.

3. A consensual encounter gone bad. The incident occurred, but it was a consensual encounter that nonetheless turned out to be deeply distasteful for Ford (which is why she broke it off). Over time, she came to think of it as an assault. Scenarios like this are at the heart of some dubious Title IX cases on college campuses. Perhaps Kavanaugh behaved badly, but in this scenario he was not guilty of sexual assault. If this is what happened, Kavanaugh is still guilty of lying about what occurred, unless he was so drunk that he simply does not remember the event (which is certainly possible), or he just forgot about it during the intervening 36 years.

I don't buy scenario 1. But 2 - and especially 3 - are not easy to just dismiss, at least in my opinion.

Scenarios where Kavanaugh is guilty:

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1. Kavanaugh as diabolical sociopath. The man we think we know is just a mask for the monster within. It may seem as if Kavanaugh is a nice person and respectful of women - very different from Weinstein, Moore, Trump, etc. But in reality he is just much more careful than they are. He limits his predatory activities to carefully chosen situations where it is highly unlikely he will ever get caught (e.g. - the woman would not be a credible witness for some reason, or has strong incentives to keep things quiet). The Ford case was a rare instance where he was less cautious than usual (he was still very young, after all). There may be lots of other victims out there, but even now they are too scared to come forward, because Kavanaugh chose his marks well.

2. Kavanaugh just acted out of character. In general, he would never do something like this. But this incident was an aberration. We've all done some bad things in certain situations that are atypical of our general behaviour. Such aberrations may have been more likely when he was a teenager (teenage boys, on average, are more aggressive and less inhibited than adults).

3. Kavanaugh is a different person when drunk. When he gets seriously inebriated, his normal inhibitions fall away, and he does the sort of things Ford accuses him of. Perhaps, unlike Mark Judge, Kavanaugh only rarely gets drunk in situations where this might happen. By all accounts, he's a careful person with good self-control. But it DID happen with Ford back in 1982. Maybe also in a very small number of other cases, most likely when he was in HS or college. But those other women have not come forward, for any number of possible reasons. If they were themselves drunk at the time, they may not have clear memories of what happened.

I do NOT buy scenario 1. It's a good movie plot, but not, in my view, realistic. But, as with the first set of possibilities, 2 and 3 are hard to just dismiss.