Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Video Shows Anti-Kavanaugh Lawyer Saying Christine Blasey Ford Wanted ‘Asterisk’ By Justice’s Name

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Mary Margaret Olohan Social Issues Reporter
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  • Video footage obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation shows Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyer Debra Katz discussing Ford’s motivations for making accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh public.
  • Putting an “asterisk” next to Kavanaugh’s name before “he takes a scalpel” to Roe v. Wade was “part of what motivated Christine,” Katz says in the video.
  • Author Ryan Lovelace said Ford would have been questioned differently during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing had Ford’s motivation been known.

Exclusive video footage of Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyer obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation shows her saying that putting “an asterisk next to” Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s name before “he takes a scalpel” to Roe v. Wade was “part of what motivated” Ford to speak out.

The video, first reported by Ryan Lovelace for his new book, Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh,” shows Ford’s lawyer, Debra Katz, speaking at the University of Baltimore’s 11th Feminist Legal Theory Conference, “Applied Feminism and #MeToo” in April.

“In the aftermath of these hearings, I believe that Christine’s testimony brought about more good than the harm misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanaugh on the court,” Katz says in the video.

“He will always have an asterisk next to his name,” Katz continues. “When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”

WATCH:

“A lot of people ask if Christine Blasey Ford was lying,” Lovelace told the DCNF. (RELATED: Christine Blasey Ford Makes TIME’s 100 Most Influential People In The World)

“To know that, you have to know her motivation,” the author continued. “Since she has not talked to me directly, the best way I can understand what she is thinking is by what her lawyer is saying. And her lawyer says that she is motivated, at least in part, by Roe v. Wade protecting legalized abortion.”

This contradicts what Ford testified in September, Lovelace, who is a reporter for the National Law Journal, said. He also said it contradicts what both Ford and her lawyers told the press.

“Before the confirmation, Ford had maintained that she came forward out of a sense of civic duty to provide information that she thought senators needed to know before voting on Kavanaugh,” Lovelace wrote in “Search and Destroy.”

Lovelace believes that this calls into question everything that Ford and Katz have previously said — and that if this information was known during the September hearings, there might have been different questions and different results.

“I think if we knew in September what we know now, there would have been all kinds of questions at the hearing about this,” he told the DCNF. The author said he believes there will be more scrutiny going forward, saying that this is part of the reason he penned “Search and Destroy.”

“I want people to look for themselves and to understand for themselves,” he said.

Katz also discussed the role Ford’s race played in the Kavanaugh hearings, Lovelace told the DCNF. Katz suggested at the same Baltimore conference in April that Ford’s race, background, class, and academic record made it possible for Ford to accuse Kavanaugh.

“We must ponder the very real possibility that had Dr. Ford not come from the same background, and the same race, and the same class, and the same country club as Brett Kavanaugh, had she not had an impeccable academic record, and stellar professional credentials, if she was not on the faculty of Stanford with 70 publications to her name, if she wasn’t married to a man with two children, would she have been given the opportunity?” Katz said in April, according to a passage from “Search and Destroy.”

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