It’s unlikely that you haven’t heard of Brett Kavanaugh by this point. Since the middle of September, it’s practical all the media has been covering.
On Sept. 14, rumors surfaced that someone was claiming to be a survivor of sexual assault; the perpetrator being Brett Kavanaugh. The attack allegedly took place in the summer of 1980 when Kavanaugh was 17 and the accuser was 15. Kavanaugh was already announced to be President Trump’s pick for supreme court justice and he was nearly guaranteed a spot on the court due to the Republican-majority Senate. Several days later, Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward saying that she was the victim.

Both parties, to some extent, asked for a hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to question the validity of both Kavanaugh and Ford’s statements.
At the Sept. 27 hearing, both Ford and Kavanaugh were questioned about their testimonies by Democratic senators and a sex crime prosecutor who was hired by Republican senators. Ford recalled her trauma as she remembered it; Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge had pushed her into a room, where Kavanaugh sexually grabbed her against her consent, even covering her mouth to cloak her screams. “I believed he was going to rape me,” said Ford. There was a theory that the perpetrators were actually, in fact, two separate, similar-looking men to Judge and Kavanaugh. This was brought up to Ford, which led to her stating that she is completely sure that Kavanaugh was the man who had assaulted her.
Kavanaugh’s questioning, on the other hand, was quite a bit more situational. He was asked about his calendars from that summer (which he claimed to prove his innocence). Later, the inevitable was brought up; his drinking habits as a youth. This aspect is crucial because Ford’s testimony included the fact that Kavanaugh was drunk when she arrived at the party meaning that it is plausible that he wouldn’t remember the alleged assault. He had previously claimed that he did not drink in excess during his youth, however, his answers to the senators’ questions seemed evasive. When Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked him if he had ever been black-out drunk, he countered with “Have you?” He later conceded: “I drank beer with my friends, almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers, sometimes others did.”
After the hearing, an FBI investigation was conducted surrounding the controversy and they found no additional evidence to support Ford’s claims.
One of the most fascinating parts of the entire process was senator Heidi Heitkamp’s (D-ND) decision to vote against Kavanaugh’s confirmation, potentially alienating possible voters. However, her justification for her vote was very bipartisan, which she is. “Both sides horribly handled the process around the nomination. We must learn from these mistakes,” said Heitkamp.
In the end, Kavanaugh was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court on Oct. 6. The final vote was 51-49, the most partisan confirmation of any supreme court justice.