Did Christine Blasey Ford Prevaricate?

No one really questioned whether Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth about what she said happened on that day thirty-six years. I have said that I and many others found her testimony credible. Thus, that she was suffering from false memory and had mistaken the identity of her rapist. It was far easier to grant her some credence, as a rhetorical strategy, than to accuse her of lying. If anyone had brought forth such accusations, the hue and cry would have drowned out all rational deliberation. Women around the nation would have risen up to claim that they were being accused of lying about their own assaults.

So far, so good.

Now, Dawn Perlmutter argues in Front Page magazine, that Ford was an hysteric and a liar. My research tells me that Perlmutter is not a mental health professional, and, for my part I find her diagnosis of hysteria to be off the mark. After all, the illness, such as it was, seems to have been a psychological contagion during the Victorian era. By all accounts it disappeared, even from France, in the 1920s. American psychiatrists discarded it in the 1950s… and more recently replaced it with histrionic disorders.

As it happened, Ford might have been lying. She was not acting like a classical hysteric. The first is far more consequential than the last. Hysterics are histrionic, but they are not liars. And they are not acting.

Nevertheless, Perlmutter raises an important point, briefly alluded to on this blog: Ford did not recount her experience as something she had lived, but as a physician observing from the outside… which is not the same thing:

During her testimony, Ford frequently responded not as a victim but as a physician. When asked by Senator Feinstein about the impact the events had on her, Ford responded:

Well, I think that the sequelae of sexual assault varies by person, so for me personally, anxiety, phobia and PTSD-like symptoms are the types of things that I’ve been coping with. So, more specifically, claustrophobia, panic and that type of thing.

We recall, again, that Ford is not a licensed psychologist. Her doctoral degree is in Educational Psychology. It was granted by a School of Education, not by a Psychology program.

Perlmutter continues:

When Senator Feinstein asked her how she was sure it was Judge Kavanaugh that assaulted her, Ford responded:

It’s — just 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. And so, the trauma-related experience, then, is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.

The press praised her unusual responses by characterizing her as a research psychologist who appeared as her own expert witness. The reason expert witnesses do not testify on their own behalf is that a court and jury rely on expert witnesses to be disinterested parties, who are not biased and have no motive to fabricate an issue. It never occurred to the media to question Ford's self-diagnosis as the result of a trained political operative or the manifestation of a mental disorder. In fact, people who suffer from factitious disorders often research and study symptoms and diseases, so they can better fake them. Ford has made a career out of studying mental illness, writing prolifically about the long-term impacts of trauma, including trauma related to sexual abuse. She would know exactly how to lie about the symptoms and trauma associated with sexual assault.

What if Ford had been coached on how to present her testimony? She would, by virtue of her professional experience, to know how to lie about sexual assault and its symptoms. For the record, nothing about such a performance suggests hysteria.

Perlmutter suggests:

There is a significant difference between studying trauma and authentically experiencing it. The genuineness of Christine Ford’s choice of language, affectation and disclosures were questionable. Throughout her entire testimony there was no other person, event, detail, or evidence that corroborated her testimony. Her demeanor and body language appeared rehearsed and coached. The most obvious pretense was her speech pattern. During most of her testimony she used a deliberate and calculated childish voice to project vulnerability and helplessness. When responding to specific questions about her trauma, she spoke in the third person in the guise of an esteemed physician. Survivors of sexual assault do not describe their trauma in the third person nor do they have to read from a written script to remember the details.

Notably, Ford was not speaking as someone who had undergone a trauma. She was speaking as a clinician reporting on someone else’s case. I am not going to suggests that survivors “never” speak of their trauma in the third person, but Perlmutter’s argument is persuasive. It is worth noting because no one else had the temerity to do so.