Courtesy of Pam Martens
On August 14, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, tweeted that an African-American woman he had previously hired to work in the White House, Omarosa Manigault Newman, is a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.” In any other executive job in America, those published words would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
Yesterday, while attending a political rally in Mississippi, that same President mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the courageous professor who gave sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27 that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. Dr. Ford also submitted to the Senate the results of the lie detector test that she had passed and affidavits from four people she had told about the assault in earlier years.
Trump mocked Dr. Ford’s sexual assault testimony yesterday, telling the laughing crowd:
“ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ‘Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it?’ ‘I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.’ ”
Not only is it an outrage for the President of the United States to mock a credible sexual assault survivor for coming forward as the United States is in the midst of confronting a deplorable history of the Catholic Church, military, college campuses and corporate executives covering up sexual assaults, but the President flagrantly lied to his audience about Dr. Ford’s testimony.
Far from not knowing whether the assault had occurred upstairs or downstairs, Dr. Ford precisely explained to the Senate committee that “Early in the evening, I went up a narrow set of stairs leading from the living room to a second floor to use the bathroom. When I got to the top of the stairs, I was pushed from behind into a bedroom. I couldn’t see who pushed me. Brett and Mark came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them.” Dr. Ford’s other details of the assault itself were very specific. Not remembering what happened before and after a traumatic experience of 36 years ago is not uncommon in trauma victims.
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