Judge Brett Kavanaugh has adamantly denied allegations that he sexually assaulted a girl at a party decades ago when they were both teenagers.
With his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, slated to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a high-stakes hearing that could derail his Supreme Court nomination, some Kavanaugh backers have tried to compare her account to benign forms of adolescent flirtation.
In New Hampshire, state Representative Norman J. Silber made waves Monday when he published a letter in the Laconia Daily Sun newspaper, writing a mock confession that he shared a “closed-mouth kiss or two” with a girl during a high school game of spin the bottle.
Because of his “long-ago sins,” Silber wrote, he was withdrawing his consideration for any court appointments.
The letter drew a swift rebuke from the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which chided Silber on Twitter for “mocking and reducing sexual assault into some kind of horrible joke.”
Yet comparing the account of Ford, who says the 17-year-old Kavanaugh jumped on top of her, tried to remove her clothes, and covered her mouth when she attempted to scream, to a more trivial encounter between kids could help pave the way for the judge’s confirmation, said Colby Bruno, an advocate for sexual assault victims in Massachusetts.
“Believe me, I hope I am dead wrong,” said Bruno, senior legal counsel for the Victim Rights Law Center. “[But] I think too many people think it was too long ago [and] wasn’t serious enough. . . . I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not optimistic.”
Bruno said focusing on the young ages of Kavanaugh and Ford during the alleged assault — Ford was 15 — and the many years that have elapsed misses a larger point.
“I think that people don’t quite understand the impact that a sexual assault like that can have long term on a victim’s life,” Bruno said.
Ford skeptics, she said, may be inclined to think, “ ‘It was such a long time ago, it was two teenagers, it wasn’t that serious.’ But for each individual victim it’s an everyday struggle.”
Kavanaugh on Monday flatly denied Ford’s account, saying in a statement, “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone.” A White House spokesman also weighed in, telling reporters that Kavanaugh “looks forward to a hearing where he can clear his name of this false allegation.”
But the separate argument that the specific allegations themselves, involving high school students in a social setting, are too distant or trivial to have any bearing on Kavanaugh’s nomination, continues to get heavy play.
The attached photo showed a piece of notebook paper with a scribbled message: ‘‘Hi Cindy will you be my girlfriend, Love Bret.’’
It’s a public relations strategy aimed at a particular demographic, according to Mark J. Geragos, a prominent criminal defense lawyer based in Los Angeles whose client roster has included Michael Jackson and Chris Brown.
“[S]ince this case has no real criminal exposure because the Statute of limitations has run out it is really an appeal to a constituency,” Geragos wrote in an e-mail. “It has attraction to older males who grew up in a different world.”
That appeal, however, won’t salvage Kavanaugh’s nomination if Ford comes across as credible during her testimony, Geragos said.
“If she holds up in the confirmation hearings he is toast,” Geragos wrote.
Gina Scaramella, executive director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, said she hopes Ford walks into a different environment than the one Anita Hill faced in 1991 when she publicly accused then-high court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Hill, Scaramella said, was “so dismissed.” Scaramella hopes that when Ford testifies, “we can believe that people who are victimized have real harm done to them. . . . We’ve held adolescents to account as adults for” their actions from years earlier, in the context of college and job applications.
She also conceded that teenagers make mistakes they can move beyond.
“I don’t know if pinning someone down and putting a hand over their mouth would fall into that category of mistake,” Scaramella said. “Is this a mistake, or is this something that he did that we would want him held to account for [and] rather than deny it, have him share how he has changed and or what he learned from that experience?”
Ari Flesicher, a former White House spokesman in the George W. Bush administration, also waded into the controversy during a recent Fox News appearance, suggesting that high school behavior should be weighed in the context of an adult life without any known blemishes.
“How much in society should any of us be held liable today when we’ve lived a good life, an upstanding life by all accounts, and then something that maybe is an arguable issue took place in high school?” he said. “Should that deny us chances later in life, even for a Supreme Court job, a presidency of the United States, or you name it? How accountable are we for high school actions, when this is clearly a disputable high school action?”
Fleischer also noted that if Ford sounds believable during her appearance before the committee, and Kavanaugh doesn’t when asked about her claims, conservatives may decide, “We just can’t win.”
James Pindell of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press, Washington Post, and New York Times was also used.