A Fox News poll released Sunday found that 38 percent of female voters believed Ford and 28 percent sided with Kavanaugh, while men were more narrowly split. The big differences again came by party: 59 percent of Democrats believed Ford, while 60 percent of Republicans believed Kavanaugh.
Women weigh in at a Minnesota salon
At a blowout bar in Edina, Minn., Cindy Scriver said she feels conflicted whenever a prominent man is accused of sexual misconduct.
“Some are real, and some are not real, or they are hyping them up. And I guess I’m protective of boys because I have five of them. I just said to them, ‘You can’t be anywhere alone with a girl without a parent there. You could be accused of doing something.’ And it’s sad. I shouldn’t have to be teaching that,” said Scriver, 49, a Republican stay-at-home mom.
Scriver was speaking generically. She said she didn’t know about the accusations against Kavanaugh because she has tuned out most political news, finding it too critical of President Trump, whom she voted for and supports.
When the details were described to her, she added a lament: “It’s so hard to know if these stories are real or not. They come up so much. But if it is in fact real and he’s denying it, then I think this shows something about his character, and maybe he’s not a good candidate.”
Another customer at The Wow Bar Blow Dry & Style Bar, Kerry Ciardelli, believes Ford.
Ciardelli has distant memories of when another woman, law professor Anita Hill, in 1991 accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. It wasn’t until she watched a documentary years later that she realized everything Hill endured.
“We didn’t really understand what she was going through . . . and all the games that were going on behind the scenes. And I feel like that’s going on again, and I don’t know how much will really change,” she said. “It feels like we haven’t come very far, and it’s just shocking to think that we’re right back where we were.”
Women share opinions in South Carolina
“I don’t have any doubt in my mind that what she’s saying is true because it rings true to every person who’s been victimized. You know the era that we lived in; we were basically told to just kind of shut up and put up with it. That was the message for women,” said Corin Buskey, 53, who is running for the South Carolina statehouse in a deeply red district in the Rock Hill area, a suburb of Charlotte. “Dr. Ford, she was born in the same time era that I was born. She was in high school at the same time I was in high school. So I get her. And I understand.”
Buskey said she was assaulted in college and didn’t inform anyone. Only years later did she tell her mother and sister what had happened.
She was one of about a dozen women who gathered for breakfast at a Golden Corral on Saturday morning for a meeting of the Democratic Women’s Council of York County. They were frustrated by dismissive comments made by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — and by Rep. Ralph Norman, a Republican who represents the Rock Hill area and joked last week that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had accused Abraham Lincoln of groping her. (Norman’s Democratic opponent, Archie Parnell, has been accused by his ex-wife of violently beating her — an accusation he has not denied.)
Vickie Holt, a 65-year-old retired flight attendant who is also running for a seat in the statehouse, said the accusation against Kavanaugh came up in a Facebook group that includes her former co-workers.
“One person just said, ‘You don’t have to answer, but I just would like to know, have you ever been victimized.’ I can’t tell you how many hundreds of yesses popped up in a matter of minutes,” said Holt, who added that she was assaulted by a relative when she was 11 and didn’t tell anyone for decades because she was ashamed of what had happened.
A day earlier, 15 women gathered in Rock Hill for a “Burn Boot Camp,” a 45-minute, high-intensity workout class marketed to “fit moms and women” — many of whom are trying to juggle work and children, not leaving much time to keep up with the news. Nearly all of the women declined to share their views on Kavanaugh.
Katie Thompson, a 25-year-old mother of three who works the boot camp’s front desk, said people in positions of power should be held to a higher standard and often are not. Still, she feels torn between wanting to give every woman’s assertion of assault full credit and wondering whether too many have taken advantage of the #MeToo movement.
“I feel like it’s hard because we have a whole women’s movement that’s finally finding their voices and finally being brave enough to talk about this stuff, feeling like it’s actually going to go somewhere,” said Thompson, who sided with Trump over Clinton because she considered him the “lesser of two evils.”
“I do think that there’s a fine line because there are some people who will try to take advantage of that voice and get attention or put someone down. And it’s like, how do you find the validity in what they’re saying? But, I mean, I would never discredit someone who’s brave enough to say, ‘I’ve been raped.’ ”
A Houston woman urges ‘some deeper digging’
At a high school football game in the Houston suburbs Friday night, Alicia Lacy-Castille said she remembers being suspicious of Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment by Thomas. Lacy-Castille, who is African American, was in her early 20s at the time.
“I’ll be totally honest, this was an African American nominee, and that has happened how many times in our history? So I was like, where did she come from? Who put her up to this?” said Lacy-Castille, now 51, who usually votes for Democrats. “I thought it might have been a ploy to sabotage his nomination, initially. Now we know better. We started this whole Me Too movement.”
Lacy-Castille, who works for the Houston Independent School District and is a school board trustee for the Stafford Municipal School District, said that she doesn’t know enough about the accusation against Kavanaugh — and that it’s worth “some deeper digging” before lawmakers vote on his nomination.
“There’s a lot of power in that position,” she said. “The confidence that the public needs to have to be able to trust the process is going to be compromised if we have someone in there who sexually assaults women.”
A trio of Florida girlfriends question Ford
That same evening in the Tampa suburb of New Port Richey, a group of girlfriends gathered after work for drinks at a bar and brushed off Ford’s accusation as simply another attempt by liberals to smear Trump and thwart his attempts to improve the country.
The women questioned why Ford didn’t raise concerns when she was a teenager or when Kavanaugh first became a judge. One woman accused Ford of doing this “for a check.” Another accused her of “making a molehill into a mountain.”
“If it did happen to this woman, I feel bad, but come on. I think it’s a bandwagon against Trump,” said Nancy Bacher, 52, a registered Democrat who voted for John McCain in 2008, Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. “I think there might have been an incident at a party, but I think it wasn’t that vicious.”
Bacher, who works as a baker at a grocery store, said that she taught her two sons, who are now in their 20s, to respect women and to not take advantage of them. She praised her own mother for teaching her to stand up for herself as a woman.
“Us women have never been treated fairly, ever,” Bacher said. “And it’s not going to change.”
Johnson reported from Washington. Saundra Amrhein in New Port Richey, Fla., Scott Clement in Washington, Brittney Martin in Houston, Kurt Shillinger in St. Louis, Dan Simmons in Milwaukee and Jodie Valade in Rock Hill, S.C., contributed to this report.
