Haga of the First Water

I wish I could remember where I read the suggestion -- Dad29 only hints at it -- but sometime around Friday I read someone who suggested that the Kavanaugh accuser would turn out to have had first made the accusation in a therapy session, many years after the fact. The idea is that 'recovered' (but actually false) memories in psychology work are a known issue, and this was likely enough to turn out to be one.

Now it may be that the accusation is true, although both of the people she names as having been there deny that it or anything like it ever happened. But the psychotherapy-created-memory idea doesn't sound implausible to me given the facts. For one thing, it did in fact first come up in a therapy session in 2012, when she and her husband were having trouble and she needed a way to try to right that ship. But also:

She did tell someone about this years before Kavanaugh was nominated — but never mentioned his name. She doesn’t remember where or even when exactly the incident happened, but she does remember the names of two other people who were allegedly there. (Neither responded to WaPo’s request for comments.) She passed a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent but her own therapist had notes saying four boys were involved, not two, which Ford blames on a misunderstanding.

All of that is explicable if the hypothesis is correct. The fuzziness on exactly where and when this happened arises from the fact that it never did happen, as does the fuzziness on just who was responsible or how many people were present at the time. But also the polygraph: she could readily pass one, per hypothesis, because she isn't lying. She's telling the truth of what she thinks she remembers.

(UPDATE: Paragraph removed due to inaccurate source. I regret the error.)

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was in fact the truth. Kavanaugh has passed six FBI background checks, none of which turned up anything like this; there's no pattern of behavior, as you'd expect if this accusation were true. But that doesn't mean she is lying, not in the strict sense. She is quite possibly telling the truth as she believes she understands it.

Defenders might say that a good reason for being unstable is having suffered a rape attempt in your young adulthood, and perhaps that's fair. In the end, both hypotheses are possible. We just have to decide which one is more plausible. Or maybe not even that; a 17 year old's bad behavior, even if proven at law rather than being alleged after the statute of limitations had passed seven times over, would normally be sealed in juvenile records just because we wouldn't want it to prevent them from reforming and living a responsible life as an adult. By all indications, he has led a responsible life as an adult. Maybe we don't have to decide what is true about the one allegation from 35 years ago to know the right way to proceed now.

All of that involves taking this accusation seriously. It leads us to the same place we would get to if we didn't take it seriously at all, as well we might not given the way the Democratic leadership sat on the thing for a month until they could raise it at the last minute to cause chaos. I'm open to the idea that we shouldn't given them an inch given how they've behaved; but a lot more is at stake than punishing Sen. Feinstein for her perfidy. I'm willing to take the matter seriously. All the same, I think that absent any new evidence or additional accusers, the course is clear.