'Every man' should be 'worried' if Kavanaugh's nomination is derailed by Ford's credible sex assault accusation, White House ally says

On Sunday, after The Washington Post published Christine Blasey Ford's account of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault in the 1980s, the White House reissued a blanket denial Kavanaugh had made Friday, before Ford's name was public but the outlines of her allegations had leaked: "I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time."

A lawyer close to the White House said the accusation of attempted rape will not derail Kavanaugh's nomination. "No way, not even a hint of it," he told Politico. "If anything, it's the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something."

Ford told the Post that around the summer of 1982, when she was 15 and Kavanaugh would've been 17, he and a friend shoved her into a room in a suburban Maryland house and Kavanaugh pinned her down, groped her over her clothes and tried to remove them, and held his hand over her mouth when she tried to yell for help over the loud music blaring. Ford said Kavanaugh was probably unable to undress her because he and his friend, Mark Judge, were "stumbling drunk," and she was able to escape after Judge jumped on top of them and they all toppled to the floor. Judge said Friday that the assault "never happened" and he "never saw anything like what was described."

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The retired FBI agent who gave Ford a polygraph test in early August confirmed to The New York Times that Ford's answers indicated "no deception," meaning "she was being truthful" in affirming her allegations against Kavanaugh. A therapist's notes from 2012 also partially corroborate her story. In a book about recovering from alcoholism, Judge included a story about his friend "Bart O'Kavanaugh" puking in a car and passing out at a party, and Kavanaugh's Georgetown Prep high school yearbook suggests he was a tippler, the Post says.