Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, on Thursday told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she is willing to testify next week so long as senators offer "terms that are fair and which ensure her safety," the New York Times reports.
But Blasey Ford's lawyers - in an email sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee - said it wasn't possible for Blasey Ford to testify Monday, as scheduled, because the timetable set for a hearing "is not possible and the Committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event."
"As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home," the email added. "She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety."
Blasey Ford, a college professor at Palo Alto University in California, went public with her accusations Sunday in the Washington Post. One day later, Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, invited Blasey Ford to testify before the panel on Monday. Grassley gave Blasey Ford a 10 a.m. Friday deadline to decide whether she would appear before a hearing.
Blasey Ford's lawyer, Debra Katz, wrote in the letter to top Republican and Democratic aides that she wanted to set up a call later Thursday to "discuss the conditions" under which Blasey Ford would be prepared to testify.
Blasey Ford had written a confidential letter to her local congresswoman in July, but decided in early August to not come forward because she thought it would upend her life and not affect the confirmation.
She went public with the Post because she wanted to be the one to tell her story. Blasey Ford said the incident occurred when she was 15 and a student at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Md. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at Georgetown Preparatory School. Kavanaugh and a friend — both allegedly “stumbling drunk” at a small gathering of teens that night — corralled her into a bedroom in a house in Montgomery County, she said.
With his friend watching, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and trying to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
Kavanaugh has denied the accusations.
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