Now that the woman accusing Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has come forward, most of the women who rushed to defend him last week have suddenly fallen silent.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats disclosed that they had given the FBI a letter from an anonymous woman who said Kavanaugh violently attempted to rape her when they were in high school. Just 18 hours later, Senate Judiciary Republicans had released a letter from 65 women vouching for Kavanaugh.
Those women said that they had each known Kavanaugh while he was attending an all-boys high school, and that they thought he “behaved honorably and treated women with respect.”
On Sunday, however, that anonymous woman went public. Christine Blasey Ford, a 51-year-old professor and research psychologist, gave an on-record interview to the Washington Post about her ordeal.
The letter defending Kavanaugh was supposedly a spontaneous effort, beginning after 5 p.m. on Thursday. Somehow, in less than 18 hours, the signatures of 65 former students from five separate high schools were gathered and delivered in time for Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to release the following morning.
But now, more than 20 hours since Ford came forward, only two of those 65 women have so far been willing to publicly stand by their support of Kavanaugh.
Politico reached out to “more than two dozen” of the women who signed the letter. Just two of them reiterated that they stand by Kavanaugh. Two declined to comment, and the others did not respond.
One of the most prominent signatories to that letter was Virginia Hume, who also penned a lengthy explanation defending the letter against those who found its timing suspicious.
But even Hume, whose father is right-wing Fox News commentator Brit Hume, has remained silent since Ford came forward.