Commentary: Christine Blasey Ford's latest stunt sinks any credibility she had left

There were many people who walked away from watching Christine Blasey Ford's testimony thinking she was a Democratic operative working to delay the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. I was not one of those people. I believed her pain was real. I believed that she was sexually assaulted by someone in her younger years — I just did not believe that it was, in fact, Brett Kavanaugh, for various reasons. But the antics of Ford and her lawyers Wednesday at the 11th hour (sound familiar?) of the FBI investigation have me now convinced I was dead wrong.

In Ford's opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27, she stated:

My motivation in coming forward was to be helpful and to provide facts about how Mr. Kavanaugh's actions have damaged my life so that you could take into a serious consideration as you make your decision about how to proceed. It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court. My responsibility is to tell you the truth.

But on Wednesday, Ford's attorneys declared they would not comply with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley's request to deliver to the FBI documents that would — according to them — only bolster the credibility of Ford's testimony. Her legal team told Grassley they would withhold Ford's therapist notes and audio recording of Ford's lie detector test unless and until the FBI agreed to interview Ford as part of its investigation.

Well, wait a minute. If her motivation in coming forward was purely to "provide facts" and "tell the truth" and the requested documents would help the FBI corroborate her testimony, why would she withhold the information?

She already gave her sworn testimony of the account — under penalty of perjury — in front of Senate members and all of America. To assert that her account to the FBI would be different from her sworn testimony would be asserting she committed perjury. If her testimony was true, the FBI didn't need to interview her, which her attorneys most certainly knew.

Still, I didn't want to believe that Ford, a well-respected member of academia, would knowingly destroy a man's life over false allegations, so my initial reaction was to blame her attorneys. Maybe they were keeping information from her in an attempt to use her as a political pawn. After all, Ford seemed genuinely confused when she was told during the hearing that members of the Senate committee offered to come to her, due to her supposed fear of flying. In the same way, maybe her attorneys didn't tell her they were attempting to strong-arm and delay the FBI investigation by withholding documents, I thought.

But that can't possibly be the case in 2018 America. Unless Ford has been locked up in solitary confinement with no access to any media and no contact with the outside world, there's no way she didn't know Senate members offered to come to her for testimony, and there's no way she didn't know Grassley asked for documents that would corroborate her story to be included in the FBI investigation. So, the only reasonable conclusion is that she was involved in the decision to withhold the documents from the FBI.

If she was, in fact, a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, and her true intention was to "provide facts and truth," as she stated in her sworn testimony, she would have delivered to the FBI both the recording of her lie detector test, along with notes from her therapist that would have allegedly corroborated her story.

Either way, Ford's collusion in this latest political stunt is a disgrace to all sexual assault survivors who do have the courage to come forward and speak out.