In a town full of headline-seekers and attention-grabbers, she was the one person desperate to escape the limelight. And yet there she was — a star witness before the US Senate judiciary committee.
“I am not here because I want to be here,” the once anonymous Christine Blasey Ford said on Thursday, her voice breaking. “I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”
Ms Ford had stepped out of the newspaper pages and into the public consciousness. The 51-year-old research psychologist was reliving what she described as one of the worst nights of her life: an attempted rape she says occurred at the hands of President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court when she was 15 and has haunted her ever since.