HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028442.jpg

A", "range":{"length":16,"start":371},"type":"link"}],"identifier":" anf-body-4","inlineTextStyles":[{"range":{"length":619,"start":0},"textstyle":"anf-ts-11"},{"range":{"length":3,"start":173},"textStyle":" anf-ts-10"}],"layout":"bodyContentLayout","role":"body","text":"That change is happening whether or not Republicans push Kavanaugh through, whether or not Democrats take the House or the Senate. The change is not simply (or perhaps, not yet) about outcomes, but rather about expectations and what it’s okay to talk about and when. Women â€" 27 years after Anita Hill, 12 years after Tarana Burke’s Me Too, and one year into #MeToo â€" are refusing to stop speaking about their experiences, their perspectives, their memories. By doing so, they’re expanding the boundaries of what kinds of stories must be taken seriously â€" and bringing a much fuller picture of female humanity into view.","type":"text"},{"additions":[{"URL":"https://apple.news/A3a5du8CBSk-YrrB4JgycQw","range":{"length":12,"start":87},"type":"link"},{"URL":"https://apple.news/AEoAndznRQDi2nA0rwpKTOA","range":{"length":30,"start":747},"type":"link"}],"identifier":" anf-body-5","inlineTextStyles":[{"range":{"length":854,"start":0},"textStyle":"anf-ts-11"},{"range":{"length":11,"start":51},"textStyle":"anf-ts-10"}],"layout":"bodyContentLayout","role":"body","text":"I thought about this forced shift when I opened the New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow on Sunday night, and read about the kind of encounter most women I know have always assumed they’d never be able to recount in public â€" least of all in the midst of a highly scrutinized, high-stakes political battle â€" because it didn’t meet the impossibly high standards the world has set for women who’ve been abused or assaulted and want to be believed. The story was told by Deborah Ramirez, who told Mayer and Farrow that she almost didn’t come forward â€" even with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court in the balance â€" because what she had to relate happened one night in college when she’d been drinking. What she did remember was her Yale classmate Brett Kavanaugh pulling down his pants and thrusting his penis in her face against her will.","type":"text"},{"additions":[{"URL":"https://apple.news/AMN_04a95QdyVaSlT0eQzPA","range":{"length":21,"start":317},"type":"link"}],"identifier":" anf-body-6","inlineTextStyles":[{"range":{"length":708,"start":0},"textstyle":"_anf-ts-11"},{"range":{"length":3,"start":458},"textStyle":"anf-ts-10"}],"layout":"bodyContentLayout","role":"body","text":"Ramirez openly admits that her memory is patchy, that only flashes are clear, that she was drunk to the point of slurring. Each of these things, she clearly understands, undermines her tale, leaves her open to a different kind of assault now, 35 years later. And yet she not only decided to tell her story; she, like Christine Blasey Ford, opened it up to investigation. The imperfection of her victimhood did not stop her from speaking, from insisting that her view of events should count just as much as the blithe, blanket denials being issued by a man we have no reason to believe remembers his drunken youth any more clearly than she remembers hers, yet whose word is reflexively granted more authority.","type":"text"},{"additions":[{"URL":"https://apple.news/AcQZ0Mp-TQg04sysZiGbcJQ","range":{"length":20,"start":140},"type":"link"}],"identifier":"_anf-body-7","inlineTextStyles":[{"range":{"length":1257,"start":0},"textStyle":"_anf-ts-11"},{"range":{"length":4,"start":108},"textStyle":"anf-ts-10"}],"layout":"bodyContentLayout","role":"body","text":"Ramirez’s willingness to speak was particularly affecting in the same week as the publication of Washington Post writer Elizabeth Bruenig’s remarkable reporting on the rape, in her Texas hometown, of 16-year-old Amber Wyatt, 12 years ago. At the time of her alleged assault, Wyatt did tell her story, to fellow students, to her mother, and to police. But her account of how, after getting drunk and high at a party, she was taken to a shed by two boys who penetrated her vaginally and anally, and demanded that she perform oral sex, wasn’t viewed as authoritative. Neither was the investigation that followed it, which included the collection of evidence of her attack and a medical examination at a hospital. Instead, Wyatt was vilified for having caused trouble to her community; vile slurs about her penetrability were spray-painted around her town and at her school; she was sent to finish her education elsewhere, and eventually written off as having made a false accusation, the voice she’d worked so hard to raise quelled, her story recalled as fallacious. Bruenig quotes a friend of Wyatt’s who remembers, “Everyone started blaming [Wyatt] because she said something, and if she would have kept her mouth shut then nothing would have ever happened.â€","type":"text"},{"additions":[{"URL":"https://apple.news/ARif95BbdToiojzs2D y5c5w","range":{"length":16,"start":169},"type":"link"},{"URL":"https://apple.news/AbWC vXYSQQRibKkYIhU4zVA","range":{"length":18,"start":624},"type":"link"}],"identifier":" a nf-body-8","inlineTextStyles":[{"range":{"length":908,"start":0},"textstyle":"_anf-ts-11"}],"layout":"bodyContentLayout","role":"body","text":"The message to women â€"

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028442