Christine Blasey Ford

Christine Margaret Blasey Ford (born November 1966) is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects.

During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.

From 1978 through 1984, she attended the Holton-Arms School, a private, all-girls university-preparatory school in Bethesda, Maryland.

While on her regional sports team for diving, she accompanied diver Greg Louganis on a trip to the White House to discuss the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott.

Ford had wrestled with the choice to make her identity known, weighing the potential negative impact it could have on her, but ultimately spoke to The Washington Post, alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the summer of 1982 when she was 15 and he was 17.

She said that, while his friend Mark Judge watched, Kavanaugh, intoxicated, held her down on a bed with his body, grinding against and groping her, covering her mouth when she tried to scream and trying to pull her clothes off.

She earned an undergraduate degree in experimental psychology in 1988 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She received a master's degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University in 1991.

Her 1995 dissertation was entitled Measuring Young Children's Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict.

In 1996, she received a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Southern California.

Since 1998, she has worked as a research psychologist and biostatistician in the Stanford School of Medicine psychiatry department.

In 2009, she earned a master's degree in epidemiology, with a focus on the subject of biostatistics, from Stanford University School of Medicine.

Ford has worked in the academic and private sector as a biostatistician and research psychologist.

Since 2011, she has been a psychology professor in the PGSP-Stanford Consortium for Clinical Psychology, a collaborative program between Palo Alto University and Stanford.

Ford teaches subjects including psychometrics, study methodologies, clinical trials, and statistics to doctoral students and serves on dissertation committees.

She has also performed consulting work for multiple pharmaceutical companies.

She formerly worked as a director of biostatistics at Corcept Therapeutics, and as a biostatistical consultant for Titan Pharmaceuticals, and Brain Resource.

She has collaborated with FDA, academic and industry statisticians, including leading roundtable discussions at the American Statistical Association's Annual FDA-Industry meetings that focus on statistical analyzes in industry-FDA interactions.

She is widely published within her field.

Ford "specializes in designing statistical models for research projects in order to make sure they come to accurate conclusions", as summarized by Helena Chmura Kraemer, a Stanford professor emeritus in biostatistics who co-authored a book and several articles with Ford.

Ford has written or co-written several books about psychological topics, including depression.

Her other research topics published in academic journal articles have included child abuse and the September 11 attacks.

In 2015, she co-authored a book titled ''How Many Subjects?

Statistical Power Analysis in Research''.

Her research into the social impact of hiding one's sexual orientation was published in 2016 in the journal Behavior Therapy, and reviewed by psychologist William Gibson of the American Psychological Association, who found their research "demonstrates that issues of identity have relevance to mental health outcomes in ways that much of previous work misses."

In September 2018, Ford alleged that then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in Bethesda, Maryland, when they were teenagers in the summer of 1982.

She testified about her allegations during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination later that month.

Ford grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her parents are Paula K. and Ralph G. Blasey Jr., registered Republicans.

She has two brothers, Tom and Ralph III.

In early July 2018, after Judge Brett Kavanaugh was reported to be on Donald Trump's shortlist to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ford contacted both The Washington Post and her congresswoman, Anna Eshoo.

On July 20, eleven days after Trump nominated Kavanaugh, Eshoo met with Ford, becoming convinced of her credibility and noting that Ford seemed "terrified" that her identity as an accuser might become public.

Eshoo and Ford decided to take the matter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of Ford's senators in California and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would deliberate Kavanaugh's nomination.

In a July 30, 2018 letter to Feinstein, Ford alleged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when both were in high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and stated that she expected her story to be kept confidential.

In August that year, Ford took a polygraph test that was administered by a former FBI agent, who concluded Ford was being truthful when attesting to the accuracy of her allegations.

Feinstein said that owing to her confidentiality commitment to Ford, she did not raise the issue in the initial Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings.

On September 12, The Intercept reported (without naming Ford) that Feinstein was withholding a Kavanaugh-related document from fellow Judiciary Committee Democrats.

On September 13, Feinstein referred Ford's letter to the FBI, which redacted Ford's name and forwarded the letter to the White House as an update to Kavanaugh's background check.

The White House in turn sent the letter to the full Senate Judiciary Committee.

On September 16, after media reported anonymous allegations and reporters started to track down her identity, Ford went public.