In late September, Christine Blasey Ford testified under oath that she was “100 percent” sure that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982. Later that day, Kavanaugh responded by swearing with equal certainty that he did not. How do we square these two contradictory statements? A case of mistaken identity provides a neat resolution: It allows us to believe them both. Ford is sincere and wrong, her memory warped by trauma and the passage of time. Yes, someone did try to rape her in high school—it just wasn’t Kavanaugh, who is sincere and correct in his assertion of innocence. Indeed, this was the exact argument made by many Senate Republicans, eager to thread a needle between the two contradictory testimonies and get Kavanaugh confirmed.
It worked to whatever extent it had to, given that Kavanaugh is now a Supreme Court justice. But believers in the theory of mistaken identity should reconsider because the error they’ve made matters greatly to Ford’s story, and to how we understand and process sexual assault more broadly.
It makes no sense to take an empirically proven cause of wrongful convictions in stranger rape cases and apply it to a teenager’s attempt to force himself on a female acquaintance. Comparing these two radically different sexual attacks is the equivalent of comparing apples to sushi. The conflation of the particularized trauma experienced by sexual assault survivors also trivializes the fact that the majority of mistaken identifications happen in stranger rape cases where the assailant is black and the victim is white. Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University and an expert on mistaken identifications, said he was “flabbergasted” when the theory was floated by credible people from across the political spectrum. “To call it hogwash is giving too much credit to hogs,” he said. “It’s just absurd.”
Article by Lara Bazelon and Jennifer Thompson. Read more.
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