If the allegations were true, Dr. Blasey Ford would have reported it at the time

The argument

This argument rests on an inference from silence: it holds that the way a person responds to a traumatic event is itself evidence about whether, and how seriously, the event occurred. Its most prominent statement came from Trump, who wrote on Twitter that he had "no doubt" that "if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities". The reasoning treats immediate reporting as the expected consequence of a genuinely serious attack, and then asks what follows when that expected consequence is missing. The inferential chain runs in three steps. First, proponents assume that an attack of the severity Dr. Ford describes would ordinarily produce a prompt report — that the seriousness of an assault and the likelihood of contemporaneous charges rise together. Second, they observe that no such report was made and no charges were filed with local law enforcement at the time of the alleged incident. Third, they conclude that the absence of this expected evidence is itself evidence of absence: either the attack was not as bad as described, or it did not happen at all. On this view, the missing contemporaneous record is not a neutral gap but a positive indicator that undercuts the allegation. Connected to the broader position, the argument supports the conclusion that Brett Kavanaugh didn't do it by attacking the allegation's credibility at its foundation rather than by offering an alternative account. Its scope is set by its own conditional: the claim is that if the attack had been as bad as she says, charges would have followed immediately — so, advocates hold, the lack of any timely report to law enforcement licenses doubt about the allegation itself, and with it the case against Kavanaugh.

Context

The alleged sexual assault happened decades ago. Surely, if it was as traumatic as she says, Ford would have reported it at the time?

Premises

Counter-arguments

It is very common for women and men to wait years and even decades before reporting sexual assault and abuses. This happens for a number of reasons, including feelings of shame and guilt surrounding the circumstances of the assault. Many victims simply do not feel ready to put what happened to them into words. They do not feel strong enough to relive the encounter when telling the police, then again in court. They also fear retaliation from the predator. This could be in the form of personal attacks to discredit the victim’s story. The victim and their family and friends can sometimes become the target of smear campaigns. For Ford, it wasn’t until a therapy session in 2012 that she was able to acknowledge what had happened to her. She told the Washington Post that the assault “derailed me substantially for four or five years”. In the wake of Trump’s comments, a Twitter campaign named #WhyIDidntReport offered an outlet for many victims of sexual assault to explain why many victims don’t come forward at the time of the attack.

Rejecting the premises

Victims often don't feel able to report attacks at the time for a number of reasons.