During a break in Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony Thursday, a woman called into C-SPAN and tearfully recounted a decades-old sexual assault. “This brings back so much pain,” she said. “I thought I was over it, but [I’m] not. You will never forget it. You get confused, and you don’t understand it. But you never forget what happened to you.”
The woman, identified on air as 76-year-old Brenda from Valley Park, Missouri, says her assault occurred in the second grade—nearly 70 years ago. Her words provided a striking counterbalance to skeptics who have made it a point to distrust the reliability of a sexual assault victim’s memory, including Ford’s. “It is such a shame,” she said.
Brenda credited listening to Ford’s testimony as the reason to share her own story of trauma to a national television audience. “I thought I was over this. And I have not brought this up for years until I heard this testimony—and it is just breaking my heart.”
