Christine Blasey Ford wanted to flee the United States to avoid Brett Kavanaugh. Now she can testify against him.

When Donald Trump won his presidential victory in 2016, Christine Blasey Ford's thoughts quickly turned to a name most Americans had never heard of but had disturbed for years: Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh – a judge of the prestigious US District Court of Columbia – was among those mentioned as possible replacement of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. When Trump named Neil M. Gorsuch, Ford was relieved but still worried.

Then, Judge Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement and Ford, 51, started complaining again.

"His mind was," I have this terrible secret. . . "What am I going to do with this secret?" Remembers her husband, Russell Ford, 56 years old.

For many, Kavanaugh was a respected jurist. For her, it was the teenager who had attacked her in high school.

Ford had already moved 3,000 miles from the wealthy suburbs of Maryland where she says Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a party at home – an accusation he would categorically deny. Suddenly, living in California did not seem far enough. Maybe another hemisphere would be. She went online to search for other democracies where her family could settle, including New Zealand.

"She was like, I can not cope with that.If he becomes the candidate, I'm moving to another country.I can not live in this country if he's in the Supreme Court," said her husband. "She wanted to go out."

That was the length that Ford, a teacher and mother of two, once thought of as a way to avoid revisiting one of her most troubling memories – the one she had only talked about in therapy and with her husband. Instead, her deep-rooted secret would end up in the headlines, putting her family and her at the center of an explosive debate about the future of the Supreme Court.

[California professor speaks out about her allegation of sexual assault]

Now, as she plans to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ford's sincerity is being attacked by social media and by the president himself. Death threats have poured in. His email was hacked.

The day Ford publicly identified herself as Kavanaugh's accuser in an interview with the Washington Post, her husband was driving his 15-year-old son and his friends to a football tournament in Lake Tahoe. He could not answer the calls that were detonating his phone. by the time they arrived home, a crowd of journalists was waiting.

Russell has struggled to explain to his children. "I said that Mom had a story about a Supreme Court candidate, and now there has been news in the press, and we can not stay at home anymore," she said. he recalled. The family was separated for days and the boys stayed with friends and their parents in a hotel. They sought a security service to escort their children to school.

While Ford met with the FBI on Friday to discuss his safety, critics continued to question his motives and his memory. Why, they ask, has it waited decades to come forward? Trump joined the chorus on Twitter, stating, "I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been filed immediately with the authorities charged with Law enforcement.

[Trump questions credibility of Kavanaugh accuser]

While senators assess Kavanaugh's confirmation, the endless cycle of news has plunged into every corner of her accuser's life to find out who Christine Blasey Ford really is.

The answer is someone very different from what it was. In Bethesda, Ford's life was a cloisonné advantage, with her time at a private girls' school, at the Columbia Country Club and at parties where she easily moved among the privileged and the popular.

Christine Blasey Ford in front of the Giants Stadium in San Francisco, CA on this undated photo. (N / A / family photo)

But after high school, and after the alleged assault, Ford left the Washington area and never retreated. She started surfing. She dressed in jeans when she was not in combination on a surfboard. His colleagues mistook him for a native Californian. Quietly, she gained a reputation for her research on depression, anxiety and resilience after trauma, telling almost no one what she had endured.

She has successfully reinvented herself far from where her family is known, where politics reigns, where Kavanaugh has gained power and prestige – and where next week she could come back to revive everything.

& # 39; What are you doing? & # 39;

Growing up, she was just "Chrissy" and, like her younger siblings, she was often described by her relationship to someone else: Tom and Ralph 's sister, Ralph's daughter, a regular at the golf courses. the president of the Burning Tree Club, an all-male club. Ford's mother, Paula, was very popular with the kids at the Columbia Country Club because she remembered their names.

"You were not just a lounge chair to go past it," said Stephen Futterer, a Chicago doctor who was part of the club's swim team with Ford. "There were certainly families who had a little controversy, such as the parent drinking too much or the son who was caught stealing from the men's locker room, but it was not the Blasey family. They were just average for the club. "

As many the well-to-do families of the region, the Blaseys sent their children to private schools For Ford, that meant six years at Holton-Arms, where students wore blue-checked skirts that they were trying to convince their mothers to shorten . Among his classmates were the King of Jordan's daughters and members of the J.W. Clan Marriott

Coach handbags were the bag to go, and at lunch, girls were allowed to sit outside, tan their legs and drink.

Intellect has been rewarded and Ford has not missed it. His favorite teacher, Jack Caussin, taught anthropology at the girls' school after 20 years in the Marine Corps. ("My main qualification was to have five sisters," he said.) Ford has stood out as a bright, witty teenager who seemed destitute of a great deal. part of the drama that filled the hallways of the school.

"In class, she always helped," he said. "I could always count on her for a wise crack or two to make me laugh."

The entrance of the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, where Christine Blasey Ford went to high school. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Ford's inner circle was, "How do you say that? Pretty popular girls, "says Andrea Evers, a close friend. "It was not like we were a bunch of tasteless preppies, but God, we were preppy then.

Weekends were spent shopping at the White Flint Mall, the third edition of the Georgetown Club – age of drinking was then 18 – or parents' home out of town for drinking packages from Hamm or Schaefer.

Every summer, the "Holton girls" entered a rented house for Beach Week, an annual bacchanal of high school students from across the region. The preparatory schools that formed Ford's overlapping social circles usually met in a Delaware seaside town each year. Kavanaugh, in his end-of-year directory, quoted his own members in the "Beach Week Ralph Club".

Like Kavanaugh, Ford was part of this alcohol-fueled crop. But those painless evenings, both in beach rentals and in Bethesda's basements, often left girls in trouble.

"The boys were pretty brutal," Evers said. "They would do what they could to make you drunk and do whatever they try to do to you."

In his Post interview, Ford stated that a group of Georgetown Prep boys were attending one of the beer consumption sessions in an unsupervised house near the Columbia Country Club, probably at the same time. summer of 1982. One of them was Kavanaugh, whom she described as acquaintance. At the time, she was 15 years old and he was 17 years old.

Kavanaugh and classmate Mark Judge had started drinking earlier than the others, she said, and they were both "drunk" when they went to school. push in a room. She alleges that Kavanaugh was lying on her, fumbling with her clothes and pressing her hand on her mouth to stop it from screaming. Only when the judge jumped on them was she able to escape the room and hide until she could flee the house, she said.

Her biggest fear after, she recalls 37 years later, was like an attack. So she was as if she were not. At the bottom of the stairs. On the outside. On the rest of her high school years, she said. On graduation day, she wore the required white dress and wore red roses. She did not say anyone.

For the university, her first chance to start again in a new place, she chose the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, five hours away.

"It was not easy for her," said Dan Goldstein, one of his closest friends at the time. "She went to a very small girls' school and was now in a giant state university.

Years later, Ford would describe the university as a time when she was "derailing", struggling with symptoms of trauma that she did not understand yet.

She joined a sorority, but the way of life was too much like where she came from. Despite the math talent that she had shown in high school, a college mate recalled that Ford had failed a statistics course. She became a close friend of Catherine Ricks Piwowarski, who would become her roommate and matron of honor. But both spent a lot of time watching MTV videos from Bon Jovi and Motley Crue.

"In what was a very turbulent academic atmosphere, we were not particularly involved in social life," Piwowarski said. "Our apartment for both of us was a safe place. … but we were a little isolated. "

It was during Ford's junior year that Goldstein, who is currently working as an English teacher in Japan, gave him advice that would change the course of his life.

"He said, you're really smart, and you're like totally [messed] up, "recalled Ford. She remembers him saying, "What are you doing? … Everyone is doing it together but you do not like it."

If she was going to graduate on time, he said, she should specialize in psychology. Since the major did not require students to attend classes in a specific order, Ford could take them all at the same time.

This is how Christine Blasey Ford spent her life doing research on trauma and if it was possible to overcome them.

"Women are away"

Ford graduated on time and made a transformational leap to the other side of the country. Her high marks in postgraduate exams earned her a clinical psychology program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. A doctoral program followed at the University of Southern California. By that time, Ford had learned to surf and adopt the So-Cal lifestyle.

When she moved to Hawaii for a one-year internship in order to complete her PhD, by taking a cheap studio close to Sans Souci Beach, the conversion seemed complete.

"I think she's really reinvented herself," said Jeff Harris, her supervisor at the University of Hawaii's counseling center. "A California surfer is a different image of a girl from the Bethesda Preparatory School."

It was his love of surfing that would attract Russell Ford's attention when he was browsing profiles on Matchmaker.com. At the time, he was an engineer for a medical equipment company. She went from clinical practice to statistician in the Stanford Department of Psychology.

For their first date, they just had dinner, but it was their second date – a surf meeting – along the San Mateo coast that tightened their relationship.

"There is a joie de vivre that happens when you surf on a wave," said Russell. "All your attention is on the wave and at that moment you do not think of anything else."

He knew that more than a love of water had brought him to the West.

"She did not always get along with her parents because of political differences," Russell said. "It was a very male dominated environment. Everyone was interested in what was going on with the men, and the women were discarded, and she did not have the attention or respect she felt she deserved. That's why she was in California, to get away from the TV scene.

As their relationship intensified, Ford told her that she had been physically assaulted years ago. He would learn the specifics of the event, including Kavanaugh's name, during a therapy session a few years later. But then, he just listened.

"I could say that it was uncomfortable to go into all the details," he said.

On June 21, 2002, they were married in a park in the Redwood Forest in front of a hundred people, many of whom were Washington friends. Soon, they had their first son and finally moved to Watsonville, near Monterey Bay, to surf and escape the hectic life of Silicon Valley. The trip, however, was too important and in 2005, they returned to the Palo Alto area after the birth of their second son.

With two young children, Ford decided to enroll in another master's program at Stanford, specializing in epidemiology. Her master's thesis explored the relationship between trauma and depression.

Ford devoted herself to pursuing this type of research while teaching at Stanford and Palo Alto University. She is adored by students for her easy-to-understand lectures – supplemented by surfing metaphors – and admired by her colleagues for her analytical mind and her inventive mathematical models.

She is particularly interested in resilience and post-traumatic growth – the ideas that people who experience trauma can return to normal and even become stronger than before. Ford said she had delivered speeches on the subject to students saying, "You can always recover."

She will have to remember these lessons if she testifies before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate.

Ford knows what to expect: a resumption of Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Three surviving members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during this 1991 confrontation will be on the podium – but this time the show will take place in the era of social media. He will probably be asked to detail every moment of the alleged attack. How much she had to drink. Why she climbed up. What she wore

She will be back in the city she left behind, facing the skepticism and exposure she has been trying to avoid since she fled this teenage night.

Julie Tate contributed to this story.