Last week, Judge Kavanaugh’s job interview for the role on the Supreme Court ended up more of a trial after Christine Blasey Ford detailed allegations of him sexually assaulting her, allegations he denies. And now his daughter has been unfairly dragged into the story.
A cartoon, drawn by Chris Britt for the Illinois Times, depicts Trump's Supreme Court pick Kavanaugh’s 10-year-old daughter praying by her bed, ‘Dear God, forgive my angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr Ford’
The joke, because it’s quite easy to overlook the funny side when a 10-year-old is held up as an object of ridicule, is in reference to the previous time Kavanaugh’s daughter was used to make a point, and that was during Kavanaugh’s hearing.
Speaking of his sympathy for Dr Ford, who alleged that he climbed on top of her at a party, groped her and tried to remove her clothes, before covering her mouth to stifle her screams, making her wonder if he might accidentally suffocate her, Kavanaugh explained: ‘I’m not questioning that Dr Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time but I’ve never done this to her or anyone. That is not who I am, that’s not who I was. I am innocent of this charge.
‘I intend no ill-will to Dr Ford and her family. The other night Ashley [his wife] and my daughter Liza said their prayers’
At this point, Kavanaugh started crying, saying ‘And little Liza, all of ten years old, said to Ashley, we should pray for the woman. That’s a lot of wisdom from a 10-year-old.’
He added: ‘We mean no ill-will.’
Of course the Illinois Times isn’t the first to throw little Liza into the fray of the Kavanaugh hearings, that was her dad’s thing. But stooping to his level of leveraging a little girl to make a point is just not on. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and who does it really help in the end? Certainly not those many, many people - mainly women - who have felt moved by the Kavanaugh hearings and the subsequent #WhyIDidntReport hashtag to realize their own experiences of sexual assault.
Chelsea Clinton, another child of politicians, tweeted about the cartoon: ‘Please leave Judge Kavanaugh’s daughters alone. They do not belong in your cartoons, “jokes”, or skits. If you can’t make your point about Judge Kavanaugh, whatever it may be, without bullying his kids, it’s not worth making.’
This isn’t the first Kavanaugh-inspired cartoon to upset - a Canadian cartoon of the GOP (that’s a nickname for the Republican Party, to which Kavanaugh belongs) raping Lady Justice did the precise sum of zero to alleviate the feelings of upset amongst sexual assault and rape survivors.
As for the FBI investigation triggered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, to find the truth of the matter between Kavanaugh and Dr Ford? According to the Wall Street Journal, the White House has so far found that the FBI investigation has produced no corroboration of Dr Ford’s allegations. This may have something to do with the fact the White House restricted the FBI’s investigation so much so that Dr Ford wasn’t allowed to speak to them. That situation is the joke, not a 10-year-old child.