2. Is the Story Specific, and Does the Story Make Sense?
Making sense is the strongest point in Blasey Ford’s favor, and the one that gives her story its popular support: This sounds like a real incident, and undoubtedly mirrors other real events. Certainly, we know Kavanaugh and Judge to have been booze-and-party types at the time, and Judge admits to having been a very hard drinker. It’s not hard to picture a generic group of privileged white teenagers acting in this fashion. Blasey Ford’s account makes internal sense, and does not require any elaborate conspiracies.

However, not all of her story is entirely believable without raising some eyebrows. She insists that “each person had one beer but that Kavanaugh and Judge had started drinking earlier and were heavily intoxicated.” Which seems awfully convenient if it is important for her to maintain that her memory of the incident is unclouded by alcohol, and frankly sounds a lot like the kind of thing teenagers say when caught drinking (“Honestly Mom, those guys were drunk but I only just had one beer.”) The nature of the allegations make it irrelevant whether she was drunk, if she’s telling the truth — but whether she was drunk matters a lot to how clear her memory of the event is 36 years later.

Moreover, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the passage of so much time, there are an awful lot of details missing from this story — when the party was, where it was, how she got there or left, what she did after. That becomes particularly important given that Kavanaugh, Judge, and Smyth — three of the four boys supposed to have been in attendance — all deny any of this happened at all. And if it was a party in the summer, as Blasey Ford now claims, that would seem inconsistent with King’s claim to have heard about it at school at the time.