Why did she change her story of an assault in the mid-1980s, when she was in her late teens, to 1982, when she was just 15 — and does her tale of “struggling” due to the trauma match up with that timeline? (I explored this question in an earlier column here.)

Why did she offer so many other shifting details, in such short order, and leave so many blanks in her story? (Why is it that her memory is credited as unquestionable with regard to Kavanaugh being the perpetrator, but her manifold confusions of memory are accepted as being irrelevant to the former question?)

Why haven’t reporters and editors been more interested in the stunning dichotomy between Ford’s listing of her lifelong friend Leland Ingham Keyser as present at the gathering, and Keyser’s insistence that she never even knew Kavanaugh and remembers no gathering remotely like it? How could they accept, without question, Ford’s contention that it is unremarkable for Keyser to forget such a gathering? (Most people would think that if a girl — Keyser — went with only one female friend to a gathering with older boys both barely knew, and the friend disappeared, leaving Keyser as the only girl there, it would be very surprising indeed for Keyser not to remember it, especially if the alleged attacker, Kavanaugh, was as flagrantly drunk as Ford said he was even before the attack.) Why did it take a British, not American, publication to explore Keyser’s status?