On planes, in bars, around phones, a nation is transfixed

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. >> Travelers on airplanes cried as they watched it on their seatback televisions. College students holed up all day at library computers and streamed it on their phones, drowning out their lectures. Friends sat together, stunned and still, on living room couches. Television screens at nail salons, sports bars and hotel lobbies were tuned to nothing else.

All day today, through eight hours of tears, anger and exasperation, it seemed like the country could not look away.

On the New York subway, people huddled around their phones to listen. They sat in parking lots with testimony wafting out of their car windows. They listened to it on their commutes home, transfixed by the high-stakes spectacle unfolding in a cramped Washington hearing room as Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, gave emotional and irreconcilable accounts of a night 36 years ago that has indelibly changed their lives while splintering Washington and much of the country.

Some felt they had to bear witness to history unfolding. They compared it to watching the Challenger space shuttle explode or the O.J. Simpson police chase. Only now, it was a battle for control of the Supreme Court tangled with questions about justice, gender equality and how America’s political system treats claims of sexual assault against members of its ruling class.

Raw, unfiltered pain was on display for all to witness. Democrats saw Kavanaugh’s tears. Republicans were faced with Blasey’s pain.

“This brings back so much pain,” a viewer identified as Brenda from Missouri, 76, told C-SPAN as the network broadcast a shot of Blasey’s empty chair. “You will never forget it.”

In Colorado Springs, three conservative friends who met through church decades ago sank into a living-room couch overlooking a ridge of mountains.

The women said they thought the hearings amounted to a show trial that would not definitively establish whether Kavanaugh attacked Blasey one night in 1982 at an alcohol-soaked high-school party in Maryland.

“It sounds like it’s real to her, I can’t judge that,” said Susan Kennedy, 57, who watched with her hand at her chin. “I go back to: When you hire somebody you look at who they are now. Even if he was part of that, it’s not who he is now.”

Sitting beside her, Louellen Welsch, 62, recalled how she had survived multiple sexual assault attempts as a girl and a young woman, and reflected on how some 30 years ago she had been forced to avoid a boss who made sexually charged jokes.

“I have a problem with this coming out now,” she said. “I would be glad to have those people prosecuted. I want those people punished, not ‘I’m going to keep this secret.’”

After days of nonstop discussion about Blasey’s allegations, people across the country went still as they watched her speak on camera for the first time.

At the Cravings coffeehouse in western Pennsylvania, where a group of Democratic women had gathered to watch the hearings, the room fell silent as Blasey’s testimony began. The phone scrolling around the room came to a pause.

Even as her plane to Atlanta was taxiing at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Farrah Shapiro sat in her middle seat, glued to her phone watching the Senate hearing in Washington. Almost as soon as the in-flight Wi-Fi became available, she turned back to Blasey’s testimony. She kept watching even after she landed in Georgia.

“It’s important to see that a woman has a voice,” she said tearfully as passengers left the plane.

Shapiro said she was too young to recall Anita Hill’s appearance before Congress. It was important, she said, to be able to watch Blasey’s testimony, even as she traveled.

Reading news coverage of the hearing, she said, would be one thing. Watching it live, though, “squeezes at your heart.”

In Plymouth, Massachusetts, Dorothy Brodesser started the morning by sitting down with a cup of coffee and her gray kitten for comfort as she steeled herself to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, knowing it would dredge up her own memories of being raped.

When Blasey sat down in the witness chair, Brodesser gasped.

“Oh my God,” she said. “She looks like she is going to have a heart attack.”

As Blasey began to describe the assault, Brodesser put her fingers to her temples. As Blasey talked about how the experience changed her life — how she struggled in school, for instance — Brodesser nodded.

“I just want to hug her,” Brodesser said as she watched Blasey answer hours of questions from Democratic senators and an outside prosecutor hired by the Republican majority. “She seems more fragile than I expected. I’d be scared to death in that hall.”

Then, when Kavanaugh’s turn came to speak in the afternoon, the feeling of the event shifted dramatically, as the Supreme Court nominee radiated anger over his nomination process.

In Portland, Oregon, Robert McCullough, an energy economist who describes himself as a “liberal Republican,” was struck by Kavanuagh’s emotional tone as he pilloried Democrats on the committee and cried as he talked about how the charges had affected his family and children.

“For an experienced judge to issue such a tirade is very unusual,” McCullough said. “I was surprised and a bit alarmed.”

In Atlanta, Sophia Tone, 17, watched the hearing in a classroom at Druid Hills High School and then tuned in again once she got home. While Trump and Kavanaugh’s conservative supporters rallied behind his angry rebuttals, Tone said she found them jarring. “He’s so aggressive, it’s hard for me to process what he’s saying and believe it,” she said.

She wanted the hearings to focus on an alleged sexual assault, but the increasingly divisive reactions from Senators of both parties only underlined, for her, the polarized atmosphere of American politics. “This shouldn’t be Republican versus Democrat,” she said.

When it was over, and people changed channels or turned off their televisions, there were few signs of any national catharsis. Blasey’s supporters believed her when she said she was “100 percent” sure Kavanaugh had attacked her. Supporters of the conservative judge accepted that he was “100 percent certain” the accusations were false.

In Massachusetts, Brodesser finished the day with more empathy for Kavanaugh and the threats and slurs his family had been forced to endure. But she still believed Blasey. Surviving an assault like she did, she said, does not simply wrap up like a daylong televised confirmation hearing.

“Every night when you walk to your car in a parking lot,” she said. “Every minute of every day, you’re thinking about it whether you want to or not.