Melania told Trump that Christine Blasey Ford was 'lying' about sexual assault during Kavanaugh hearings, claims new book
First Lady Melania Trump reportedly told President Donald Trump that she thought Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was lying when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a new book has claimed.
Ford's testimony last year was historic as she became the first woman in decades to be publicly subject to questioning over her sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee.
"You know that woman is lying, don’t you?” Melania told Trump, according to a book published by conservative authors Mollie Hemingway and Carie Severino titled 'Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court'.
Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist while Severino is the chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network. The duo's book is set to come out on Tuesday.
The authors, in the book, used the first lady as an example of an under-reported storyline in the news that "millions of other women and men" did not believe Blasey Ford.
Dr. Ford had given a heartbreaking and tearful testimony about the painful details of her harrowing experience in 1980s citing her "civic duty" to come forward.
The Senate, however, confirmed Kavanaugh to the SC bench a week after the psychology professor's testimony.
"Her credibility, if anything, was viewed as stronger because of her lapses in memory and because the odder parts to the story, such as her description of how she came to tell her husband about the assault," the authors wrote in the book.
“Despite the holes in her story, the media clung to these details," however, Melania didn't, according to the authors, the New York Post reported.
As millions of Americans, on September 27, 2018, listened to Ford describe the intimate details of her alleged attempted rape publicly and relived the trauma of her horrific experience 36 years ago, many sexual assault survivors began to share their own experience on social media.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the National Sexual Assault Hotline witnessed a 147 percent increase in the number of calls on the day of the testimony compared with a normal weekday. RAINN is the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the country which administers the hotline.
Hemmingway and Severino's book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Kavanaugh hearings last year.
An excerpt of the book, published in The Post, reveals how Republican Sen. Susan Collins was treated during this time.
She was considered a pivotal swing vote. According to the book, her husband was threatened with ricin in a letter addressed to their Maine home.
While Collins' neighbor, in Washington, said that he was troubled that he was living next door to a "rape apologist."