Mazie Hirono Says Susan Collins Can't Have It Both Ways on Christine Blasey Ford and #MeToo: 'What Is That?'

Senator Mazie Hirono, Hawaii Democrat and voice of reason amidst the madness, found Senator Susan Collins’s response to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony “insulting.”

“I believe that she believes what she testified to,” the Maine Republican said of Ford’s testimony, in which she recounted being sexually assaulted at 15 by a then-17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh: “I do believe that she was assaulted, I don’t know by whom, and I’m not certain when, but I do not believe that he was the assailant.” Collins made the comments on Friday, when she announced her support for Kavanaugh—while, in the same breath, saying she supports the #MeToo movement. Collins was one of the undecided swing voters in the Senate who ultimately tipped the vote in Kavanaugh’s favor.

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Hirono—who told the Republican men supporting Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to “just shut up and step up” during the hearings—said: “To say that she thinks that Dr. Ford thinks that she was assaulted, what is that? Is she mistaken?”

“She, herself, said that she serves so many survivors from her state and elsewhere,” Hirono said. “All of us have been hearing stories from and accounts from survivors going back many, many years where they kept all these painful, traumatic accounts to themselves. And this is what happens with sexual assault survivors, that they do not come forward.”

Hirono also criticized the assertion, made by Collins and other Republicans, that Ford’s account had not been corroborated. “She had talked about this assault to her husband, to others, before Brett Kavanaugh ever was nominated to the Supreme Court. She took a lie detector test.

“There was no corroboration on Brett Kavanaugh’s bald assertion that he didn’t do it,” she said, “because the people that the FBI interviewed—which was just a small number of the dozens that they should have interviewed—they all said that they had no recollection. That is hardly what I would call exoneration.”