NBC News

Women From Catholic High Schools in DC Area Break ‘Culture of Silence'

Christine Blasey Ford has broken a "culture of silence" around other experiences of sexual assault that stemmed from alcohol-fueled parties in the 1980s among classmates that attended private schools in the Washington, D.C., area, NBC News reported.

A dozen women who attended Catholic and private prep schools in the Montgomery County area of Maryland decades ago when Brett Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School spoke to NBC News this week, seven of them on the record. The women — most of whom signed an open letter saying they believed Ford’s allegation, and all but two of whom did not know her or Kavanaugh personally — shared their memories of kegs, bonfires and unsupervised beach houses where heavy drinking fueled sexually inappropriate comments and behavior and attacks that were never spoken of afterward.

“So many of us thought we were alone,” one graduate of the all-girls School of the Sacred Heart said. “But we weren’t. When we heard Christine’s story, we knew that story. We’d experienced it.”

Contact Us