While reading One Way Back, the new “memoir” by Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 confirmation hearings, I was reminded of a frequently reoccurring scene on the show Cops: A perpetrator has been caught red-handed doing something wrong—let us say he’s got drugs in his car. As the police question and arrest him, the suspect proceeds to talk about everything in the world except the drugs. He was at his brother’s house. His dog is missing. He works afternoons at his job. He talks, incessantly, about absolutely anything but the bag of cocaine in his trunk.

So it is with One Way Back. Christine Blasey Ford is an expert at not answering basic questions about the singular thing that made her famous while going on mindlessly about other things: surfing, her family, and what it’s like to stay in Oprah’s house.

Of course, how could Ford respond to basic questions regarding her attempted upheaval of the American political system? Doing so would require her to unmask herself and the plot in which she was involved.

Ford is, of course, the woman behind the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Brett was confirmed, but the allegation upended Washington and caused serious trauma to many of us involved. As Kathleen Parker recently noted in the Washington Post of all places,  Ford couldn’t care less about the lives she has damaged. So it’s no surprise that One Way Back and her ongoing book tour reveal Ford to be a petulant narcissist.

Ford mentions me only a few times in this new book, and this time it is cautiously and only in the context of official government transcripts and records. The reason for her caution is obvious. As my lawyer put it, “liberals don’t want Mark Judge owning St. Martin’s Press.” Ford already ran over me, a private citizen, once. To do so again would be not only indecent, but enough to risk her reputation and litigation.

Like the criminal on Cops who will talk about anything but the drugs in his car, Ford and her handlers never address the pushback against her charges, such as the questions I raise in my own book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. There are dozens of them, but here I will stick to just two.

The first question is about the role of Ford’s friend “Keith,” a key figure In One Way Back. She explains that he was one of the first people she told about her allegations against Kavanaugh. What she doesn’t reveal is that Keith Koegler was an opposition researcher who spent the entire summer of 2018 doing research on me and Brett. According to the book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, produced by two New York Times reporters, Koegler “spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties … and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.”

Koegler and other oppo researchers had set things up, and the next step was to hit me with an unexpected allegation and entangle my life, which has included a struggle with alcoholism when I was younger, with the life of Brett Kavanaugh, who had a much different journey. It was an oppo research hit, the lynchpin of which was to try to get me to crumble, babble, and use my life to take my friend down, even if he had nothing to do with my struggles. Reading accounts of Ford’s behavior, it becomes clear why she never went to the police or released her therapist’s notes (which never mentioned Brett Kavanaugh) and why she kept asking for delays. She was waiting for me to talk and sink Brett. 

There’s another sign that this opposition research was focused on me. In her July 2018 letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Ford refers to me as. “Mark G. Judge.” Mark G. Judge is a byline I used as a younger journalist and have not used for decades. No one calls me that. Why did Ford? It seems likely that it came from an opposition researcher like Koegler who was poring over my old articles.

The second question is about the dates of the alleged assault, which Ford kept changing. First it was “the mid-1980s” then “the early 1980s” and then 1982. It’s almost like they were trying several ways to put me at a party with Brett and Ford, and when the mid-1980s didn’t work—we were both in college and hundreds of miles apart—they had to rethink the timeline.

Then there are the questions the public, or at least conservative journalists, still ask. To this day Ford cannot say where this alleged party took place, what day of the week it was, how she got to the house or how she got home. How are these questions addressed in One Way Back? Like this: “How did I end up at that party in the summer of 1982? There has been so much emphasis on the literal how—who drove me there, how I knew the boys. But the larger answer to the question is much more interesting. How did I end up being a girl who went to parties with boys she really didn’t know?”

No, Christine, when you’ve almost destroyed lives and given people near-suicidal PTSD with your false claims, those larger answers are not more interesting—or morally important. Again, it’s another attempt to change the subject.

Much of One Way Back concerns Ford’s history and personal life. She grew up in the suburbs of D.C., which she describes as a conservative government town. “The men talked and the women laughed,” she writes. I also grew up in D.C. and I found the opposite to be true; it was a liberal government town, not a conservative one. After some hard-partying years in college in North Carolina, she found her groove in California where she became a psychologist. Ford never expresses gratitude that her wealthy family paid for all of this. But then, her blood family did not support her accusations, with her father Ralph even apologizing to Brett’s father after the storm passed. Ford leaves them by the side of the road: “My immediate family’s silence highlighted the immense love coming from friends, cousins, nieces. aunts, lifelong colleagues and strangers across the world. We don’t get to choose how others respond when we are in crisis, but I am grateful for those who stepped in like family.”

It’s worth mentioning here that, as Kathleen Parker observed in the Washington Post, the problem is not that someone registers a complaint against a nominee. It’s the tactics they use. As I told the FBI, as I told Fox News, and as I told high school friends, had Ford contacted me anytime in the summer of 2018 I gladly would have met with her and the police, senators, her family—anyone, anywhere, anytime. When asked by Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post why she never reached out to me, Ford merely said she thought about it but “didn’t know how.” I’m a journalist with a big mouth who has lived in D.C. his entire life. At the time I had a reasonably large online presence. She couldn’t reach me?  

I had forgotten that at one point Ford’s own lawyers told her to stop and Sen. Feinstein sent her a thanks-but-no-thanks letter. “Christine, our final recommendation is that you don’t go forward,” the lawyers told her in September 2018 as Brett approached the finish line. Ford then threw a tantrum: “I was also devastated that I’d spent the last two months trying to do this the right way and now everything had turned on a dime … How is this possible? What about all the work we’ve done? I don’t understand why you are saying this now.” “The case is closed,” Feinstein wrote. “We can’t let you stand in front of an oncoming train,” the lawyers said. Ford “hung up the phone, crying in tears of rage and frustration.”

Then like a surprise demon who pops up at the end of a horror movie, Kamala Harris arrived when Ford’s case had been dismissed. Harris heard about Feinstein’s letter and that Feinstein had closed the case, and Harris raised holy hell. The game was supposed to be over, Ford writes. “But other forces were at work that decided otherwise. I started getting calls and emails from journalists.” Reading this from Ford, I now believe it was Kamala Harris, the queen of opposition research, who launched the attack.

In the summer of 2018, Harris was photographed at a noon party with Ace Smith, known as “Dr. Death” and the father of opposition research. Who was Ace Smith’s disciple? Michael Avenatti, the criminal extortionist lawyer who would accuse me and Brett of drugging girls and gang rape. In March 2018, Politico reported that Avenatti was seen in a New York restaurant having dinner with Ronan Farrow. On Sept. 14, Farrow called to say that I had been implicated in a letter charging me and Brett with “sexual misconduct.” Farrow could not tell me who the accuser was, or where this alleged misconduct had allegedly taken place. The when? “Sometime in the 1980s.”

For her part, Ford had been working the entire summer with Emma Brown, the reporter at the Washington Post who broke the story. Brown contacted me on July 11, a day after first meeting with Ford. She asked me about Brett and what made Georgetown Prep, our high school, “so special.” She mentioned nothing about Ford. Brown’s explosive Sept. 16 story about the alleged assault also left out Leland Keyser, Ford’s high school friend who denied the party ever took place and said she doesn’t even know Brett Kavanaugh. She would later say she was pressured by Ford’s goons to change her story but refused.

Getting the picture? The opposition researchers found me, discovered I did some sinful and stupid stuff in the 1980s, and moved heaven and Earth to put Brett Kavanaugh in the same places as me. They tried extortion, death threats, and even a honey trap on me, which I’ve written about elsewhere.  They also tried to convict me of being a hard-partying teenager in the 1980s. There’s an irony here. While I was reaching sobriety in Washington, Ford was baking in California. “I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before,” she writes, “I now explored MDMA, which helped me get outside myself … I realized I had quite a few attributes, not the least of which was my ability to have fun.”

From what I heard from people who knew Ford in high school, she was having fun at Holton Arms also. A lot of fun. At one point in One Way Back she and a friend reminisce about their past behavior, which included drinking, drugs, and “hooking up” with boys whose names they don’t even recall. 

In One Way Back, Ford claims to feel bad for Brett and his family “I had never, ever wanted his family to suffer. I had tried to keep things private for both of our sakes. When my allegations came out publicly, the media started reporting that he was getting threats. It troubled me a lot.” She also says she feels bad for dragging her now former friend Leland Keyser into the nightmare. “I still feel terrible that my situation caused her so much stress and pain in a life that had already seen its fair share.” Another friend who supported Ford and was with her at the hearing now has cut her lose: “Suddenly she stopped responding to my calls and texts.”

Of course, Ford can now rely on her new Hollywood pals: “Oprah was pivotal, at a time when I needed it the most.” Ford is also welcomed backstage by Metallica, a band that ought to know better. Her speaker fees now range between $40,000 and $75,000 per event, according to this speaker’s bureau website.

Ford, who claims to know so much about trauma, had no idea—or rather no concern—for how her ridiculous accusations would nearly destroy people like me and Leland Keyser. The closest Ford comes to addressing any of my questions is a glancing blow to “other books” about the nightmare hearings of 2018. This includes “fringe books that no one would read beyond their own extremist audience.”

Another dodge. Again, Ford is the criminal in Cops who will talk about anything but the facts. “Drugs in my car? You know, the Washington Redskins recently changed their name.” As Senator John Kennedy put it when he saw the final FBI report, it’s time for Ford and those who still buy her crazy tale to “put down the bong.” You can dismiss it as “extremism,” but anyone interested in the facts—and not themselves in the thrall of hallucinogenic drugs—will give The Devil’s Triangle its due.