'Such a Slap in the Face.' Sexual Assault Survivors Who Met With Susan Collins Feel Betrayed [View all]

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Last Thursday night, Amanda O’Brien sat on a bus for 10 hours to get from Maine to Washington D.C. to meet with Sen. Susan Collins and share her opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The bus was full of sexual assault survivors, who shared their stories with their seat mates as they crawled toward the Capitol. O’Brien, who wore black like the rest of the survivors, tried to prepare herself. When she and a handful of other survivors got to the Senator’s office on Friday, she told Senator Collins that she had been sexually assaulted for years as a young child. She told her because of the impact of the assault, she later became the victim of domestic violence. She told her Senator things she has rarely told anyone, things she would still rather not repeat.

“Senator Collins was also teary eyed,” she recalled on Friday morning. “It was very much a woman-to-woman conversation. She hugged us, we felt very listened to. I would be shocked if she votes yes.”

“I looked her in the eye with tears in my eyes and said ‘please,'” recalls Perreault, a 46-year-old office administrator in Portland who is also a sexual assault survivor. Perreault says she skipped other big protests of the Trump era because she’s shy, she’s a germaphobe, and she gets motion sickness easily. For this, she got on a bus. “I begged her not to confirm Kavanaugh,” she said.

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But on Friday afternoon, Collins announced her intention to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh, all but ensuring that Trump’s pick will sit on the Supreme Court, despite Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that he pinned her to a bed and tried to rape her when they were both in high school. Kavanaugh denies Ford’s allegation.

“I feel betrayed,” says O’Brien. “I feel it was a really dirty trick to sit down and listen to survivors and almost use them as talking points to get on the soapbox for Republicans.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/such-a-slap-in-the-face-sexual-assault-survivors-who-met-with-susan-collins-feel-betrayed-shell-vote-for-kavanaugh/ar-BBO0x72?li=BBnbcA1