Immediately after U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh underwent intense questioning for his alleged sexual assault decades ago, I heard from a handful of Northwest Indiana women who claimed that they, too, were victims of sexual assaults in their younger days.

“As much as I want young men and women to understand how easy and commonly sexual assault can and does happen, I can’t bring myself to share my story without anonymity,” explained one woman who’s been a Facebook friend and reader for many years. “I hate that I am too weak. I am in awe of the women who aren’t.”

The Chesterton woman, who’s in her 40s, believes her story could be shared by too many women who have experienced similar circumstances in their past.

“This is the whole point of #MeToo,” she said. “But I feel like those words have lost their meaning along the way.”

For too many women, the meaning of being victimized by sexual assault has also been lost or distorted or dismissed along the way, I believe.

“As an adult in 2018, I can look back at it and know it for what it was,” the woman said.

When she was a 21-year-old college student, she was sexually assaulted, she told me.

“I didn’t think of it that way for many years, and I still struggle with defining and understanding it,” said the woman, who’s married with children. “I honestly don’t feel damaged or traumatized by it. I think that is the upside to not truly seeing it as rape or assault at the time.”

The woman admitted to me that sometimes she drank too much in college. She experimented with drugs. She partied a lot.

“I was kind of a typical college kid,” she recalled.

“If I were nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, I am sure old friends would come out of the woodwork to tell the world how wild I was back then,” she admitted. “The truth is that I am not the same person I was then, and I would not want to be judged now based on who I was then.”

As all of us should know, most adults are not the same people they were as high school or college students. We grow. We mature. We learn.

“We hopefully become better humans through life experience and all the trials and tribulations that come and go over the years,” she said. “This probably sounds like I am defending Brett Kavanaugh. I am not.”

Kavanaugh is being considered for what is likely a lifetime position on the Supreme Court. He’s being grilled by critics and millions of Americans for good reason. Once he’s on the nation’s highest court, Kavanaugh will have immense legal power and the pivotal role of presumably conservative-leaning rulings.

“A vote to confirm Kavanaugh tells survivors of sexual abuse that their experiences can be disregarded if they inconvenience their powerful abusers,” said Faiz Shakir, national political director for the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s a grave injustice to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and millions of people with experiences like hers.”

Like the women who contacted me about their alleged sexual assaults from long ago that have been dredged up by the allegations against Kavanaugh, whose innocence has been publicly questioned.

“I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk,” stated Charles “Chad” Ludington, a former Yale University classmate of Kavanaugh’s.

Ludington, an educator at North Carolina State University, released a public statement Sunday: “If he lied about his past actions on national television, and more especially while speaking under oath in front of the United States Senate, I believe those lies should have consequences.”

As the FBI investigates Kavanaugh’s past, the women who contacted me are investigating their own pasts. They’re not doing it publicly through Senate hearings, but privately through hushed realizations.

“The night I was raped I went quite willingly with my rapist,” the Chesterton woman told me. “He was my friend and we hung out within our group of friends and we worked together. He had a serious girlfriend at the time and I hung out with her sometimes, too.”

The woman admitted she was “seriously and dangerously drunk” that night.

“I could barely walk,” she told me. “I remember going to his room and throwing up immediately into his trash can. The next thing I remember was waking up face down in his bed while he was raping me.”

She passed out, she said, waking up the next morning and leaving without saying a word.

“I did not feel like I was raped because, before I passed out, my intention was to sleep with him,” she said. “That was my drunken intention. In the harsh light of the sober day, I was excruciatingly ashamed of my behavior and I felt it was my fault.”

She could hardly look him in the eye after that night.

“Not because he raped me. It was because I was embarrassed of my actions that night,” she said. “In 1996, it did not matter that I was too intoxicated to make good decisions and that he should have been respectful of the fact that I was in no condition to consent. That was not the paradigm under which we lived.”

Is it the paradigm in 2018? No. Not nearly enough. We know this. Maybe the Kavanaugh investigation will also launch an examination of this long-secretive subject in our country. Maybe not.

“It infuriates me when I hear people defending this nominee with arguments questioning why this woman would come out now,” the woman said. “I still cannot publicly tell my story. I don’t want my kids to know … my husband … my parents … my friends, colleagues, family, acquaintances, clients. … I don’t want any of them to know.”

Slavery and its shameful aftermath has been deemed our nation’s original sin. But maybe it’s the untold numbers of sexual assault victims who now feel unshackled to share their repressed stories and face their accusers. If only in their own mind.

“My rapist is married with three lovely children,” the woman said. “They look like a family we would be friends with. He is probably a great guy who made a dumb decision that night. None of that changes the fact he was a rapist the one time I needed him not to be.”

jdavich@post-trib.com

Twitter@jdavich