Jeff Flake Is Confronted on Video by Sexual Assault Survivors

The scene was striking: Two women blocking an elevator door, angrily demanding to be heard as a senator stood by, listening quietly, nodding and looking away.

“On Monday, I stood in front of your office,” one of the women, Ana Maria Archila, forcefully told Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. “I told the story of my sexual assault.”

Flake had just announced his intention Friday morning to vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, despite emotional testimony a day earlier from Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Reporters swarmed around as Flake waited in the elevator, but the two women interrupted and demanded that he listen.

“I need to go, I need to go to the hearing,” Flake told Archila, 39, in the widely shared video of the moment.

Archila persisted. “I told it because I recognized in Dr. Ford’s story that she is telling the truth,” she said, her voice breaking. “What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court. This is not tolerable. You have children in your family. Think about them.”

Hours later, in a surprise development, Flake said he would not support confirmation without a one-week FBI investigation into the allegations, as he joined his fellow Republicans in advancing the nomination. There was widespread speculation that the elevator encounter had played a role.

Archila, a national committee member of the Working Families Party and an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a New York-based liberal organizing group, said the moment had come together in a flash of righteous rage. She had spent the week in Washington protesting Kavanaugh’s nomination, she said, and had just read about Flake’s decision when she saw him in a Capitol Hill hallway.

Archila and Maria Gallagher, 23, who had also come to protest the confirmation, raced to block the elevators Flake was heading toward, she said, and confronted him as he entered.

“I wanted him to feel my rage,” Archila said in an interview Friday afternoon.

As she spoke to him, Flake nodded and looked down, his eyes darting between her, the floor and the elevator wall — a moment captured live on CNN.

Then Gallagher spoke.

“I was sexually assaulted, and nobody believed me,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter.”

Later, as she tearfully reprimanded Flake for his decision to support Kavanaugh, Gallagher demanded the senator’s attention.

“Don’t look away from me,” she said. “Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me, that you will let people like that go into the highest court of the land and tell everyone what they can do to their bodies.”

Gallagher declined to be interviewed, but confirmed many details through a spokesman.

Archila said that when they confronted Flake, it was one of the first times either had publicly shared their accounts of sexual assault. Archila, who says she was assaulted when she was 5, said she was moved to tell her story after seeing Blasey’s testimony.

“When the #MeToo movement broke out, I thought about saying it — but I wrote things and deleted it and eventually decided I can’t say, ‘Me too,'” Archila said. “But when Dr. Blasey did it, I forced myself to think about it again.”

Flake was in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday afternoon after the exchange and could not be immediately reached for comment. In the video, he can be seen bowing his head as the women tell their stories, and murmuring, “Thank you,” without answering their questions.

Archila said “he looked ashamed” and “had a hard time looking us in the face.”

“He knows that this is wrong and it sends the wrong message to my children and his children,” Archila said. “But despite all that, he chooses party.”

The exchange channeled anger among liberals over how Republicans have run the confirmation. Shortly after the women confronted Flake, several Democrats walked out of the committee’s hearing.

“This is just a total railroad job,” yelled Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, before walking out of the room.

For each woman, the encounter meant that their family now knew about an assault that was once private, given how widely video footage of the exchange had been shared.

Archila said her father messaged her after finding out: “I’m so sorry for not being able to protect you,” he said.

“It was Dr. Ford’s story that allowed me to tell this secret to my parents,” she said. “I now have to do the work of how me and my parents process this experience, and I don’t know how this is going to go.”