Washington DC : White House counselor Kellyanne Conway opened up about being sexually assaulted in the past and expressed empathy for other victims of sexual assault. “I feel very empathetic for victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and rape. I’m a victim of sexual assault,” she told CNN. However, Conway, while speaking about the case of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of assault by a professor, Christine Blasey Ford, argued that an individual should be responsible for his/her own conduct.
“I don’t expect Judge Kavanaugh or Jake Tapper or Jeff Flake or anybody to be held responsible for that (sexual assault). You have to be responsible for your own conduct,” she added. Conway further clarified that the ongoing probe on Kavanaugh should not be compared to the ‘Me Too’ uprising, which saw women accusing men in a position of power of sexual misconduct. “Let’s not compare Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, and a few others, to what’s happened here, if we’re going to have a national conversation, stop judging the victims and perpetrators according to their politics,” she said.
Clearing the air about working with United States President Donald Trump, Conway asserted that the US President was “so good to the women who work for him.” Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California, had alleged that Kavanaugh had assaulted her during a party in the 1980s when they were both in high school. She had accused Kavanaugh of groping her and attempting to remove her clothes. Kavanaugh, however, denied all the allegations during the testimony, and said the reputation of him and his family has been “totally and permanently destroyed”.In the wake of the developments, Trump directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to conduct a supplemental investigation on Kavanaugh.