The Santa Barbara #BelieveChristine rally joins actions nationwide against Brett Kavanaugh's potential appointment as a lifetime justice.
Erika Carlos

More than a hundred community members gathered at noon today at De la Guerra Plaza to demonstrate solidarity with Christine Blasey Ford, who testified to Congress this morning about an attempted rape she says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed when they were teenagers.

The #BelieveChristine rally joined actions nationwide against Brett Kavanaugh’s potential appointment as a lifetime justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alejandra Melgoza, community organizer at Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), spoke about the daily discrimination and injustices that women face, and how “women of color, especially black women, have pushed so many of these [social justice] movements so that we can feel comfortable about saying, ‘I’m a survivor, I was harassed, and this happened to me, too.’”

Participants wrote “I Believe” on their hands and held them up during a moment of silence for survivors of sexual assault. “When are we going to say ‘That’s it’?” Melgoza asked the crowd. “This is the last person that needs to come out so that survivors do not feel forced to tell these stories. So that they do not feel forced to relive their traumas,” she said.

Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony to counter Blasey Ford’s continues at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing as of the time of this writing.

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