On Thursday, September 27th, both Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his sexual assault accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified at a public hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
While watching the historic hearing, TV writer and Twitter personality Aaron Fullerton drew an eerie connection between Ford’s testimony and a scene from the Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale. He tweeted a photo from Capitol Hill photoshopped next to a still of a government meeting in the show. The resemblance between the two images is clear; both show a panel of white men in suits looking sternly forward.
“One of these is from today’s hearing. The other is a still from The Handmaid’s Tale,” Fullerton wrote on Twitter. “Big props to all the fun people who don’t realize the point is that it’s a bunch of powerful, protected white men deciding the fate of women.”
The scene from The Handmaid’s Tale that Fullerton referenced shows a group of women pleading in front of an all-male council for the right to learn to read and write. People are drawing similarities between Serena Joy Waterford, the protagonist of the show, and Dr. Ford.
The 51-year-old psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University testified that Kavanaugh, 53, tried to sexually assault her at a high school party in the 1980’s.
Ford said that since her story became public, her greatest fears have been realized; her and her family have been targets of harassment and have received multiple death threats.
“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” said Ford, tearfully. “I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”