Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both "stumbling drunk," Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.

By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh's confirmation. "Why suffer through the annihilation if it's not going to matter?" she said.

Her story leaked anyway. On Wednesday, The Intercept reported that Feinstein had a letter describing an incident involving Kavanaugh and a woman while they were in high school, and that Feinstein was refusing to share it with her Democratic colleagues.

Feinstein soon released a statement: "I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court," she wrote. "That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities."

The FBI received a version of the letter with Ford's name redacted, according to a Republican official with knowledge of the letter, and then sent it to the White House to be included in Kavanaugh's background file. The White House sent it to the Senate Judiciary Committee, making it available to all senators.

As pressure grew, the New York Times reported that the incident involved "possible sexual misconduct."

By then, Ford had begun to fear she would be exposed, particularly after a BuzzFeed reporter visited her at her home and tried to speak to her as she was leaving a classroom where she teaches graduate students. Another reporter called her colleagues to ask about her.

On Friday, the New Yorker reported the letter's contents but did not reveal Ford's identity. Soon after, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) released a letter from 65 women who say they knew Kavanaugh when he attended high school from 1979 to 1983 at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in North Bethesda.

"Through the more than 35 years we have known him, Brett has stood out for his friendship, character, and integrity," the women wrote. "In particular, he has always treated women with decency and respect. That was true when he was in high school, and it has remained true to this day."

As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.

"These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid," she said, explaining her decision to come forward. "Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation."

Katz said she believes Feinstein honored Ford's request to keep her allegation confidential, but "regrettably others did not."

"Victims must have the right to decide whether to come forward, especially in a political environment that is as ruthless as this one," Katz said. "She will now face vicious attacks by those who support this nominee."

After so many years, Ford said she does not remember some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.

At the time, Ford said, she knew Kavanaugh and Judge as "friendly acquaintances" in the private-school social circles of suburban Maryland. Her Holton-Arms friends mostly hung out with boys from the Landon School, she said, but for a period of several months socialized regularly with students from Georgetown Prep.

Ford said she does not remember how the gathering came together the night of the incident. She said she often spent time in the summer at the Columbia Country Club pool in Chevy Chase, where in those pre-cellphone days, teenagers learned about gatherings via word of mouth. She also doesn't recall who owned the house or how she got there.

Ford said she remembers that it was in Montgomery County, not far from the country club, and that no parents were home at the time. Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party. Those individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.

She said she recalls a small family room where she and a handful of others drank beer together that night. She said that each person had one beer but that Kavanaugh and Judge had started drinking earlier and were heavily intoxicated.

In his senior-class yearbook entry at Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh made several references to drinking, claiming membership to the "Beach Week Ralph Club" and "Keg City Club." He and Judge are pictured together at the beach in a photo in the yearbook.

Judge is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post. He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in "Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk," which described his own blackout drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book "Loyola Prep." Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a "Bart O'Kavanaugh," who "puked in someone's car the other night" and "passed out on his way back from a party."

Through the White House, Kavanaugh did not respond to a question about whether the name was a pseudonym for him.

Ford said she left the family room to use the bathroom, which was at the top of a narrow stairway. She doesn't remember whether Kavanaugh and Judge were behind her or already upstairs, but she remembers being pushed into a bedroom and then onto a bed. Rock-and-roll music was playing with the volume turned up high, she said.

She alleges that Kavanaugh — who played football and basketball at Georgetown Prep — held her down with the weight of his body and fumbled with her clothes, seemingly hindered by his intoxication. Judge stood across the room, she said, and both boys were laughing "maniacally." She said she yelled, hoping that someone downstairs would hear her over the music, and Kavanaugh clapped his hand over her mouth to silence her.

At one point, she said, Judge jumped on top of them, and she tried unsuccessfully to wriggle free. Then Judge jumped on them again, toppling them, and she broke away, she said.

She said she locked herself in the bathroom and listened until she heard the boys "going down the stairs, hitting the walls." She said that after five or ten minutes, she unlocked the door and made her way through the living room and outside. She isn't sure how she got home.

Ford said she has not spoken with Kavanaugh since that night. And she told no one at the time what had happened to her. She was terrified, she said, that she would be in trouble if her parents realized she had been at a party where teenagers were drinking, and she worried they might figure it out even if she did not tell them.

"My biggest fear was, do I look like someone just attacked me?" she said. She said she recalled thinking: "I'm not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn't happen, and he didn't rape me."

Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.

"I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years," she said. She said she struggled academically and socially and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. "I was very ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships."

She also said she believes that in the longer term, it contributed to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms with which she has struggled.

She married her husband in 2002. Early in their relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.

He said he expects that some people, upon hearing his wife's account, will believe that Kavanaugh's high school behavior has no bearing upon his fitness for the nation's high court. He disagrees.

"I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong," Russell Ford said. "If they don't have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that's a problem. So I think it's relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard."

Exclusive to the Washington Post, September 16, 2018

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Post Script. Yes. Supreme Court Justices should be held to a higher standard. Kavanaugh was a would-be rapist. Call your elected officials. #StopKavanaugh

By the way, there were no girls at Kavanaugh's high school. Georgetown Prep was and is all boys. GOP Senator Grassley who obviously knew about the charges against Kavanaugh found girls from nearby schools to testify as to his character. Those girls didn't go to school with him. They barely knew him.