This week Sports Illustrated, the magazine that started out covering sports and branched off into political commentary and soft-core porn, gave out its “Inspiration of the Year” award. In the past it has gone to the US Women’s National soccer team and the organizers of the ALS “Ice Bucket” challenge. This year it went to former gymnast Rachel Denhollander. Denhollander was the first member of the US gymnastics program to accuse Dr. Larry Nassar of sexually molesting her while he served as team doctor. Eventually, some 265 young women accused Nassar of sexually abusing them while acting as their physician.

I’m pretty much agnostic on these kinds of awards as the serve more as a means of virtue signalling by magazines or as a way of saying just how “woke” rightminded people should be (Bruce Jenner was “Woman of the Year?” Really?). But SI wasn’t content to present the award, they chose as the presenter for the award Christine Blasey Ford.

In her first public statement since September, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford presents Sports Illustrated’s Inspiration of the Year Award to Rachael Denhollander https://t.co/2lBOB9nVDk pic.twitter.com/AjRYVYfOmS

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) December 12, 2018

It is difficult to believe that any responsible human would have dragged Ford into this. While she may have been a “survivor” of some kind of sexual assault at some point in her youth, the testimony she gave before the Senate Judiciary Committee showed a deeply troubled woman who was a habitual liar and who looked like she had been coaxed into making groundless accusations against JUSTICE! Brett Kavanaugh by a politically active friend. In fact, a trained sex crimes prosecutor gave a scathing rebuke to Ford, stopping just south of calling her out as a liar:

In the legal context, here is my bottom line: A “he said, she said” case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard … Dr. Ford has not offered a consistent account of when the alleged assault happened … Dr. Ford has struggled to identify Judge Kavanaugh as the assailant by name … Dr. Ford has no memory of key details of the night in question—details that could help corroborate her account … Dr. Ford’s account of the alleged assault has not been corroborated by anyone she identified as having attended—including her lifelong friend. (h/t to Daily Wire for he synopsis)

Choosing Ford to give the award as a way of trying to rehabilitate her shredded image cheapens not only any value the SI award may have but have used, I say again, used a young woman who was actually a victim of sexual assault as a prop in a partisan political brawl.

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