Oct 1, 2018
Ana María Archila, sexual abuse survivor, presses GOP senator on Kavanuagh
DONNA ACETO
Ana María Archila at the 2017 Gay City News Impact Awards.
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
An Astoria lesbian activist long involved in the fight for immigrant rights and the empowerment of New York City lower-income communities was one of two women who confronted Senator Jeff Flake on Friday morning, September 28 just moments after the Arizona Republican, a member of the Judiciary Committee, announced he would vote to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice.
Ana María Archila, who is the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, which works with grassroots organizations and labor unions across a broad range of progressive issues, had traveled to the US Capitol on a number of occasions in recent weeks to protest the Kavanaugh appointment. As the Judiciary Committee was preparing on the morning of the 28th to vote on advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, Archila and another activist, Maria Gallagher of Westchester County, whom she had just met, spied Flake as he was approaching an elevator in the Capitol. They scurried after him.
As Archila held her foot in the elevator’s door, Gallagher, a sexual assault survivor, said to Flake, “Look at me when I’m talking to you. You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter. That what happened to me doesn’t matter. That you’re going to let people who do those things into power.”
Archila, who several days earlier, while standing outside Flake’s office, had for the first time publicly told the story of her own sexual assault as a five-year-old child, said to the senator, “You are allowing someone who is unwilling to take responsibly for his actions to sit in the highest court of country. Do you think he is able to hold the pain of this country and repair it? That is the work of justice.”
The exchange was captured and broadcast by CNN.
