Trump turns on Supreme Court nominee's accuser

The woman whose sexual assault allegation threatens to bring down Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee rejected an ultimatum Friday for testifying in the Senate after the US president turned against her, claiming her accusation could not be true.

The increasingly ugly fight over the fate of Trump's bid to put conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh into the lifetime position on the Supreme Court appeared to be nearing its end game, though still with no clarity on whether the woman at the center of the row will testify.

Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who says Kavanaugh carried out a violent sexual assault against her when he was 17 and she was 15, insists she is ready to testify under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

However, she rejected a deadline of late Friday imposed by the committee's Republican leader to agree to his terms for the hearing, which he said should take place next Wednesday.

If she didn't agree, committee chairman Charles Grassley said, he would go ahead and schedule a vote on confirming Kavanaugh on Monday, but without her testimony.

A statement by Ford's lawyers carried by CNN asked for one more day to respond, calling the deadline "arbitrary."
"Its sole purpose is to bully Dr Ford and deprive her of the ability to make a considered decision.... Our modest request is that she be given an additional day to make her decision."
"I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr Ford was as bad as she says," Trump wrote, "charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents."
"Why didn't someone call the FBI 36 years ago?" The senior Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, called Trump's logic "a highly offensive misunderstanding of surviving trauma."
"We know that allegations of sexual assault are some of the most under-reported crimes that exist. So I thought that the president's tweet was completely inappropriate and wrong."