(PALO ALTO, Calif.) — Her studies first brought her West, but for Christine Margaret Blasey Ford, the move to California proved a way to leave behind what had gone wrong in her teenage years in the patrician suburbs of Washington, D.C. Born into a well-off family in Montgomery County, Maryland, Ford has said she spent years working to recover from an assault as a young girl in that world of prep school parties — by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, she would disclose years later. Long before she decided to come forward, Ford, now 51, had built a new life for herself in Malibu, Honolulu and the San Francisco Bay area, embracing academia, surfing, cheering on the Stanford football team and taking in outdoor rock concerts. Ford settled in the Silicon Valley in the 1990s, when the first wave of the tech boom was transforming lives around her and startups were replacing peach orchards.