Anti-Kavanaugh Protest: More than 300 arrested

More than 300 protesters, including the comedian Amy Schumer and model Emily Ratajkowski, were arrested at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday as they made a final, desperate appeal to senators to reject the embattled supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Demonstrators chanted, unfurled banners and staged a sit-in at a Senate office building, one day before the body is poised to take its first vote on the judge’s nomination to America’s highest bench.

The scenes were unprecedented for any supreme court nominee in recent history. Thousands of protesters, survivors of sexual assault among them, gathered outside the courthouse in Washington where Kavanaugh currently sits as a federal judge and walked in unison to the supreme court, where he hopes to secure a lifetime appointment.

Protestors sloganed “We believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford”, the university professor who has accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly and violently sexually assaulting her at a party when they were teenagers.

“It’s time for women to be heard,” said Karen Bralove, an alumna of Holton-Arms, the all-girls preparatory school Ford attended in the early 1980s when she alleges Kavanaugh attempted to rape her.

As protesters brandished signs that read “Kavanaugh lies” and “Never again” outside the steps of the supreme court, senators huddled behind closed doors in the Capitol on the other side of the street to digest the findings of an FBI investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh. The reaction to the FBI report fell firmly along partisan lines, and the Republicans are in the majority in both houses of Congress, but those who took to the streets said they weren’t giving up hope just yet.

US Capitol police said 302 were arrested. Among them was Schumer, who is involved with the Time’s Up movement against sexual violence and harassment and is a distant relative of the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, and the model Emily Ratajkowski.

“Today I was arrested protesting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, a man who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault,” Ratajkowski wrote on Twitter. “Men who hurt women can no longer be placed in positions of power.”