Vanity Fair interviewed several women who attended Holton Arms at the same time as Christened Blasey Ford.

It was and is an elite prep school.

“Ford’s story ignited a national news cycle. More locally, it lit up the Holton alumnae network almost immediately, in part because the community is so tightly knit: each class is made up of about 65 young women, many of whom are still in touch, some of whom still live in the area. Many of the 1,800-odd members of the private Holton alumnae Facebook group immediately rallied behind their fellow classmate, whose story has dominated the national discourse—even as it spurs an equally crucial dialogue in the suburb she once called home.

“To many Holton students, Ford’s description of the party she attended in 1982 felt familiar. Beginning in middle school, there were parties with young men from surrounding schools like Georgetown Prep, Landon, and St. Albans every Friday and Saturday night, at big houses set back from winding, dimly lit streets. There was money to get alcohol. Parents were absent. The homes had pools and movie theaters and sweeping yards. They were teenagers in a candy store. “It was a highly professional culture of parents, many of whom self-selected those schools to be a big babysitter . . . a lot of them just parked the kids and left,” one 1980s Landon alum who socialized with Ford in high school told me. A woman who graduated from Holton in 1988, and lived down the street from Ford, recalled students from the boys’ schools pulling up to parties with duffel bags full of alcohol. “I never went to a party where there wasn’t alcohol; it was a drunk fest,” she said. “You’re living in a bubble where a lot of the families are exceedingly wealthy, a lot of parents are not tuned in to their kids, and, a lot of times, parents were away and the mice would play.””