The National Sexual Assault Hotline received more than 3,000 calls on Friday, marking the busiest day in the hotline’s history, a day after Christine Blasey Ford and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified on Capitol Hill about her claims that he sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.
RAINN, which administers the hotline, reported a 738 percent increase from its normal amount of calls, the organization said in a statement.
The organization also reported a sharp increase in calls throughout Thursday, the day of Blasey and Kavanaugh’s closely watched testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
From Thursday through Sunday, the hotline saw a 338 percent increase in calls. Over the entire month of September, it experienced a 157 percent increase compared to September of last year, receiving 28,509 calls, or an average of about 950 each day.
Blasey is one of the three women who has accused the Supreme Court nominee of sexual misconduct. Her emotional testimony compelled many people to speak out about their own sexual assault experiences.
During breaks between Thursday’s rounds of questioning, C-SPAN received several powerful calls from viewers recounting past incidents of sexual abuse, some of whom said that they had rarely spoken about it before.
“History shows us that when high-profile allegations such as these are in the news it often causes others to reach out too. This story has clearly resonated with survivors, and has led thousands to reach out for help for the first time,” RAINN President Scott Berkowitz said in a statement. “Over this past year, following the cases of [Harvey] Weinstein and [Bill] Cosby and the explosion of #MeToo, our numbers have been growing pretty rapidly, but we’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
This story has been updated with additional data and a statement from RAINN.