Minutes before Anita Hill began her testimony on October 11, 1991, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee spoke at length about what he hoped to accomplish at that “extraordinary” hearing.
He also made clear what, in his view, was not at stake — at least on that day.
“Let me make clear that this is not, I emphasize, this is not a hearing about the extent and nature of sexual harassment in America,” said then-committee chair Sen. Joe Biden, the Delaware Democrat and future vice president. “That question is for a different sort of meeting of this or any other committee.”
Despite his directions, what followed over the next few days would indeed shape the discussion around sexual harassment well beyond the boundaries of that or any other legislative chamber. The “question,” as Biden described it, continues to roil American politics and culture, expanding over time to encompass sexual misconduct in almost all its forms.
But heightened awareness does not guarantee progress, especially when the political stakes are so high and the calculations so stark.
Whether this time around, with a new nominee in Brett Kavanaugh and a new accuser in Christine Blasey Ford, plays out differently remains to be seen. What’s clear now: It would take some effort to conjure up something as appalling, 27 years later, as what unfolded when Anita Hill gave her testimony.
’14 men’
Biden, who has since expressed regret for his handling of what turned into a brutal cross-examination mostly by the Republicans on the committee (Thomas was GOP President George H.W. Bush’s appointee), seemed to grasp the bad optics of the Hill hearings from the outset.
“Perhaps 14 men sitting here today cannot understand these things fully,” he said of the panel, which was also entirely white.
Republicans today, already at a growing deficit in the polls with women voters, have at the least grown more savvy and hired a female outside counsel with expertise in sex crime prosecution to question Ford and Kavanaugh — a necessity, in part, because they have no women senators on the actual committee.
‘That’s a word we use all the time’
Early on in Hill’s testimony, Biden, after having heard her opening statement in all its explicit detail, asked if she could “tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidents that you have alleged?”
Hill responded: “I think the one that was the most embarrassing was this discussion of pornography involving women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people, or animals. That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated.”
Then it was then Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter’s turn.
Specter did most of the questioning of Hill on the GOP side. He would repeatedly press her on why she had not gone into greater detail during a previous discussion with the FBI. After saying he didn’t want to “add to” any discomfort she might be feeling, having cycled through the specifics, Specter followed up on Hill’s earlier answer to Biden.
“You testified this morning, in response to Senator Biden, that the most embarrassing question involved — this is not too bad — women’s large breasts. That’s a word we use all the time,” Specter said, digressing with a grin. “That was the most embarrassing aspect of what Judge Thomas had said to you?”
Hill, who had nodded patiently as Specter spoke, corrected him in her answer, saying: “No, the most embarrassing aspect was his description of the acts of these individuals, these women, the acts that those particular people would engage in. It wasn’t just the breasts…”
‘Drive Judge Thomas to the airport?’
Whether genuinely confused or deliberately obtuse, Specter and other senators repeatedly expressed befuddlement that Hill didn’t quit her job or, after leaving Thomas’s office, refuse to see him.
In particular, Specter, who died in 2012, focused on Hill’s decision to drive Thomas to the airport when he visited Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma for a speech.
“(Thomas) having said these things to you as you represent, being violations of the Civil Rights law, constituting sexual harassment, given that background, why would you voluntarily agree to drive Judge Thomas to the airport?,” Specter asked.
“I really don’t recall that I voluntarily agreed to drive him to the airport. I think that the dean (of the Oral Roberts law school) suggested that I drive him to the airport, and that I said that I would,” Hill said.
Specter followed up, asking if her efforts to maintain a “cordial professional relationship,” as Hill described it, were actually evidence of her scheming “to derive whatever advantage you could from a cordial professional relationship?”
Hill replied: “It was a matter that I did not want to invoke any kind of retaliation against me professionally. It wasn’t that I was trying to get any benefit out of it.”
Specter would mention the airport drive again later on, as did former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, also a Republican.
Toward the end of Hill’s testimony, Simpson expressed similar doubts, asking, “If what you say this man said to you occurred, why in God’s name, when he left his position of power or status or authority over you, and you left in 1983, why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?”
Again, Hill said that she had been afraid of professional retaliation and tried to explain that her response “is not atypical” in cases of sexual harassment.
‘The product of fantasy’
On at least two occasions during her testimony, Specter brought up the idea of Hill’s accusations being the product of some kind of “fantasy.”
First, he quoted then-Oral Roberts law school dean Charles Kothe, the same man Hill said had asked her to drive Thomas to the airport, as saying, “I find the references to the alleged sexual harassment (by Thomas) not only unbelievable but preposterous. I am convinced that such are the product of fantasy.”
“I am not given to fantasy,” Hill said, again outlining the painstaking personal process that led her to Capitol Hill.
Later on, Specter again outsourced the accusation to another man’s testimony. After a protracted debate on the panel over whether to question Hill with a statement from John N. Doggett III, who had not yet testified, Specter read Doggett’s claim that Hill once told him she was angry that he had led her on but not pursued a relationship.
“I came away from her going away party feeling that she was somewhat unstable,” Doggett said, “and that in my case she had fantasized about my being interested in her romantically.”
Specter continued reading from Doggett’s statement, highlighting a part in which he said, “Ms. Hill’s fantasies about sexual interest in her were an indication of the fact that she was having a problem being rejected by men she was attracted to.”
Doggett also said he believed Thomas’s denial, adding that Hill’s accusations were, in his opinion, “yet another example of her ability to fabricate the idea that someone was interested in her, when, in fact, no such interest existed.”
Hill denied having had any interest or much of a relationship of any kind with Doggett, but the suggestion had now been aired publicly. The damage was done.
More than a quarter century on, most of Kavanaugh’s defenders have been more careful in how they cast doubt on Ford’s claims. None has made a similar allegation. But in an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who was on the panel for the Hill testimony, amplified Kavanaugh’s claim that he was not at the party where Ford alleges she was assaulted.
“Clearly somebody’s mixed up,” Hatch said. When asked if he believed Ford, he added: “I think she’s mistaken, I think she’s mistaken something that I don’t know, and I don’t know her.”
‘You didn’t really intend to kill him, but you might have’
Hours after it began, the senators offered some final thoughts and questions. It was then that Simpson, the Wyoming Republican, delivered what might have the most memorable — and, frankly, still familiar — assessment.
Troubling to Simpson, he said, was the affect the accusations would have on Thomas. And, as is often articulated in the pushback to similar allegations made now, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, suggested a charge like this was akin to a killing.
“It seems to me you didn’t really intend to kill him, but you might have,” Simpson said of Hill’s allegations. “And that is pretty heavy, I don’t care if you are a man or a woman, to know that 43 years or 35 years of your life or 60 years of your life, where no one has corroborated what is a devastating charge, kind of a singular torpedo below the water line and he sinks, while 103 days of accumulated things never penetrated the armor.”
(The “103 days” appears to be a reference to the time between Thomas’s nomination, on July 1, and when Hill’s allegations changed the narrative, sending the committee back to work.)
President Trump, on Monday night, picked up this unbroken thread and tweeted, “The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Accusations the likes of which have never been seen before!”
‘We face a very difficult problem’
While some senators on the panel openly sought to discredit Hill, an effort that would ramp up once Thomas sat down for his own testimony, a handful offered their thanks. Biden mostly praised her for being willing to face down such scrutiny, as did the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, and others.
Then-Illinois Sen. Paul Simon, also a Democrat, spoke rarely and when he did used his time to give Hill space to clarify her points. His final question — a “suggestion,” as he phrased it — was that Hill, her law school colleagues and their students, consider the ongoing situation and offer a recommendation on how the Senate should proceed if a similar one arose in the future.
“How do we deal with a charge that someone makes, that is a substantial charge, but that person says, ‘I don’t want my name used publicly,’ or even ‘I don’t want the charge made publicly’?,” Simon asked. “We should not simply ignore it. On the other hand, how are you fair to a nominee? This is the struggle that this committee has gone through and the Senate is going through.”
Simon, who died in 2003, then thanked her for performing “a great public service.”
Nearly three decades later, the question — however uncomfortably foisted on Hill as it was in the moment — is as relevant as ever. And the Senate, along with an increasingly divided country, seems just as far away from agreeing on an answer.
