Nearly Three Decades After Anita Hill Came Forward Sen Orrin Hatch Again Sides With the Accused

Anita Colina testifying to sexual harassment from former boss Clarence Thomas during a Senate Judiciary Commission hearing on the nomination of Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991.

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In Oct 1991, Americans were riveted by the spectacle of an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Commission questioning Anita Hill, the African-American law professor who had accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

TV viewers, both male and female, watched in increasing discomfort as the senators asked Loma about large-breasted women, a porn star named Long Dong Silver and pubic hair on a Coke can, among other previously unthinkable subjects for a Senate committee hearing.

Only for women, Hill'south testimony would have special significance, as information technology was the first time someone had and then publicly shared her business relationship of workplace harassment—something that so many of them had experienced.

Listen to audio of Anita Colina's testimony here.

Though the committee would eventually ostend Thomas, making him only the second Black man to serve on the Supreme Courtroom, the impact of Loma's televised testimony would reverberate dramatically across the nation, with lasting consequences that endure today.

"I think women saw play out, in the most human being terms, Anita Hill—credible and very much reflecting the experiences of so many other women—being demeaned, being dismissed and being mistreated by an array of male senators," says Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president emerita of the National Women's Police force Center. "And when they reflected upon information technology at the finish of the hearings, their anger began to ascension, and their determination to do something about it began to increment."

Both Thomas and Hill had risen from poor rural childhoods in segregated America, graduated from Yale Law School and launched promising legal careers in Washington, D.C. Their paths converged at the U.Southward. Department of Educational activity in 1981, when Thomas hired Hill to be his special assistant in the department's Part of Ceremonious Rights.

Shortly later on that, according to Hill, Thomas began harassing her, a pattern that would keep after Thomas left his post to become chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and Hill moved with him to continue as his assistant.

Clarence Thomas during his hearing regarding the alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill.

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Hill, who left Washington in 1983 and became a law professor in her native Oklahoma, was initially reluctant to come up frontward with her allegations against Thomas. But in the late summertime of 1991, she was contacted by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who had heard rumors of possible misconduct by Thomas against at least one female employee in his by. After a three-day FBI investigation led the White House to make up one's mind the allegations were "unfounded," the reporter Nina Totenberg of NPR learned of the FBI report and revealed Colina'due south accusations to the public for the first time.

On Oct 11, Hill testified before the committee that Thomas had asked her out repeatedly and that even after she refused, ofttimes talked to her in graphic particular about sex. Throughout the brutally uncomfortable questioning by senators, Colina retained her composure, fifty-fifty when forced to repeat once more and again the most disturbing and embarrassing parts of Thomas' alleged harassment. Years subsequently, the committee'south Democratic chairman, Joe Biden, would publicly apologize to Hill for not protecting her from his fellow senators' grilling.

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Thomas vehemently denied Colina'southward allegations and invoked racial discrimination, calling the hearing "a national disgrace...a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any manner condescend to think for themselves." imagining Thomas' harassment, or of committing "flat-out perjury," in the words of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah even accused her of borrowing the Coke can incident from the 1971 novel The Exorcist. Despite Hill'southward testimony, and that of four corroborating witnesses who said she talked with them about Thomas' behavior at the time, the Senate voted to confirm Thomas 52-48, the narrowest margin in about a century.

All the same Hill's testimony had an immediate affect in other ways. "She sparked conversations amid women that they had never had earlier nigh experiences that they realized were shared by and then many others," Greenberger says. "This was the get-go time that they saw they weren't alone, both by her telling her own story, so by their discussing their stories with their friends and family."

Phones at the National Women'southward Law Center began ringing off the claw, Greenberger remembers, as women sought legal advice to deal with the sexual harassment that they had faced. Claims of sexual harassment filed with the EEOC shot up, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Human action of 1991, which gave victims of workplace sexual harassment more legal recourse. Country laws began to alter also, and anti-sexual harassment programs became the norm in offices across the country.

READ More than: How Anita Colina's Confirmation Hearing Testimony Brought Workplace Sexual Harassment to Lite

In 1992, the year after Hill testified, a record number of female person politicians were elected to office, part of what became known as the "Twelvemonth of the Woman." Xx-four women won election to the House of Representatives (which more doubled the total number of female representatives at the fourth dimension) and four women were elected to the Senate, bringing the full number to six.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who start won election during that momentous twelvemonth, would become the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Commission by 2018, when the committee confronted another charge of sexual misconduct, made past Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, against some other Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

Through the intervening decades, sexual misconduct has figured prominently in U.S. politics and culture. President Beak Clinton was impeached for lying about his relationship with the immature White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Donald Trump, equally a presidential candidate, was exposed equally making lewd advances on women with the public release of a recorded tape. And Americans have seen the rise of the #MeToo movement, aslope the revelations of sexual misconduct and harassment on the function of numerous powerful men in entertainment, politics, business organization and other fields.

"I think that #MeToo has roots in the Anita Colina-Clarence Thomas hearing, in Anita Hill'south boggling testimony, and in the strength of her character," says Greenberg. "On the other hand, I as well call up that progress is non always linear, and there are fits and starts along the way.

According to Greenberger, Hill is an "icon" and a "national leader," who however has an of import role to play in the changed America her testimony helped create. For her role, Hill wrote in the New York Times about the high stakes that accompany the Kavanaugh hearings, and her advice for how the Senate Judiciary Committee could handle them differently than in 1991.

"With years of hindsight, mounds of evidence of the prevalence and damage that sexual violence causes individuals and our institutions," she wrote, "as well every bit a Senate with more women than ever, 'not getting it' isn't an choice for our elected representatives. In 2018, our senators must get it correct."

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/anita-hill-confirmation-hearings-impact

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