Clarence Thomas has written a memoir in which he angrily recounts his rather contentious confirmation hearings. Anita Hill sets the record straight with regard to his claims about her:
I stand by my testimony.
Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.
In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.
Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.
In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was “asked to leave” the firm.
It’s worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.
That’s a common tactic of harassers — casting the complainant as someone who was in trouble at work, who had performance or attitude problems, who’s making the accusations to get back at her supervisor or to prevent being fired (in fact, I just did a trial in which a high-level supervisor, who had been fired after being accused by not one but two of his direct reports of sexually harassing them, claimed he was wrongfully terminated because the two employees were lying, that he had all this evidence (that somehow was mysteriously never put before the court or, for that matter, anyone else in the company that would have to approve termination) that they were both about to get fired, they just wanted to get back at him, etc. Utterly classic). It’s a way of impugning credibility. And, as Hill notes, in the past, it was difficult to fight against your supervisor because courts and higher-ups had a tendency to believe the person with the greater authority (now, employers pretty much have a duty to at least investigate complaints).
But Thomas didn’t just repeat long-discredited lies about Hill’s competence. He also smeared her character:
In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.
Back when David Brock was still a tool of the Right Wing Noise Machine, he wrote an infamous 1992 piece for the American Spectator called “The Real Anita Hill,” in which he characterized her, memorably but falsely, as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” In Blinded By The Right, he explained how he smeared her:
While these two sections were skewed, they were plausible interpretations of the written record. As is always the case with sexual harassment, there were weak spots in the story told by Hill and her witnesses, and I portrayed them as intentional lies. But I still had a problem that caused me to overreach. If Thomas was completely innocent, Anita Hill would have had to be insane to go on national television and tell a lie under oath. Grasping for an explanation of the inexplicable, doing everything I could to ruin Hill’s credibility, I took a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix. Hill was an ambitious incompetent passed over by Thomas for a promotion. She was “kooky.” She was a man-hater. She had a “perverse desire for male attention.” She had a “love-hate” complex with Thomas. She made “bizarre” sexual comments to students and coworkers. She sprinkled pubic hairs in her law students’ term papers. She was, in my words, “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”
The fact that this construct of Hill gained traction had a lot to do with how women who complain about sexual harassment are perceived — and the fact that Thomas is repeating these themes even today, even after 15 years on the Supreme Court because Hill’s testimony failed to stop his nomination, even after Brock admitted that he made up a whole lot of shit that just sounded right — is not only disheartening, but worrisome given Thomas’s position on the Supreme Court. (Okay, not that anyone expects him to find in favor of plaintiffs in sexual-harassment cases, but still.)
Despite the attacks on her, though, Hill’s bravery and dignity in testifying and withstanding the smear machine were something to see. I worked at a newspaper at the time of the hearings, which occurred the year after I left college, and we were all glued to the TV in the conference room — as we made our deadlines, we’d head into the conference room. More than once, I was glad that Hill was a professor, and thus was addressed as “Professor Hill,” since I’d seen and heard the contempt some of those Senators could put into a multisyllabic “Ms.” And despite all the aspersions cast on her competence and her character and the speculation about what she wanted from all of this, she went back to her work and her life in Oklahoma and quietly succeeded in her field. She doesn’t speak out about Thomas often, but when she does, it’s worth paying attention to.