Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker.
Crucial factors link allegations against Kavanaugh and those leveled against Thomas on the eve of his 1991 appointment. Both women wanted to remain anonymous. Both episodes are said to have occurred in the early 1980s. But the two cases also diverge in important ways, among them the fact that only a decade had passed between Hill’s alleged sexual harassment by Thomas and his installation on the court vs. three decades that have gone by between Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior and his confirmation process.
A year into the #MeToo movement, the dispute over Kavanaugh’s nomination could test how the culture wars have evolved and what the country has learned since 1991.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed a vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination planned for Thursday. Instead, on Monday, Kavanaugh and Ford will testify publicly under oath before the Senate.
Ford’s allegations
As the The Washington Post revealed Sunday, Ford has accused Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, of sexually assaulting her when he was 17 and she was 15. One summer night in the early 1980s, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her down and attempted to remove her clothes, placing his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
“I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time,” Kavanaugh said in a statement issued by the White House last week, when aspects of Ford’s account came into view.
Ford did not intend to go public, but when details emerged last week of a letter she had sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she decided her “civic responsibility” outweighed her “anguish” and fear of retaliation. The alleged episode, though many years in the past, exacted a psychological toll on her, one that she first articulated during couples therapy with her husband in 2012, as The Post’s Emma Brown reported.
“Do we assume that women are lying or do we listen respectfully and take their claims seriously?” said Sally Goldfarb, a law professor at Rutgers University who helped draft the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. “I hope the current allegations against Judge Kavanaugh will be treated in a different way than the disgraceful way that Anita Hill’s allegations were treated in 1991.”
Hill’s allegations
Hill had worked under Thomas in the early 1980s, first at the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During this time, she alleged, Thomas repeatedly asked her out, ignoring her refusals, and tried to initiate conversation about pornographic films as well as his sexual prowess.
In an opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1991, Hill recounted how she “began to feel severe stress on the job,” fearful that Thomas would “take out his anger” on her by passing her over for assignments or even dismissing her.
The FBI had investigated her claims the previous month and reported back to the committee, at which point lawmakers split 7-7 on the nomination, put forward by President George H.W. Bush. Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del.) joined six Republicans in supporting Thomas. No mention of Hill’s charges was made at the public meeting.
With the panel’s work apparently finished, debate in the full chamber began early the following month. But on Oct. 6, 1991, NPR and Newsday broke news of Hill’s allegations.
“Here is a person who is in charge of protecting rights of women and other groups in the workplace, and he is using his position of power for personal gain, for one thing,” Hill told NPR’s Nina Totenberg. “And he did it in a very, just ugly and intimidating way.”
Thomas denied the allegations, and when the committee hearings reopened on Oct. 11, the D.C. circuit judge and Yale Law School graduate — a pedigree shared by Kavanaugh — called the proceedings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.”
Hill, a Yale Law graduate raised on an Oklahoma farm, spoke after him, explaining that she “may have used poor judgment” in not taking more “militant steps,” but that this “seemed the better as well as the easier approach.”
She recounted how she had tried to maintain her privacy, reluctant to come forward when Senate staff members approached her about Thomas’s nomination. Ultimately, however, she felt she had a “duty to report,” she said.
The all-male, all-white members of the committee questioned her credibility and quibbled with her about the lurid details of her account.
Biden refused to permit public testimony from a number of witnesses who endorsed Hill’s version of events. He did “a disservice to me, a disservice more importantly, to the public,” Hill said in a 2014 interview with the Huffington Post.
“I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill,” Biden told Teen Vogue last year. “I owe her an apology.” The former vice president and possible 2020 presidential contender ultimately voted against Thomas when the judge was confirmed, 52-48, on Oct. 15, 1991.
Hill, who did not return an email late Sunday seeking comment, told Politico through a spokeswoman last week, as the allegation against Kavanaugh became public, that, “the government needs to find a fair and neutral way for complaints to be investigated.”
“I have seen firsthand what happens when such a process is weaponized against an accuser, and no one should have to endure that again,” added Hill, who is now a professor at Brandeis University.
“I was motivated to run for the Senate after watching the truly awful way Anita Hill was treated by an all-male Judiciary Committee interrogating her about the sexual harassment she endured at the hands of now-Justice Clarence Thomas,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement Sunday.
Murray asked her colleagues to “treat this survivor with empathy and humanity and make sure that the United States Senate in 2018 doesn’t send the signal it sent to millions of women in 1991 who were scared to speak up, afraid to share their stories, and watched on television as someone very much like them was attacked and maligned.”
