Reimagining 1991: Behind the Scenes

to believe it was happening. A Supreme Court nominee on the verge of confirmation being called back to answer charges that he had once made unwelcome sexual comments to a female. Perhaps not ever has so much turned on a single hearing. There are a couple of things you need to know about how I came to be sitting in front of a nationally televised hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on

October eleventh, nineteen ninety one. First, I crafted a statement for the FBI about working with Clarence Thomas at the EOC where he sexually harassed me. Then that statement was leaked to the press. National Public Radio has learned that the woman brought her accusation to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, and finally, after a public outcry, Senator Joe Biden subpoenaed me to testify. I had three days notice. Remarkably,

my legal team somehow came together for one thing. When we first talked, it was not even clear they're going to do anything. We really didn't know whether they were even going to consider it. That's law professor Susan Dela Ross. She's an author and she is the director of a women's human rights clinic at Georgetown University. Ross is one of the women who pioneered the field of sexual harassment law. It wasn't until nineteen eighty six that the Supreme Court

ruled sexual harassment a civil rights violation. Five years later, when I testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed me, it sparked a national conversation, one I never anticipated. Luckily, I had Susan Dela Ross as part of my legal team. She was the only one of us who had experienced with sexual harassment litigation. Somebody on the Senate Judiciary Committee called me up and gave me a hypothetical and said,

would that constitute sexual harassment? And I said, well, yes, I thought it would, and he said, can you send me a memo that would describe what sexual harassment law consists of? And so I said yes, I'd be happy to do that, and I sent a memo. And then a few days later I got another call, this time saying there was an actual person behind this hypothetical. The person speaking to me said, would you be willing to speak to this person? I said yes, I'd be delighted to.

Of course, the person behind this hypothetical was me. I'm Anita Hill. This is getting even my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. On this show, I'll be speaking with people who are improving are imperfect world, people who took risks and broke the rules. In the last episode, you heard from Sakari Hardnett, one of the witnesses who wasn't called to testify at the nine Thomas

Confirmation hearing. We talked about how being excluded from this historic conversation impacted her life and the country in the past three decades. In this episode, Susan Dela Ross and I try to piece together what else was happening behind the scenes, much of which the public has never heard. You and I talked on the telephone before my testimony, and we were trying to figure out what we were going to be stepping into and how we could be heard.

We had no notice of what was going on. Senator Biden called the committee back in session to hear the testimony, and he called me, and I haven't written down. On October eighth, in nineteen ninety one, I was told that I'd be called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yes, they announced that there's going to be hearing that they're going to ask you to testify, which you didn't know before that day. Then you fly to Washington, DC, and

then the very next morning you start testifying there. I was in Washington, DC, and I think we were all just shocked by how fast it came about. I was sitting in a conference room and that was the first time we met face to face, and we were there to try to prepare or what was going to be happening the following day, which was when they told me that I would be called. It's worn in to testify.

That day, we really didn't know much of anything. We didn't know who was going to be talking aside from Thomas. We didn't know whether the committee was trying even to investigate. Was there ever any real exchange of information about the process and how it would work. Not, as far as I'm aware. All we were told was that you were going to be testified first, and that I got to call the night before from someone on Biden staff saying, oh, no,

we're going to switch it. We're going to start with Clarence Thomas, which is peculiar to start with Clarence Thomas rather than starting with you, who had the account of what had happened. And the switching of the order allowed for Clarence Thomas to testify on prime time morning TV as well, when you know, people are still making their way to work and still at home watching, so he had a much morolder viewing audience. So it was just

t J. Yeah. Absolutely, And we knew nothing about information they had in their hands, but I gather they had refused to tell you well, and the hearing was about

his character and fitness for the position. There were women who said that they had experienced or witnessed harassing behavior, and others knew from their own experience that Thomas was making sexual advances or using the office to assassin women who worked at the EOC for their sexual availability to him, and so there was much that could have been admitted in terms of witnesses, and I'm particularly struck about the lack of willingness to hear from those those women who

had experienced something similar or even other experiences that went to Thomas's character and his fitness for the position. Did you know about those women? No, I didn't know a thing. I don't think any of us did. We didn't learn it until after the fact that there are other women who worked at the EOC who reported a similar experience. I only found it out when I read the transcript of everything after the hearing. That was my first time, and I was so astounded to see how closely their

accounts mirrored exactly what you had said. But that was kept from the country. The country never knew that, and it was the chairman who basically said, we're not going to hear from the witnesses without explaining what they would have testified to. So the committee kept them from testifying. They didn't allow Sukari Hartnett to testify. They did put it in the record, but nobody knew what it said, and that was because the committee didn't write a report.

Committees always write a report after they do their work before forwarding it to the full Senate for a vote. But there was no committee report assessing the reliability the credibility of you of him. People were left to try to piece together what they had seen, which was a totally incomplete set of facts. So there was very clear evidence. The media never reported it on afterwards. They shut it down once he was confirmed. So many of the senators

they just were trying to get rid of it. They didn't want to talk about it, they didn't want to explore it, they didn't think it was relevant, they didn't care. So the general public has never come to learn exactly what the evidence was that corroborated everything you said. After the break, Susan Deller Roth and I posed the question, what if what if the hearings hadn't been so poor handled in nineteen ninety one, What if we had all the information available, What if the public had been offered

a better understanding of sexual harassment during the hearing? Where would we be today? You're listening to getting even my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. I'm Anita Hill, and I'm talking with Susan Deller Ross the only member of my nineteen ninety one legal team with experience and sexual harassment law. Do you think that people had any real awareness even after the nineteen eighty six decision by the Supreme Court that sexual harassment was

in fact a violation of a law. No. I think people were very confused by it. Initially, the courts didn't treat it as an employment discrimination issue at all. They saw it as sexual activity, and it was sort of a boys will be boys. What can you expect? And because the facts are often really atrocious, there's a tendency in media not to cover what really goes on in these cases. I remember hearing people saying, Oh, I want to be sexually harassed. You don't know what's going on.

When you say something like that, well you don't, And I think you're right. It's a focus on sex and not even sexual but on sex itself and that being something normal and overlooking the term harassment. And even the day when people think about sexual harassment, many people still think that we're just talking about words, and we're talking about verbal exchanges and not the psychological and off and physical harm that is going on in the workplace. And

certainly if we have that today. In nineteen ninety one, when we sort of jumped into the scene in the Clarence Thomas case, there was so much confusion. I think the country would have been even further ahead if it had gotten some real explanation of what sexual harassment consists of at the time. Now, I think there was never less progress, but maybe not as much progress as might have happened if there had been a real attempt to

grapple with the issue at hand. One of the things I think really happened was a there were a lot of women who were very, very upset about how you were treated, and that convinced a lot of women to run for office. President Bush, Senor had been vieting a proposed bill that would expand Title seven to allow victims of sexual harassment to get damages. After the hearings, he finally signed because of the pressure of the Republican Party was under for having supported sexual harasser from the women

who'd been horrified by watching what had happened. There was publicity around the world about sexual harassment, So I think if we'd been able to have a full presentation of what actually happened, with all the sources of evidence that were relevant, to the issue, people would have had a better understanding it and gone forward. But nevertheless, it did make progress, you know. But the fact that there was an impact shows to me one how people were interested

and they needed to know the information. But it also indicates to me that there was a lost opportunity, that there was a powerful platform out there that could have become a model for how to do this right. We might have avoided some things in the future, and by the future, I mean between now in nineteen ninety one thirty years or so, you know, we might have learned some lessons that could have been put in place. And

I think about all these what ifs. If there had been a different kind of investigation by a different body than the FBI or expert witnesses had been allowed, if there had been less disinformation or information shared so that people could respond, we could respond to without this certainly overwhelming number of witnesses that they had. I had wonderful witnesses stop up for me to confirm what I had said to them during the time was exactly what I

was testifying to. And certainly, of course the fact that the other women weren't called might have made a difference. But there are still things that are nagging me personally. You know, I wonder had nine been handled differently, whether Christine Blasi Fords testimony would have resonated stronger, or whether the Kavanaugh hearing might have been structured differently. Right, I had the same feeling of dejan view, here we go again.

You know, they're keeping out relevant evidence, doing everything they can to shut down what's actually happened. So I'm going to ask you, what is that one lesson that we should have learned from nineteen ninety one. Well, I think it is the importance of really trying to find out what happened and being willing to get the unpleasant details out in the open so that people understand what's happening.

Because the basic problem over and over and the hearings was a failure to put on all the relevant evidence. There was an instead of an attempt to keep out relevant evidence to shut it down. And unless you can hear everything that bears on the credibility of what the key parties are saying, there's no chance of finding out the truth. Finding out the truth isn't about finger pointing or vindication. It's about giving us a starting point for

trying to make things right. As we wrapped up our conversation, Ross reminded me of another memory from a long time ago. Just a few weeks after the hearing, we went to a conference of women elected in offices across the country. It was a delegation of state legislators, state women legislators

from around the country. We walked in with Anita leading the way, and suddenly all the women rows, and they had pink napkins, and they waved the napkins in the air, and there was just this round of applause for Anita. Such a contrast with what we had faced on the Senate committee, with all those white men one side overtly hostile, the other side sitting quietly and doing nothing. It had

gotten me through the winter. You know, I admire you so much for the courage you displayed and standing up and doing what was right, and in your dedication to these issues over the years ever since. Prior to the Thomas Confirmation hearing, many people didn't know that sexual harassment was illegal. Now they do, in part because of the hearing in nineteen ninety one. But knowing that the law exists isn't enough to get equality. Victims and their allies

to know how to use the law. One thing that struck me after speaking with Susan Deller Ross and Sakari Hardnett, one of the witnesses who wasn't called to testify at the nineteen ninety one Thomas confirmation hearing, is that even though the process was imperfect, they both said that they

would do it again. I feel the same way. I never set out to get mired in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, but what I did set out to do, way back before I ever met Clarence Thomas, was to tell the truth and to make our country a more just place. In the rest of the series, I'll be talking to other people who, like Hardnett and Ross, have taken risks to make equality more possible, more tangible, people

who I believe we should all be listening to. Next, I speak with Kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the terms intersectionality and critical race theory. Race reform has in this country always been met with a backlash, and sometimes the backlash was more powerful and lasted longer than the reform. Jet Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries and is written and hosted by me Anita Hill. It is produced

by Molaboard and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer, our engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Louis Garat composed original music for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobel and Letal malad. Our Director of Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin thanks to Heather Fame, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barden, John Schnars, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at

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