For Anita Hill, the work is never done

together at two government agencies a decade before. What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things experiences of my life. It was a truly historic moment. It's hard to even imagine now given the past couple of years and the advent of Me Too.

But before Anita Hill shared her d tailed testimony in front of an all white male panel, the term sexual harassment, let alone the act of it, had never really been talked about publicly and in front of a television audience. That was a turning point. It brought sexual harassment into the national conversation in a way it had not been before. Countless women, I think, identified with the experiences that Anita Hill spoke about very movingly, very powerfully at the hearing.

Debor Turkheimer is a law professor at Northwestern University. She's also the author of the new book Credible, Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers. Way back when sexual harassment

wasn't even a term that anyone recognized. It had to be coined before there could be this common vernacular, and people could then begin to identify their experiences as experiences that other people had to other, particularly women in the workplace, particularly vulnerable, marginalized women in the workplace, that this was something that wasn't idiosyncratic, it was patterned and and there

were commonalities to it. And so this consciousness raising is a really important aspect of of sort of what feminism is. And then when you have a high profile event like the Anita Hill testimony, and you have the the the entire country transfixed and processing and reaching you know, different conclusions, but nevertheless focused on this as an issue, I think it does really galvanized new understandings and important conversations. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation

to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid on several occasions, Thomas tomy graphically of his own sexual prowess. This was a really important step in the direction of societal acknowledgement that this is a problem, and a sense on the part of sexual harassment victims that this doesn't have to be tolerated, that this isn't something that is normalized. It's not something that's okay. Now that doesn't mean that victims will necessarily come forward. There are

lots of reasons why that's going to be difficult. But more so than before her testimony, I think victims of workplace harassment understood that this was not okay. How reliable is your testimony in October on events that occurred eight and years ago? How sure can you expect this committee to be on the accuracy of your statement. I guess one really does have to understand something about the nature

of sexual harassment. Um, it is very difficult for people to come forward with these She came forward having worked at the e o C, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Clarence Thomas, having, she said, experienced some fairly serious sexual harassment at his hands. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive? Who has put pubic hair on

my coat? He referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal, and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasure. So when Anita Hill came forward and told her story, she was treated horribly. She was treated horribly by the senators who were responsible for conducting these hearings. It is appropriate to ask Professor Hill anything any member wishes to ask her. Are you a scorned woman? Do you have have anything to gain by coming here is to plumb the depths of her credibility?

Are you interested in writing a book? You testify this morning that the most embarrassing question involved this is not too bad women's large breast. That's the word we use all the time. The witness did not say anything to the FBI about the described size of his penis, the description of the movie Long Dong Silver. You are not now drawing a conclusion the judge Thomas sexually harassed you. Yes, I am joining that conclusion that I don't understand. Pardon

me that I don't understand. This is an example of the credibility complex kicked into high gear. This was someone who was coming forward against a very powerful man who was seen by many as having an entitlement to this Supreme Court justiceship, to having an entitlement to sit on the highest court of the land for the for the rest of his of his career. And nothing was going to disrupt that. The status quo was was not going

to be upended. Even when someone with the I would say authority on the credibility of an Anita Hill came forward, it wasn't going to change the course of events. Clarence Thomas was of course confirmed to the Supreme Court since as a justice today, and that experience was so difficult for many Americans to watch, for many women, in particular women who had experienced their own workplace harassment and women who had just lived in the world and felt this

to be a very familiar experience. I think I just felt deeply wounded on her behalf. When I recently sat down with Anita Hill, she told me that she heard from those women men. When I testified, this woman wrote me and said, there will be waves of women behind you. I immediately started hearing from thousands of people. I mean, the letters were coming in in flood, and those women changed the course of her life. I thought after the hearing that I could just get back to my life,

and that wasn't possible. It was not going to be the same. Coming up my conversation with Anita Hill on her thirty year work to engender violence, her new book, and the lasting impact of her testimony thirty years later. I'm close up this morning the Clarence Thomas nomination. When the Ane to Hill Clarence Thomas controversy unfolded in September of nine, I was the newly appointed co anchor on

the Today Show. The Senate is to vote tonight on whether Thomas should get a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, but a charge that Thomas sexually harassed one of his employees a decade ago has fueled new last minute debate over the nomination. The Clarence Thomas nomination had seemed all that assured until rumors of his past behavior spurred a federal investigation. Behind the scenes of the public hearings, Anita Hill was privately interviewed by the FBI, and her statement

was leaked to the press. On October seven, she came forward publicly and said she would testify. I interviewed her on October eight. Why do you think we're not hearing about this or we didn't hear about this until the eleventh hour? What took so long from that date until these charges actually surfaced publicly. I don't believe that, um,

they were necessarily taken seriously. I think this is part of what the frustration that I'm experiencing, and then a lot of women are experiencing that these kinds of UH claims and are in statements are not taking seriously. Anita health testimony forced the country to confront sexual harassment, to take accusations seriously for the first time. When I sat down recently with Anita, we talked about how far we

have and haven't come all these years later. I remember covering your testimony and it was really the first time people talked openly and understood what sexual harassment was about. And since then, whether you're talking about me too, and the reckoning that took place in the last three years, it has really gotten to be out in the open. And yet it feels we haven't made enough progress. Why do you think with so much awareness we haven't made more progress. One of the things that we do very

often is we depersonalize it. We you know, we talk about the numbers, you know one and four college students will be sexually harassed or assault and account college campuses, And what we should be saying is that we send their children to school every year in September, and in reality, we know that that daughter or that niece, or that cousin or sister is very likely to become a victim of sexual harassment or assault in that space. We know that in the numbers are even worse for those who

don't go to college. But people want to depersonalize that. They don't want to think about the fact that when you talk about ten million people per year who will experience intimate partner violence, people don't want to think about the fact that with a number that large, you're talking about people who are in York community. You're talking about somebody who maybe waits on you at a restaurant, or

somebody who's teaching your children in school. So these are people who you know could be somebody in your own family. So we we depersonalize it, and because of that, we pretend not to see it. The other reason I think that we haven't done more about it is because we have, over the course of our lives, been groomed to believe

that it's not such a big problem. Um. Well, we hear people tell girls, especially you know, that behavior that they find that makes them uncomfortable or find even offensive isn't really that bad. It's not so bad. Deal with it and deal with it, or you know, you know, boys do it because they like it, or that's just what boys do. And sometimes that language can escalate that it's not just deal with it, or it's more you know, if you if you don't shut your mouth, you're going

to get in trouble. So there are ways that we prepare not only girls just to live with this problem and not complain, we're also preparing abusers to accept their own bad behavior and expect that other people will tolerate it. And what we heard when we got those nineteen million tweets um with me too, with the hashtag too, was that it is a problem. It is a significant problem. It's a harmful problem, and it's something that women and men are living with. Your book is called Believing, Our

thirty year Journey to End Gender Violence. It's your third book. It's a real representation of you and your work It's part memoir but also part legal and social analysis and a lot of personal accounts of women you've met over the years. Why write this book now, Anita, was the thirty year anniversary the impetus for you to say, let's look back on our progress, let's tell the stories of

the women I've gotten to know through these years. It wasn't just the anniversary, although I was mindful of the anniversary, but more importantly, it was the thirty years between and my testimony and where we are now. This was an opportunity to look at all of the things that have happened in those thirty years, and you know, take stock of where we are. And I'm concluding, of course, that we have a long way to go. Yet I really am conceding that we have come far in thirty years.

So why now, Well, because we've got evidence that really gender violence is at a toxic level when you take into account this huge range of behaviors that happened under the guise of of gender violence. All there are so many different facets of it. I mean, it ranges from bullying and harassment and elementary schools to bullying in harassment and workplaces. It ranges from sexual harassment and assaults and

rape on our streets. It includes intimate partner violence in our homes, and the phrases don't even capture the experience as fully. But when you calculate the range, when you calculate the human cost and the harm that's being done to us as a society, then what you realize is that we have this enormous problem that needs to be called out as a public crisis. When Me too happened, I'm just curious what it was like watching it unfold

from your perspective. I have been dealing with this not simply through my own experience, but through the experience of

thousands of others. I really, honestly was just grateful that people were coming forward and talking about it and that finally we could, you know, convince people that this was a real problem, that this wasn't just a few bad apples or a few people who were too oversensitive, um, that this was a problem that's a social problem, is a stomach problem, and that it should be dealt with it that way, because you know, even up until in some cases and even today, you have people say, you know,

this problem really doesn't exist, it's made up for whatever political reasons, economic reasons that it doesn't exist, when in fact we know all of the facts point to the reality of it. I still today here women and men supporting people who behaved a certain way workplace by saying women through themselves at this person. A lot of these kind of familiar defenses surface, And I'm curious what you think when you hear that, you know it's it's another

form of denial. I think what it comes down to is our unwillingness to act, our fear of acting, and really our desire to to uh prioritize the lives and experiences of men over the lives and experiences of women. And I think those will continue. Again, that's still part of the cultural problem. But but in fact, you know, there are also some systemic problems because in some ways

the culture has been built into our systems. So we we put an extraordinarily high burden on victims, even in elementary schools, to solve their own problems, to be the ones that tell the administrators exactly what's happening, when it's happening, why it was wrong, and to be able in some of the sense, to prove that they have been bullied or harassed and or to prove that they deserve to have some attention brought to it. And the problems aren't

just in schools. The problems the systemic problems, because it's in the criminal justice system throughout. When you take the problem of rape and sexual assault, you know the fact that we have rape kits that our backlog that after an individual goes through the the grueling process of having an examination done and participated in this effort to find out who her assailant is, that then they get put on the show and then warehoused. I mean that shows

us how broken the system is. When I started out this book, I thought, Wow, this is really kind of like boiling the ocean because there's so much out there. I thought about you many times over the years, and one of those times was in in two thousand and eighteen during Christine blassie Ford's testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. There were many differences, but some similarities. Were you shocked by the familiaria of the event and were you expecting a

different outcome? I wanted a different outcome. I wanted a process. I wanted, you know, something that wasn't even possible from the beginning. I would have wanted her to have a place to complain. She didn't have a place to complain. I wanted her to have a thorough investigation. What we had was one that was deliberately limited by President Trump then, who was a sponsor who had invested interest in Kavanaugh

being confirmed. You know, I wanted, of course, I wanted a different outcome, But I think that the country would have been better off even if the outcome had remained the same, if there had been a different way for her to come forward and to be heard. And that's really what I wanted. Um, that's not what we got. However, that wasn't the end of it. And we do know that the public reacted very strongly in a negative way. Or the outcome and the confirmation specifically of just now

Justice Kavanaugh. We know that again a sign of progress because there were so many similarities between but the public response was quite different. I did hear from people who would say, you know, are we going to go back to high school and blame people for you know, a boorish behavior or drinking too much? Is this an sort of an unrealistic purity test? And when people say that, you say, what this is? There is no purity test so much as there is full disclosure, honesty and transparency.

And if you can't up that with the cord, where can you get it? Um. The people who sit on the Supreme Court are making decisions about all sorts of cases, some of which will include very likely sexual harassment or sexual assault, and we need to understand the full character and integrity of those people who are making us to us us And if that means, you know, going back to the high school, we go back to the high school.

You know, we do that anyway for candidates, you know, but you know they've had elementary teachers testify or write statements in support of Canada that's nominees to the Supreme Court. So you know, it's it's dishonest then to hide the things that are not so positive, in fact are very negative. So we need to have all of that and then the public gets city side. Why did you call the

book believing? Because it takes a lot of believing too actually boil those should I mean to to look at the whole of this problem and realize that if you don't look at the whole, if you don't look at this this enormous um body of behavior that is happening. That's injuring all of us. You're not going to be able to solve the different pieces and to believe that that it is solvable, because you know, another one of the excuses that people raise is that, gosh, this is

just the way it is. This is the way it's always bad. It's much too big for us to get our arms around, and so let's just you know, you know, let's just deal with it. Let's push it off on the victims to deal with So believing for me included not only that we need to enlist and believe in survivors and victims, we also need to believe that we

are worthy of solutions and that change is possible. I remember the buttons that people were I believe, Anita Hill, after your testimony, and one question I wanted to ask you about was the notion of believing all women. You know, as a journalist, I've not necessarily struggled with it, because I know the statistics, Anita, I know the fact how much courage it does take to move forward. But in the aftermath that the Me Too movement, as some people felt the pendulum had swung too much, what do you

think about the notion of believing all women. I've talked to Jodie Canter of The New York Times a little bit about this, and it it um. It does fly in the face of what journalists are really supposed to do, search for truth and facts. So I would love you to weigh in and and tell me how you feel about that. Well, we now have a culture that assumes that women are lying despite all the facts. There's this persumption that women lie about their experiences. Do you think

that still exists even today? Oh? I do think it exists. I mean either they believe that women are lying, or that that that what happens doesn't matter, or that it was their fault or that it was their fault. Yeah. So so either way, we have decided that men are always telling the truth to some extent, or men are all the matter. And so you know, we've got we've we've really, in the face of all the damage that's being done, we have to sort of change our way

of thinking. And so that's one part. I mean, the term believe all women is for me, just our invitation.

Two put in place systems in processes that allow us to be heard and believed, and we're not there yet and so that is what it means to me believe in us enough to care enough to put systems in that allows us to get to the truth more with the need of right after this, much of this book has a sort of before and after feel of your life before nine when you gave that testimony against up then Supreme Court nominee Clearance Thomas, and when you were

a tenured law professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, the first African American ever be tenured. And then after that testimony ultimately up ended your life, you moved to Massachusetts, you took a full position at Brandis and and embarked on this journey to end gender violence. Can you talk about that moment in between and what led you to that life change chain decision? I after the hearing that first of all, I thought I could just get back to my life, and that wasn't possible.

It was not going to be the same. And people think that after I testified, I went back and things were all normal, But you know from having talked to me about what happened afterwards, that there were threats and there was hostility, and there were efforts to get me

fired from my job. But after you know, I got over the realization that it was not going to get back to normal, I actually started looking at what I could do to understand and help other people understand how we might solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. What I realized was that the law alone, and I was trained, you know and teaching law, the law alone was not going to be the answer. That the problem was bigger than the laws that we now have in place.

So I ended up moving from Oklahoma, leaving a tenure job for a contract position, because it decided I needed to learn more about all of the ways that systems and policies work together to keep this problem in place. And so that's what I did. I just I left and I started teaching at a policy school, and I was surrounded by people with various disciplines um and I was surrounded by people who were interested in solving social

problem generally. And that was an environment that allowed me to really grow and to develop many of the ideas that that came into ultimately into the book. Had I not made that change, I think I might have still been somewhat stuck in terms of my thinking. But you know what, Katie, how fortunate I am that I could do that. I had training as a lawyer. But I was also fortunate because I had a job that was transferable, and I had skills that were transferable to somewhat place else.

And I didn't have to worry about a family that would get suffered because of changes that I made, not my immediate family, and you know, I did have to leave my parents and siblings in Oklahoma, but I left with their support. You must have heard from so many people through the years, Anita, who didn't have transferable skills, who didn't really have marketable skills, who were stuck and trapped with no place to go, no options. And I imagine those for the stories that affected you the most.

They absolutely are and I say none were, They absolutely are the stories. You know, we like to say if more women would just come forward and file complaints, then the problem would be fixed. Now we're ignoring the fact that the systems as they go into aren't there to fix their problems necessarily. But we are also ignoring the fact that there are costs to people who come forward, and there risks that some people just cannot take. When when when someone says, you know, well, if I take this,

I may lose my job. I may not ever be able to get another one. I don't know where I will get another one. You know, my my uh my boss will be called if if I try to move to another place, and what am I going to tell the new employer and all of those things have to be taken into account. You know, we we make it very, very difficult for people to file complaints, which is one reason we have no idea the real depth of this problem, because there are so many people who will never be

able to speak up. That was definitely the case thirty years ago. But you don't think that's changed at all. You don't think that that there has been positive movement in terms of supporting people who I mean, granted, I totally understand what you're saying. Some people don't have the options, but is there some good news? Has the needle moved

in any way? The needle has moved, and while there are still people who who cannot make the choices that I may, there are organizations that are supporting people to make the choices that they can make. Two be safe in spaces, but the resources aren't enough to keep up with the level of the problem, and quite Frankly, the forces that really are not interested in solving your problem or my problem are very very strong. Basically, our systems have failed us. The systems that were meant to solve

the problems are not solving it. You know, I talk about a woman named Sharon Dunne UM and Sharon Dunne is a Ford um auto worker who filed a suit and nine in the ninet nineties. I believe it was nine. UM sharing Dunn is still working in the forward plan and she is now participating in a suit filed twenty years later. So for years that problem has been going on.

So we've got systems that just are not working. Even even in that first lawsuit, there was a huge settlement by four to improve the conditions that people were working under. Fast forward twenty years later, there's another lawsuit. Things have not changed, But have has anything changed? Absolutely something has changed. Hasn't changed for enough people, but some things have changed. We now want here about these lawsuits. We now know about them, We know about the are and dunes. We

now have organizations that are in fact really engaged. You know. I'm on the board of the National Women's Law Center UM and we are working hard every day, not only to make sure that women are represented, poor women are represented UM and women of color, because we know that the problems are exacerbated by race and and an income level. We are working with organizations, whether it's people who are organized in restaurant workers or people who are organizing workers

in who are doing field work and agricultural work. So we're those things that didn't exist UM in nineteen are out part of the solution. Part of the reason that you're now hearing about sexual harassment insult in schools is because of the student movement in universities and those students to move where we're part of a movement now are in the workplace, and they're part of the movement within

the workplaces. You know, we do have people walking out of workplaces because of bad decisions that were made by leadership UM. So, yes, there is energy out there, and there is information out there, there are resources out there, and I'm hopeful that this is the moment where those things will come together and we we can have changed we can push this issue forward and make the world safer for everyone. I would imagine uh that that many

people are mind their peace and cues. As my mom would say, in ways they never did because of the consequences that faced many high profile individuals. Um, do you think that that the movement has changed corporate America or you know, startups? I mean, I think you can't put everything in the same category. But don't you think men are afraid now to to act the way they have acted or not all but some of them have acted

for for decades. I think that after every every event where a rare awareness is raised, including nine changes happened. I have heard from women who have told me my my workplace changed in But clearly it's not enough, because if it were enough, we would not have had me too, and we still have. You know, whatever the reckoning is

is not complete, you know. I we did a survey at the Hollywood Commission of Industry Workers, and one of the things that was so startling was that about, oh, let's say, of the people we survey said that a powerful man will not be held accountable for their bad behavior, even if it is document. We can't fire our way out of this problem. That's just sort of treating the behavior. And we've got to deal with this as a structural problem.

And I think it goes well beyond individual workplaces. You know, it goes really to me all the way to our government, and we actually need to have a president who understands that the problem is bigger. So, you know, there's still a lot of work to be done, but we are so much closer to the answers than we were before.

And the answers are, yes, we have to deal with the behavior, but we also have to deal with the structures that are enabling to behave You have a lot of experience with President Biden, obviously as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee back in nine. Uh, you had a lot of white men staring down at you asking if you were a scold woman, uh, citing the Exorcist. You know, I know that. Then Senator Biden made you restate some of the most salacious details, even though it was in

your written testament. Any he called you to apologize. What was that like, Anita, that that phone call? Can you share it with us? Well, I talk about it in a little more detail in the book. Uh, but it was it was an odd conversation because I wasn't looking for an apology. I won't say, you know, I was completely over it by the time it happened. But I had really put it in perspective in in Chuck and I even joked about it. You know, when we were having dinner in the doorbell rang uh instead of the

fed X man. We used to think, oh, well, maybe that's Joe Biden coming to apologize. But you know, and all seriousness. Um, I really wasn't looking for an apology. What I wanted was for somebody to take responsibility. I will. And over twenty years ago, I had a question from a member of an audience that I was speaking to about what president or what Candada will be the best Candida to deal with problems of sexual harassment and that

includes all kinds of misconduct and and abuse. And I thought about that question every time we have an election because it is an important question, and it is the right question to be asked, be asking because we need to know what our leaders are going to do about

this problem. And Joe Biden, for me, was in a particularly important place because of because of his support of the Violence Against Women Act, because of his support of ending harassment and assault on college campuses is effort there and during his time in the Ovomit administration, he had an opportunity has an opportunity to be the president who says I will do everything in my power to make sure that America doesn't continue to suffer this problem. Do

you think he will? Are you disappointed with what he's done so far? Well? I think he will if we continue to push it. Remember the apology came after he was pushed barely often by different people, including journalists. Oh, I wasn't one of the people. But I think, you know, he has a lot of work to do. But I

think this should be a priority. And I think that unless we we tell him it's a priority, and that we continue to urge it and we show him the evidence of why it should be a priority, ah, he could very well be just like all of the other presidents before and and pass it on to the next generation. I think when people hear about systemic change and changing, you know, societal structures, it is like boiling the ocean. Can you condense or take a you know, a cord

of that water? And if you had to have the solutions or the steps that are necessary to really change

said system, what would they be. Well, one thing that I would say is that we need to go back and shore up the Violence Against Women Act and in the year two thousand, it was got it and the Supreme Court decision basically told Congress that it had no authority to provide protections and federal protections against violence that was based on this faulty idea that you know, gender violence didn't impact us nationally, it didn't impact commers, despite

the evidence that was there. Now we have even more evidence, so we now have more reason to go and fortify the violence against women that um, not just reconfirm it in its existing form, but to make sure we have added protections in there for individuals who want to come forward and want a safe place or fair in just place, actually not a safe safe place, not just a safe place,

but a fair and just place to be heard. UM. We need to have policies that take into account some of the harm that's being done to people who experienced in their violence and I mean very being very intentional and deliberate about it. So we know ten million people suffering from UH intimate partner violence. Estimates are that of them will become homeless. Because of that, we need housing policies that take care of those individuals. Right now, we

have shelters that are over loaded. It and especially since COVID when the numbers of intimate partner violence and domestic violence surged, but reporting declined as well. And reporting declined because there was no safe way to report and no place to go, and no place to go. Then you know there are health issues, there are housing issues. We know that, for example, people lose income and economic opportunity

because of violence. Either it can be violence and of a partner, violence or sexual harassment in their workplace that they lose time, or sexual assault that people lose time and opportunities, work opportunities. We don't have any specific policies to address that problem of of ongoing economic security for

people who have been victims of gender violence. I guess the simplest answer I would give in terms of what I would like and for solutions is to enlist survivors and victims and formulating the solutions to this problem bring us into the decision. They can put us at the table when the laws are being debated, our policies are being debated. Listen to what we have to say now, and then the other thing that I will say, and

that talk about this in the book. And we've got to acknowledge that there are all kinds of factors that are compounding this problem, racism being one, homophobia being another, and we've gotten whatever solutions that we come up with. We have to understand that if we don't get rid of both of those, if we aren't attended to both of those issues, that we will only be serving a small portion of the population and we will not be serving the people who are the most vulnerable. Ultimately, Anita,

what what do you think your legacy will be? What do you hope it will be? Well? I hope I have time to add on to it. That's I'm not ready to. I mean, it seems so final. I'm not ready for it to be final yet. I could feel like there's got to be something more that I could

think of and then will happen. So um, I do hope that even right now, that people see me as somewhat who is coming from a position of having been a victim of bias and harassment, but who is invested in A huge thank you to Anita Hill, whose new book is called Believing, Our thirty year Journey to End

Gender Violence. Thank you also to Deborah Turkheimer. Her new book is called Credible, Why We Doubt accusers and protect abusers both are out now, and if you haven't already, there's still time to preorder my book Going There before it's October release. And if you'd like to join me on tour, you can go to ticketmaster dot com slash Going There to find out we're all be traveling and to buy tickets. So I hope to see you all on the road. Next Question with Kati Kurik is a

production of My Heart Media and Katie Kurik Media. The executive producers Army, Katie Curic and Courtney Litz. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Associate producers Derek Clements, Adrianna Fasio, and Emily Pinto. The show is edited and mixed by Derrick Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter, wake Up Call, go to Katie correct dot com. You can also find me at Katie Currek on Instagram and all my social media channels.

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