Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill sat under the same hot white lights at the United States Senate, a damaged man and an injured woman demanding justice. Two parallel lives that had looked exemplary suddenly collided over an ugly story of sexual harassment. Poised and intelligent, Hill said that when she had worked for Thomas a decade earlier, he harassed her with barnyard talk of porn flicks, group sex, bestiality and his own sexual prowess. Jaw taut with outrage, Thomas categorically denied all of it, arguing that a mob from the sewer was out to lynch him. One witness was telling the truth, the other was lying; one was a victim, the other a hypocrite. But which was which?
As the needle of credibility swung back and forth between the Supreme Court nominee and the young professor of law, the country sat glued to television, watching a spectacle that was at first riveting, then depressing, and ultimately revolting. Public officials babbled over breasts, pubic hair, the meterage of penises and the exploits of a porn star called Long Dong Silver. The accused sat glaring, his wife at his side weeping at the raw details. The accuser listened while a panel of 14 men wondered aloud whether she was just a fantasist who had made it all up. To watch was to become a voyeur. The X-rated antics were hard to stomach-and harder to turn off.
Never before had the issue of sexual harassment welled up into such a large and emotional public forum. There was no way that roughly 4 million years of male supremacy was going to yield to Robert’s Rules of Order. But men nodding as senators demanded to know why any infraction 10 years old should ruin Thomas’s career themselves uneasily searching their own memories for that furtive grope, off-color joke or idiotic leer they had once considered irresistible. Women admiring Hill’s nerve recalled moments they or someone they knew had been in Hill’s shoes, the occasions they had remained silent. It happened all the time, they said; the only reason men didn’t get it was because they never tried.
The performance of the Judiciary Committee, with posturing senators, staffers and reporters tumbling over one another, raised a nasty question: had the process itself run amok? There had to be a better way to pick a Supreme Court justice. “The judge was wronged. Anita Hill was wronged. The process was wronged,” committee chairman Joseph Biden conceded. Was this the best the system had to offer? The nation had received a seismic jolt, but everyone wound up feeling soiled.
