by Anita Hill
Over dinner with Eric and Shirley, I discovered that the stress of the day had not taken away my appetite. Though I only now appreciate it fully, this was the last time I would eat in a public restaurant with some sense of anonymity. After dinner I went home alone to a ringing telephone and an answering machine full of messages, some worse than I had anticipated—death threats and threats of rape or sodomy. People felt free to leave the most cruel and revolting messages imaginable. Yet not all the messages were of that kind. Many, mostly those from women, were words of encouragement. Some were delightful, like the one from two “older women,” as they described themselves, “friends, one black, one white,” who wanted me to know that they were behind me and were praying for me. Amazingly, that one message of support undid the damage of all the threats.
Halfway through the playback, the tape jammed and I lost the remaining messages. This was symbolic to me in the days to come of the many things that had seemed to go wrong in the past few days. But the broken message machine did not stop the telephone from ringing constantly. After talking to my mother, I turned off the ringers and went to bed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Unlike its reaction to my confidential statement, the Senate’s reaction to a public airing of my claim was swift, and in some cases outright hostile. This kind of resistance did damage and disservice in a number of areas. Of course, the immediate denunciations of my claim and their unsupported comments about my character harmed me personally. But they also misinformed the public about the issue of sexual harassment and disparaged the right of a private citizen to become involved in matters of public significance. And Senate efforts to press the nomination at all costs threatened the integrity of the nomination process itself.
Because both Democrats and Republicans acted irresponsibly, their behavior said less about party politics than politics in general. It was politics in general that showed its face in the arrogant statements of the senators. Their resentment that public pressure had forced them to change their internal policies was clear. And to many around the country, even those who did not identify with the harassment experience, the Senate’s attitude suggested that their own experiences might well be dismissed if the Senate found those experiences unpopular or unpleasant. They saw a Senate out of touch with the lives of its constituents. Those who knew firsthand or related to the harassment issue recognized that it was the senators’ resentment at being accountable to the public that had caused them to attack me. The side of public life that the people witnessed during the hearing was contemptible but true. And nothing painted the unpleasant picture more vividly than the senators’ own words.
One of the first reactions to my statement that I heard was from Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, who said the following during a press conference on the afternoon of October 7, a short time after my own press conference was ended.
If you’re sexually harassed you ought to get mad about it, and you ought to do something about it and you ought to complain, instead of hanging around a long time and then all of a sudden calling up anonymously and say “Oh, I want to complain.” I mean, where is the gumption?
Later, more than one person would ask me, “Did you hear what DeConcini said?” Each person who asked seemed more incensed than the last, and none of them seemed to care that DeConcini was a Democrat. As one woman put it, “Here is a man who probably never had to face discrimination in his life telling women how they ought to react to being sexually harassed. ‘Where is the gumption’ indeed?”
I can’t count the number of times since October 1991 that I have been asked, “Why did you wait ten years to raise charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas?” To which I must first say that I wasn’t waiting from 1983 to 1991 to raise charges against Clarence Thomas. I was living my life. I was involved in the day-to-day struggles that everyone who lives and works and cares about their families and friends has. I had a full life of which Clarence Thomas was no longer a part. Moreover, the question misconceives what I was attempting to do in disclosing the information. I did not see the response as an effort to get relief or redress for the behavior. I was supplying information about how Thomas conducted himself in his professional role.
Perhaps a different question, and I believe a better question, is “Why didn’t you bring charges of sexual harassment immediately after you left the EEOC?” To understand the muteness of my response, one must understand that I wanted most of all for the behavior to stop. That was my chief objective throughout. I found a way to make that happen by removing myself from the situation. Even in hindsight I am convinced that there was no way to stop the harassment decisively except by leaving. What were the precedents? There was a woman in the District of Columbia who sued Department of Corrections officials for harassment she experienced in the late 1970s. She is still attempting to obtain relief for her harm despite the fact that she won her suit years ago. I also recall one of the very first sexual harassment lawsuits ever filed. The woman involved in this case, Paulette Barnes, was an African American suing her supervisor in the Environmental Protection Agency, complaining that he stripped her of all job responsibilities after she rejected his sexual advances, ultimately abolishing her position altogether. I know of a third woman whose career as a doctor was stalled for over ten years because as a resident she complained about a doctor’s harassment. I also know of countless women who changed college majors or professional careers and sometimes even relocated to other cities in lieu of confronting their harassers.
These were my options. I assessed the situation and chose not to file a complaint. I had every right to make that choice. And until society is willing to accept the validity of claims of harassment, no matter how privileged or powerful the harasser, it is a choice women will continue to make. I do not believe that in the early 1980s I lived and worked in a society, either in Washington or in Tulsa, that would have supported my right to raise a claim of harassment against the head of the EEOC. And given the state of the law and what occurred in 1991, I do not believe that a complaint would have stopped what was happening. For years I made the choice to remain silent about my experience and to push on in my life. I made that choice, like many other women, because I thought that it was my only choice. Even today most women choose to keep to themselves the slights, innuendos, harassment, and abuse they experience—because they are women. I hear from former students, now young lawyers working with seasoned professionals and struggling to maintain their dignity and their jobs in this kind of ongoing balancing act. I hear from middle-aged and older women who believe that their silence has allowed them to survive both economically and socially. In the world according to Senator DeConcini, all these women are sorely lacking in gumption. Yet they function in a world that encourages them to question their own reaction and to stop being “so sensitive” to the pain of their experiences. That alone takes a lot of gumption.
DeConcini also misrepresented the sequence of events that led to my statement to the Senate. No one contests that my first contact with the Senate came at the initiation of Senate staffers; it was a point I sought to stress at the press conference and one that was not debatable. Therefore, not only did I not make a call to the Senate and say that I wanted to complain, but there was never any anonymity. The Senate staffers called me and thus always had my name and my location. By the time of the hearings they had ample information about my background. Even Senator Simpson, in a rare display of probity on the matter, allowed that at least some Democrats on the committee had my name as early as September 23.
What is more important, DeConcini’s remarks reveal that he based his dismissal of my charges more on how he thought a woman should respond to harassment than on whether he believed that Thomas had actually harassed me. At one point in the days preceding the hearing, DeConcini said, “I don’t say it didn’t happen. I say there is another side.” Very often the responsibility for ending discriminatory behavior, in whatever form, is placed on the target of the discrimination, rather than the person w
ho carries it out or those in a position of authority to stop it.
In his comments DeConcini described how a victim of discrimination should feel and act. First that person should “get mad,” and then she should “complain.” If she does not, according to DeConcini, nobody should care, even when a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court is at stake. In other words, those who do not react in the way prescribed by DeConcini deserve no attention from those who should be concerned about the problem. In focusing on the target’s reaction instead of the behavior of the harasser, DeConcini failed to understand that most harassment victims experience a variety of emotions in the face of harassment; anger is just one of them. And different people deal with harassment in different ways. Some women internalize the anger; others deny it.
Filing a complaint in response to harassment is only one way of “getting mad.” As I said, it is one that many harassment victims feel would be fruitless. Only 3 percent of reported harassment incidents end in a formal complaint. DeConcini proposed this reaction as the only valid course in response to harassment, though it is one that few harassment targets ever take.
In addition to revealing real ignorance about the harassment issues, DeConcini’s comments reveal a good deal of arrogance. Given the negative reactions to charges of sexual harassment, telling women that they should angrily complain, without any consideration of the effectiveness of the complaint mechanism, is tantamount to telling them that they should subject themselves to further abuse.
DeConcini was not a trial judge responding to a plaintiff attempting to bring a claim in federal court ten years after events occurred. He was a member of a committee reviewing the entire record of a nominee for a lifetime appointment. The committee had spent the last few months reviewing Thomas’ life as far back as his childhood in Georgia. No one on the committee prevented Thomas or his supporters from bringing in character evidence dating back nearly forty years. Moreover, the committee had spent hours discussing Thomas’ role as assistant secretary of education and chair of the EEOC. Thomas’ performance in those capacities and his role as a member of the Reagan administration were chief topics of the first round of the confirmation hearing, during which the committee had also received and discussed evidence of Thomas’ improprieties in handling expense and travel reimbursement. There were claims that he was reimbursed by the government for what was essentially personal business relating to his membership on the board of his alma mater, Holy Cross University. No one objected that the material was outdated. Nevertheless, when the topic of his conduct in official positions turned to sexual harassment, DeConcini and many other senators balked at the idea of hearing it.
DeConcini and some of his colleagues apparently had a double standard for receiving information, depending on the nature of the information. The committee seemed willing to exclude “old” information on sexual harassment while considering “old” information on practically anything else. If the Senate is unwilling to view evidence of sexual misconduct with the same openness as it views evidence of other types of improprieties, victims of sexual misconduct, most often women, will face trouble when they attempt to inform Senate committees of such behavior, whether in an information-gathering session for legislative purposes, a confirmation hearing, or a disciplinary proceeding such as the Ethics Committee hearings on harassment allegations against Senator Robert Packwood. The double standard casts harassment as “personal behavior” rather than behavior that reflects on professionalism.
DeConcini’s willingness to let harassers and those with the power to end harassment off the hook is not shared by the courts. One issue of litigation in the sexual harassment arena is whether an employer is relieved of liability after taking steps to end discrimination in the workplace. Courts scrutinize the employer’s sexual harassment policy to determine if it is adequate and evenhandedly enforced. The courts have concluded that it is not enough for an employer simply to say that sexual harassment is prohibited. The employer must establish a procedure under which targets of such behavior can come forward and state a claim without fear of retaliation, and the procedure must provide for the fair investigation and resolution of the complaint should the complainant prevail. The employer does not relieve himself of responsibility for ridding the workplace of harassment by declaring that the target of the behavior should get angry. Nor does the duty to an aggrieved employee end simply because the employee failed to avail herself of the employer’s grievance procedure. The employee may still file a lawsuit.
In his press conference DeConcini essentially claimed that the Senate had no duty to investigate my charges because I had not filed a complaint against Thomas ten years ago. DeConcini should not have been allowed to sidestep his responsibility to me, or more important, to the American public, with such a bold assertion, which ignored one critical fact. The responsibility of the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the character and fitness of nominees to the Supreme Court is comprehensive in scope and time. It is by no means limited to formal complaints filed against the nominee, nor to events of two, three, or even ten years past.
During the hearing, when Senator DeConcini questioned me, our exchange would prove quite revealing. “And the fact that you admit that, in retrospect, maybe you should have done something, you have concluded that it is all someone else’s fault; none of it is your fault.” What was supposed to be a question became a statement—an accusation. “Yes,” I responded. If he meant that the harassment was not my fault, certainly my answer was yes. And if he was referring to the circumstances that brought me before the public, my answer was still yes. I had no say in how his committee had handled my statement, and certainly no part in the leak to the press. “Is that your frame of mind?” DeConcini’s dissatisfaction with my response was obvious in his tone. “That is my frame of mind,” I answered. Clearly, DeConcini wanted to blame me for what was happening in 1991 because I failed to file a complaint ten years earlier, but I held firm. The hearing was no more my fault than the harassment itself.
On Monday afternoon a group of women requested a meeting with the Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, to discuss a postponement of the Senate vote on the confirmation. The group included black and white women from academic and political backgrounds. Their objective was to persuade Mitchell to delay the vote and allow time for a thorough investigation. They were asked to wait until the senator was available, and one of them finally had to leave because of a prior commitment. The meeting with Senator Mitchell was perhaps more frustrating because of the long wait that preceded it. “My hands are tied. I can’t do anything,” Mitchell declared. Despite his perceived power as majority leader, he would take no responsibility for the action the Senate was about to take in voting to confirm Judge Thomas to the Court. The schedule for the vote was set, and according to Mitchell it could not be changed. Yet later when Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the senator in charge of the Senate Calendar, threatened to call a week’s recess, Mitchell exerted his authority, reminding his colleague that he, not Moynihan, was the majority leader. Senator Mitchell’s inaction opened the door for the Republican senators to go on the offensive.
Unconstrained by any sense of senatorial decorum, Senator Alan Simpson appeared on ABC’s Nightline that evening. He brought with him telephone logs that Thomas supporters had retrieved from his garage, hoping they would kill my claim. More numerous than the eleven calls I had made to Thomas’ office at the EEOC in the ten years since I left my job were the calls and remarks that had been blacked out, removed from any public scrutiny. Yet no one questioned Thomas’ selection of what the committee would see. Simpson implied that I had “pursued” Thomas. The campaign that began with DeConcini’s “blame the victim” remark continued with Simpson’s labeling me the aggressor in my relationship with Thomas. And the anticipation of a second round of the Thomas confirmation hearing, which might have been seen as an opportunity for responsible consideration of my claim, seemed instead to provoke greater irresponsibi
lity among some senators. The press appeared to relish their remarks, calling upon senators from the Judiciary Committee in particular.
When Senator Simpson appeared on Nightline on October 7, armed with Clarence Thomas’ telephone logs, he raised another question I have been asked countless times since: “Why did you keep in touch with him?” To which I must say that I was not threatened by Thomas as a person. I was threatened by the power he had held over me as an employer. That threat ended when I left his employ. Tellingly, so did the behavior.
By no means were Clarence Thomas and I good friends. I did not invite him to my home during the time we worked together. I spent five weeks in Washington during the summer of 1987 without contacting him or his office. My telephone calls to him had each had a work-related purpose. Some commentators have described them as “opportunistic,” suggesting that I was seeking something I had no right to expect, though I had worked for Clarence Thomas for two years and had performed my job conscientiously. When I called upon him or his office for information, or to pass along a legitimate request, I did so on the basis of that performance. Never would I have considered those solicitations opportunism. I received no personal gain. Besides, I had not been the one to behave inappropriately. So why should I later allow his behavior to deprive me of a job benefit I had rightfully earned?
Part of the answer to the complex question of why I stayed in touch has to do with the idea of control. By pretending that my departure from the EEOC was cordial, I denied to myself the significance of the harassment. But by staying in touch subsequently, I regained something I hadn’t been able to maintain working for Clarence Thomas: professional decorum.
