Sex, Lies and Politics: He Said, She Said

It was hard to imagine two more unlikely or reluctant witnesses. On one side of the divide was Anita Hill, 35, a specialist in the dry area of commercial law, a reserved woman who by all accounts is given more to listening than to talking. On the other was Clarence Thomas, 43, a courtly man who from his college days has enjoyed a reputation for treating women with particular courtesy and respect. Yet there she was, this prim law professor from the University of Oklahoma, seated in the glare of klieg lights before the Senate Judiciary Committee, calmly detailing graphic charges of sexual harassment against the man who until last week seemed virtually certain to be confirmed as the next Justice to the Supreme Court.

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He said, “I have not said or done the things Anita Hill has alleged.”

She said, “I am not given to fantasy. This is not something I would have come forward with if I was not absolutely sure of what I was saying.”

For witnesses to this spectacle, whether there in the Senate Caucus Room or at home in their living rooms, deciding who was telling the truth was all but impossible. Viewers had to weigh the testimony of two admirable people — both of whom had escaped, through diligence and perseverance, a background of rural poverty to scale great heights, both of whom are known to be grounded in strong religious and spiritual values, both of whom have reputations for great personal integrity — and pronounce one of them a liar. In the final analysis, it would come down to this: the specificity of Hill’s charges against the intensity of Thomas’ denials.

Before the days of exhausting and exhaustive testimony would end, Hill would coolly and impassively detail the nature of Thomas’ alleged harassment while she worked for him in government positions from 1981 to 1983. Words like “penis” and “breasts” and “pubic hair” would enter the public record repeatedly in so somber and untitillating a fashion that no one in the hearing room would blanch, let alone smirk or giggle. It was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of differing sensibilities — oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad taste on his. If Hill’s description of Thomas’ words and actions was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If Hill’s account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional and a candidate for medical attention.

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During Saturday’s session, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch aimed squarely at the accuser, implying that Hill was working in tandem with “slick lawyers” bent on destroying Thomas’ chances to join the court. Thomas appeared to endorse that view when committee chairman Joseph Biden asked if he believed that Hill had fabricated a tale of sexual harassment. “Some interest groups came up with this story, and this story was developed specifically to destroy me,” the nominee responded.

In the course of the hearing, which Thomas angrily characterized as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” other witnesses would come forward. Some would try to buttress Hill’s charges either by affirming that she had complained of sexual harassment at the time of the alleged incidents or by putting forward their own allegations of misconduct by Thomas. Others would seek to cast doubt on Hill’s testimony either by dredging up recollections that conflicted with hers or by offering stories that aimed to weaken Hill’s credibility.

(See “Hill Vs. Thomas: An Ugly Circus.”)

But nothing was likely to match the devastating effect of both Hill’s and Thomas’ testimony. Cool and unflappable, Hill looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question without hesitation. Her hands folded on the lap of her teal blue dress, her demeanor polite, cooperative and never defensive, she painted a vivid and sobering portrait of what it means to be victimized by sexual harassment — from the fears, embarrassments and humiliations she experienced to the repercussions it had on her work, health and career choices. Given the detail and consistency of her testimony, it was almost inconceivable that Hill, rather than describing her own experiences, was fabricating the portrait of a sexual-harassment victim.

No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were Thomas’ anguished statements and adamant denials. In his opening remarks — which he wrote himself, by a friend’s account, after telling the White House to “butt out” — he said he felt “shocked, surprised, hurt and enormously saddened” on learning of Hill’s charges. While Hill would maintain that he had asked her out five to 10 times during the period in question, he denied that he had ever asked her for even a single date. Rather, he said, Hill was someone he had helped at every turn, someone he considered a friend. That accusations of harassment should come from her seemed to him particularly hurtful. “During the past two weeks,” he said, “I lost the belief that if I did my best, all would work out.”

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Then Thomas enlarged his field of pain. He spoke of the long ordeal — 105 days by week’s end — that he had endured since his nomination to the Supreme Court, of reporters picking through his garbage cans and poring over his divorce papers. “This is not American; this is Kafkaesque. It has got to stop. It must stop for the benefit of future nominees and our country. Enough is enough,” he declared, emphasizing each word.

“No job is worth what I’ve been through — no job. No horror in my life has been so debilitating. Confirm me if you want. Don’t confirm me if you are so led.” Said he: “I will not provide the rope for my own lynching. These are the most intimate parts of my privacy, and they will remain just that, private.”

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The tone of his opening statement was so bitter, in fact, that many listeners thought he was leading up to a withdrawal of his candidacy. But he stopped short of that, apparently determined to clear his name even if he could not salvage his place on the court. “I would have preferred an assassin’s bullet to this kind of living hell,” he said the next day. But still, he insisted, he would “rather die than withdraw.”

Friday night, after Hill concluded her testimony, Thomas again took his place behind the green-draped table to answer questions. But this time his pain had given way to raw anger. “I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically, that I deny each and every single allegation against me today.” He called the hearing a travesty, a circus, a national disgrace. During his two days of testimony, Thomas returned repeatedly to a central theme of his rebuttal: that he was the victim of a racially motivated attack. “I cannot shake off these accusations because they play to the worst stereotypes we have about black men in this country,” he angrily declared.

In his second appearance on Friday, he made an astounding statement: he had not even listened to Hill’s testimony. Thomas’ wife Virginia, however, watched parts of it and reported back to her husband. When Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama suggested to Thomas that only he could put the lie to Hill’s claims, Thomas snapped back, “I am incapable of proving the negative. It did not occur.”

Defiant, defensive and plainly fed up with the process, Thomas answered further questions tersely, as the Senators played back Hill’s charges to him. “No.” “Absolutely not, Senator.” “It never occurred.” The process, he asserted, was “drowning my life, my career and my integrity. You have robbed me of something that can never be restored.”

At only one point did he offer a hint of anything that might smack of a personal relationship with Hill. “I would drive her home and sometimes stop in and have a Coke or a beer or something and continue arguing about politics for maybe 45 minutes to an hour,” he said. “But I never thought anything of it.” Later, Thomas elaborated on this aspect of their relationship by stating that there were a “number of instances” when he visited Hill’s home while working with her at the Education Department.

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Thomas’ two sessions of angry rebuttal were compelling. But even so riveting an appearance could not mitigate the impact of Hill’s own eight hours of virtually uninterrupted testimony. In her own opening statement, she spoke first about the general nature of her office exchanges with Thomas while working under his supervision, initially at the Department of Education’s office for civil rights in 1981 and ’82, then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982 to ’83. “He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes,” she alleged. “He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.”

The most charged moments came when she offered specific details about Thomas’ alleged behavior. One of the “oddest episodes,” she said, involved an exchange in Thomas’ office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” (Later, Hatch accused Hill of stealing the story from a work of fiction. Holding aloft a copy of the book The Exorcist, Hatch quoted, “There seems to be an alien pubic hair in my gin.”) On other occasions, Hill maintained, “he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal” and spoke of the pleasure he had “given to women with oral sex.”

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Urged by Biden to recall her most embarrassing encounter with Thomas, Hill responded, “His discussion of pornography involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals.” Under questioning, she also recalled an exchange in Thomas’ office where Thomas alluded to the large penis of an actor in a pornographic film by referring to the character’s name.

“Do you recall what it was?” pressed Senator Biden.

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“Yes, I do.” Hill, permitting herself a rare display of emotion, wrinkled her nose in disgust. “The name that was referred to was Long Dong Silver.” Hatch, who emerged as one of the panel’s most aggressive interrogators, later dug up a 1988 decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, citing an obscene photograph of a character by that name. Hatch suggested it was this court case that had brought the name to Hill’s attention — not Clarence Thomas.

Hill was also quite specific about her last encounter with Thomas, in 1983, while still an employee at the EEOC. Up until then, she said, she had declined all social invitations from Thomas, explaining to the Senators that she had repeatedly told him she did not feel it was appropriate to date her supervisor. But this was her last day at the EEOC before proceeding to a teaching post at Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University. So, she said, after he “assured me that the dinner was a professional courtesy only,” they went to a restaurant after work. “He made a comment I vividly remember,” she said. “He said that if I ever told anyone of his behavior, that it would ruin his career.”

(See “Clarence Thomas: A Question of Character.”)

The most moving aspect of Hill’s testimony was the vivid portrait she painted of the vulnerability, humiliation and frustration she experienced while working under such conditions. “It wasn’t as though it happened every day,” Hill explained. “But I went to work during certain periods knowing that it might happen.” She spoke of her fear of being squeezed out of good assignments, losing her job, maybe even not being able to find any job at all within the Reagan Administration if she continued to resist Thomas’ alleged overtures. At one point, she said, the stress she experienced from the tension of her relationship with Thomas caused her to be hospitalized for five days with acute stomach pains.

Although the panel of male Senators seemed to have an especially hard time with this part of Hill’s testimony, her tale struck a resonant chord with countless women across America. Judith Resnick, a law professor at the University of Southern California Law Center, characterized Hill’s testimony: “You’re seeing a paradigm of a sexual-harassment case.”

| The point most rigorously pursued by the Senate panel, particularly Pennsylvania’s Senator Arlen Specter, the chief Republican interrogator on the committee, was why Hill decided in 1982 to follow Thomas from the Education Department to the EEOC. At that point, Hill said, she thought “the sexual overtures which had so troubled me had ended.” Besides, she noted, there was talk that President Reagan was thinking of phasing out the Education Department, and she feared she might wind up jobless.

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Once she got to the EEOC, Hill said, the overtures from Thomas resumed. If that was true, Senators wondered, then why in the years since she turned to teaching had she remained in touch with Thomas? Hill said she saw little harm in maintaining cordial relations with Thomas now that she no longer worked with him and no longer felt threatened by him. “I did not feel that it was necessary to cut off all ties or to burn all bridges or to treat him in a hostile manner,” she said. “If I had done that, I would have had to explain this whole situation that I’ve come forward with today.”

Specter made much of the fact that while at Oral Roberts University, Hill remained friendly enough with Thomas to volunteer to drive him to the airport on one occasion. She suggested that the university’s founding dean, Charles Kothe, had asked her to do so. (Kothe was not only her boss at that time but a good friend of Thomas’ as well.) She visited Thomas another time after she left the EEOC, she explained, to get a recommendation from him. And what of the 11 phone calls she made to Thomas over a six-year period, publicized earlier in the week by Thomas’ Senate champion, Republican John Danforth of Missouri? Those, she explained, were work-related calls, and each “was made in a professional context.”

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Specter questioned the validity of her memory eight to 10 years after the events, given that her recollections had changed in recent weeks. As an example, he cited the fact that when she spoke to the FBI agents in late September, she recalled telling only one friend about the alleged sexual harassment. Now, he said, she had two witnesses lined up to testify that she had complained at the time. “If you start to look at each individual problem, then you won’t be satisfied that it’s true,” she said. “But the statement has to be taken as a whole.” Then she added forcefully, “There is no motivation to show I’d make up something like this.”

On that point, Hill seemed particularly persuasive. Each time committee . members tried to probe her possible motivations for denouncing Thomas publicly, they came up dry. It became clear that it was members of various Senate staffs who had approached Hill, not the other way around. She maintained her silence publicly until her FBI statement fell into reporters’ hands on Oct. 5. At that point, she said, “I felt I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

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Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy confronted the issue of motive and asked if she stood to gain in any way from coming forward. “I have nothing to gain here,” she said soberly. “This has been disruptive of my life, and I’ve taken a number of personal risks.” She said she had been threatened, though she did not elaborate on the nature or source of the threat. “I have not gained anything except knowing that I came forward and did what I felt that I had an obligation to do,” she said. “That was to tell the truth.”

The only moment when Hill seemed at all evasive came during an exchange with Specter over an Oct. 9 account in USA Today. In it, Keith Henderson, an old friend of hers who is also a former Senate Judiciary staff member, is quoted as saying Hill was advised by Senate staff members that her FBI affidavit would be the instrument that “quietly and behind the scenes” would force Thomas to withdraw, without her name ever becoming public. Specter pressed her to recall discussing such a scenario with anyone. First she demurred that she did not recall that specific comment. Pressed again, she allowed, “There might have been some conversation about what could possibly occur.” On Saturday Specter quickly attacked Hill’s change in testimony as “flat-out perjury.”

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Senators returned to the point, plainly unwilling to accept that Hill had not at least entertained this scenario when she made her statement to the FBI agents. They, like many viewers, could not fathom how Hill would have failed to anticipate that her charges might not remain anonymous and that at some point she might have to face Thomas. When asked by Biden if she considered herself part of an “organized effort” to keep Thomas from the bench, she said, “I had not even imagined that this would occur.”

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There was one attempt at producing a smoking gun: Specter’s presentation of an affidavit by John Doggett, a Yale classmate of Thomas’ and a Washington acquaintance of Hill’s. In it Doggett alleged that at a going-away party shortly before she left the EEOC, Hill steered him to a quiet corner and chastised him with the words “I am very disappointed in you. You really shouldn’t lead on women and then let them down.” Doggett called her charge “completely unfounded” and added that he came away “feeling that she was somewhat unstable, and that, in my case, she had fantasized about my being interested in her romantically.” Hill responded that she barely knew Doggett and stated flatly, “I did not at any time have any fantasy about romance with him.”

When the hearing concluded, everyone who had witnessed Hill’s and Thomas’ dramatic testimony knew for certain only what they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was shouldering the burden unfairly — and it may never be known which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the strength of a very convincing lie.

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