Two months later, in September, government officials finally called Hill to discuss rumors that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed staffers. For the first time, Hill outlined the specifics of what she’d experienced, first in phone calls with Senate investigators and then in a four-page statement. Senate staffers assured her that the statement would remain private. Instead, it was shared with the fourteen members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and their staffs, who were vetting Thomas. (It also launched an FBI investigation, but investigators were inexperienced with sexual harassment and didn’t consult experts, leading to an insufficient inquiry.) “I suspected that I would have been treated differently had I had political contacts, money, title, or any other indicia of power,” Hill later wrote.
Hill’s initial desire for anonymity, or at the very least privacy, was shattered on October 6, 1991, when Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps published Hill’s allegations. She was immediately flooded with publicity and interview requests. Reporters swarmed Tulsa and ambushed Hill’s home, to such an extent that she was forced to move into a hotel to escape them. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which was responsible for vetting Thomas, had practically concluded its confirmation hearings. They did not want to address the sexual harassment accusations against the judge, and led by Senator Joe Biden, the committee fought against hearing Hill.
This rejection stoked Hill’s determination to be heard and inspired her to talk to the press. After she spoke to every major television network over two days in early October, the committee caved to the public pressure and agreed to hear Hill’s charge on the record. Even then, the senators were more enraged by how the story got “leaked” than they were by allegations that a Supreme Court nominee had sexually harassed a staffer, according to Phelps’s book, Capitol Games.
“WHOEVER DID THIS OUGHT TO BE SHOT”
Hill had little time to prepare for the hearings—just forty-eight hours to assemble a legal team, find other witnesses, and fly everyone to Washington. But already “the steady campaign to discredit me was in full swing,” she remembered. Reports speculated that she was a partisan pawn who had come forward at the last minute to fell Thomas. The committee did not dispel that assumption. Senators who favored Thomas’s appointment took to trashing Hill.
“Is this the whole thing, the rantings of a disgruntled employee who has reduced herself to lying?” asked South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. His colleague threatened violence for accusing Thomas. “Whoever did this ought to be shot,” declared Utah senator Orrin Hatch. Hill had wanted to believe in the confirmation process, and thought an invitation to testify before the Senate guaranteed impartiality, but she soon realized how wrong she was.
Hill, her legal team, and her family members arrived at the Senate caucus hall, with its gilded ceiling, marble columns, and lush drapery, on Friday, October 11, 1991. The hearings lasted for three days. The indelible image of Hill sitting alone behind a microphone, testifying opposite fourteen white male senators performing their disbelief on behalf of disbelieving men everywhere, was an education to those who didn’t know what sexual harassment was, and a searing reminder of its consequences for women who had experienced it.
The hearing was piped live into living rooms across America. On the first day, Thomas gave a prepared statement denying Hill’s charges before she could even make them. That set the tone. After he left the room, Hill entered. She read her own prepared statement detailing her employment history with Thomas, and how he had sexually harassed her and pushed her out of her job in Washington.
Then, the questioning began, first from the committee chairman, Senator Biden. Despite her reluctance, Biden pressed her to detail the “most embarrassing incidents alleged.” She talked about the pubic hair on the Coke can, Long Dong Silver, and Thomas’s predilection for discussing pornography at work. Senators Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy harped on discrepancies between Hill’s remembrances and her previous statements to the FBI to undermine her story. Senator Alan Simpson called her affidavit “a foul stack of stench.”
“Are you a scorned woman?” asked Senator Howell Heflin. He then wondered if she had a “militant attitude” or a “martyr complex,” as if only these qualities could explain her charges. Republicans produced an affidavit from Texas attorney and Thomas’s law school classmate John N. Doggett III, who claimed that Hill had pursued him romantically, then accused him of “leading her on.” To reinforce the scorned-woman theory, Doggett detailed how Hill couldn’t stomach men rejecting her.
“It was my opinion . . . that Ms. Hill’s fantasies about my sexual interest in her were an indication of the fact that she was having a problem with ‘being rejected’ by men she was attracted to,” he said. Doggett called her accusations against Thomas “another example of her ability to fabricate the idea that someone was interested in her, when, in fact, no such interest existed.”
Heflin’s “scorned woman” accusation and Doggett’s statement contributed to the notion that Hill was an “erotomaniac” or “Fatal Attraction type,” buzzy terms that crept into the lexicon after the release of a handful of popular movies featuring sex-crazed women villains attacking the men who rejected them or their female competitors. When members of the legal community called Hill’s charges a “product of fantasy,” what they meant was that Hill had invented the sexual attention that she desired but didn’t get from her alleged perpetrators. This depiction boosted Thomas’s credibility while crippling Hill’s. Polls before the vote to confirm Thomas showed that 55 percent of men and 49 percent of women found him “more believable” than Hill.
EROTOMANIA
The “Fatal Attraction type” or the “scorned woman” label stuck to single women, like Hill, who threatened male power. A speedy path to defuse their threat was to assume such women fantasized about sex with men who didn’t want them. Erotomania was unsanctioned sexual desire, delusion, and revenge rolled into one. The senators who questioned Hill, and later Monica Lewinsky’s most vocal attackers, ensured that these women were stamped with this mark.
They weren’t alone. The term was often used in the 90s to smear sex crime victims and to shame female sexuality as predatory and dangerous, particularly when it threatened powerful men’s careers. The erotomaniac was devised and summoned by men, reducing female strength and competence to a bodily function. It also bore creepy echoes of Victorian hysteria diagnoses, which targeted and pathologized women’s emotional excesses. Erotomania still appears in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It is categorized under schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, but “little is known about the background, classification, treatment, or outcome of individuals with this disorder.”
Missouri senator John Danforth is to blame for branding Hill as an erotomaniac during her hearings, according to a 2006 paper on “tactics against sexual harassment.” The Senate Judiciary Committee member used the “erotomania hypothesis” to prove that Hill was lying. He even sought out an affidavit from a psychiatrist, Park Dietz, who had recently published an article about erotomania, describing it as “a rare delusion of some women that particular men in positions of power . . . have romantic interests in them.” Dietz spoke to the press about his theory and how it applied to Hill. The accusation spread like a rash.
In the 90s, erotomania became an increasingly powerful tool to discredit sexual harassment and assault victims, often single women, especially in court. “Date rape” entered the lexicon in 1991, as the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith—the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy—ended in an acquittal after less than an hour of jury deliberation. Considering his high birth, this was “a surprise to no one,” quipped Dominick Dunne in Vanity Fair. Throughout the trial, defense attorneys and the media assailed plaintiff Patricia Bowman’s character, reporting on her drug use, out-of-wedlock child, and abortions. They pinned her as an erotomaniac, a liar, and a floozy who roused suspicion not only for past transgressions but also for being at a bar at three o’clock
in the morning, where she met Smith.
Bowman saw where this was headed. “The issue of what I was doing at three in the morning has nothing to do with what happened to me from that man,” she said. Three other women gave sworn depositions that Smith had either raped them or tried to, but that evidence didn’t make it into the trial. On the stand, Smith testified that his accuser was an “aggressive perpetrator” and an “erratic, hysterical and irrational woman . . . a real nut” who “unbuttoned his pants” and helped him remove her underwear. Like Hill, Bowman was tabbed a “scorned woman” whose accusation of sexual misconduct was recast as revenge. Similarly, Mike Tyson’s rape victim, Desiree Washington, was accused of pursuing his fame and money. Vengeance was thought to be the erotomaniac’s favorite pastime.
Films dramatizing erotomania helped implant the trope into the cultural narrative. In the late 80s and early 90s, the unmarried woman took on a new, vengeful patina in blockbuster films—she was after your husband for sex, and she’d kill you if you got in her way. In Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close becomes so obsessed with her ex-lover that she tries to kill his wife. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) dramatizes the jealous, sex-crazed single woman. When a man commits suicide to skirt assault charges, his widow tries to murder the assault victim. Demi Moore steals an ex-flame’s job and sues him for sexual harassment in Disclosure (1994). The deranged protagonists in these films took the empowered woman of consumer fantasy, the commercialized “bad girl” who wore makeup shades called Vamp and Vixen, to a murderous and fantastical extreme. Some began to think that the crazed actions of psychotics on-screen could explain real women’s behavior. These narratives seemed to warn against remaining uncoupled; singleness could lead a woman to man-stealing and murder.
The erotomaniac label also applied to O. J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark and rock star Courtney Love for their brashness and swagger in male-dominated space. The designation was firmly lodged in the social consciousness by the time Lewinsky came around, and it’s no surprise that it was deployed to describe and explain her, too. Tabloids and politicians called her a stalker who must have forced her way into the Oval Office. Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal testified in the fall of that year that Lewinsky was “a stalker who tried to blackmail Clinton into having sex.”
MUD BATH
Hill’s defenders thought the Senate hearing resembled a witch hunt—which played out, incidentally, in the very same room where Senator Joseph McCarthy had persecuted alleged communists nearly half a century before. The senators grilled Hill about why she had followed Thomas to another job, why she had kept in touch with him after leaving his employ, and why she had waited so long to come forward to say he had harassed her. Few victims ever do come forward, even today, and when they do they are often punished. Women who accuse can still pay for it. With Hill, it was clear from the questioning that the senators—all white men—did not understand the nature of sexual harassment, nor the experience of being a victim, or even an outsider.
Wyoming senator Alan Simpson produced records of phone calls Hill had made to Thomas’s office a handful of times in the nine years since she left his employ, and wondered why she had driven him to the airport after he’d visited the law school where she taught. Hill says she was not threatened by Thomas “as a person” but by “the power he had held over me as an employer.” Once she no longer worked for him, the behavior stopped. Thomas was a powerful contact to have in the legal community. “Why should I allow his behavior to deprive me of a job benefit I had rightfully earned?” she asked.
But the committee felt that Hill’s continued contact with Thomas must have meant that she couldn’t have suffered very much by his conduct. “If what you say this man said to you occurred . . . why in God’s name would you ever speak to a man like that the rest of your life?” asked Simpson, the committee member arguably most hostile to Hill. Of course, that she was still infrequently in touch with her harasser—because he was the most powerful person she knew, even years after her departure from his office—did not prove she was unaffected. Rather, it speaks volumes about how his abuse had redirected and gutted her career.
By Saturday’s hearing, Republican operatives had unearthed an obscure reference to pubic hair floating in gin in the novel The Exorcist, and a mention of Long Dong Silver in a little-known court decision, and funneled these details to Senator Orrin Hatch. He presented these obscurities to Hill, suggesting she had used them to fabricate claims of abuse. The Senate Judiciary Committee lingered on Hatch’s accusation and belabored Hill with questions intended to fray her credibility.
“They thought the more they pressed on these details and got Hill to repeat them the more absurd and made up they would seem. I think they were trying to trip her up because they couldn’t believe things like this would or could be said,” explained Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor, who covered the case as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. But it was exactly these obscene details that made Hill believable, especially to women. Pubic hair on a soda can and Long Dong Silver were anecdotes far too weird for Hill to fabricate.
US senators saying “penis” and “pubic hair” in public may seem quaint compared to the pornified political culture we know now, but it was the first time anything like this had ever happened in Congress—and on television. Reports on Hill’s testimony emphasized how her accusations had sullied the hallowed halls of the Senate with sex talk. The press assumed the posture of the modesty police with headlines like “X-rated Drama in a Regal Setting” and “Mud Bath Displaces Decorum.” The Washington Post called it “the most lurid and dispiriting proceeding of its kind ever in a long history of TV and radio coverage of congressional business,” and sympathized with viewers who wanted to “run from the TV set directly to the showers to try to wash the whole thing away.”
Nineties television would come to fixate on other stories that preyed on women like the O. J. Simpson trial and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. But Hill was first. “It’s the first time we’ve got a story which fascinates the soap opera fans as much as the political junkies,” a television executive said at the time.
“THEY ASSUMED THAT BLACK MEN SPOKE FOR US”
Needless to say, race was very much an issue in the hearings. Hill was cast as a promiscuous Jezebel or a frigid, combative Sapphire; Thomas victimized himself, and there was only room for one victim. He finagled speaking both before and after Hill, bookending her claim with his hot denials, calling the hearings “a circus,” “a national disgrace,” and “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” Thomas’s race-baiting was even complimented by the White House. Those close to George H. W. Bush said he remained proud of his pick and was “impressed by the way Thomas played the race card.” But if Thomas was playing the race card, what did it mean that Hill was also black?
Hill should have understood that Thomas’s lewd remarks were flirtations and not complained about them, according to Harvard professor Orlando Patterson. He published an op-ed in the New York Times defending Thomas’s denial. The piece claimed that Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment were derived from a “white, upper-middle-class work world,” while Thomas’s behavior was akin to courtship in the black working-class milieu, which he claimed to understand as a black man himself. Hill was simply “pretending to be offended.”
In response, black feminists fought to dismantle the racist stereotypes at work in the trial, including those invoked by Thomas and Patterson. Elsa Barkley Brown, Deborah King, and Barbara Ransby raised funds to publish a rebuttal advertisement, also in the New York Times, titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” In it, they wrote that law and society have always ignored the sexual abuse of black women, while sexually stereotyping them as “immoral, insatiable, perverse, the initiators in all sexual contacts—abusive or otherwise.” This was why Anita Hill was not believed, they said. Hill was a victim of intersectional disempowerment, according to more recent writin
g by race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw; she was rendered a “white woman” or “raceless” because Thomas claimed black-victim status with his denial, and because black women’s sexuality is alternately demonized and misunderstood. Thus, Hill was the instigator because black female sexuality was a threat. Hill could not be the victim; only Thomas could.
Racism followed Hill even after her testimony concluded. John Burke, who had been a partner at the law firm that employed Hill, submitted an affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee describing Hill’s work as subpar and stating that he had recommended she find another job. It was later revealed that Hill had hardly worked with Burke, and that her performance reviews were acceptable. Burke had likely confused Hill with another black female associate, with whom he had worked closely.
Hill believes black women’s voices are still misconstrued and subjugated by black men’s. “Those members of Congress had never even considered that Black women had our own political voice,” Hill told Melissa Harris-Perry in an Essence magazine interview in 2016. “They assumed that Black men spoke for us.” Thus, Thomas’s appeals to injustice were heard, while Hill’s were not.
Plenty of people believed Hill. To her supporters, Hill’s even temperament and intelligent answers during the hearing made the committee’s tactics appear even more bullish. “The hearing was so ugly and twisted,” former MTV News vice president Michael Alex told me. “When she told that story, it rang so immediately true. You’re like, ‘Nobody made that up.’ Hearing Clarence Thomas’s explanation, you sat there and said, ‘What bullshit.’” In Alex’s newsroom, one woman posted “I Believe Anita Hill” in large letters above her desk. The band Sonic Youth agreed, releasing the song “Youth Against Fascism,” with the lyrics “I believe Anita Hill / The judge will rot in hell.”
90s Bitch Page 7