After the hearings, Hill had myomectomy surgery—doctors removed about eighteen ovarian tumors and cysts to alleviate pain she had suffered from for much of her life, pain that was likely exacerbated by the stress of Thomas and the hearings. She registered at the hospital under a false name to avoid press attention.
Even after the Senate confirmed Thomas’s nomination—by the narrowest margin in recent history—the gleeful trashing of Hill continued. David Brock’s 1993 book, The Real Anita Hill, implies she “effectively committed perjury” during her testimony, which he alleges was “shot through with false, incorrect and misleading statements so much so that . . . it is very difficult to believe what she said about Clarence Thomas is also true.” He accuses her of seeking revenge, being opportunistic, and hating men, quoting one of her former law students who called her “militantly anti-male and obsessively concerned with race and gender issues.”
While some called the book a character assassination, plenty read it seriously and absorbed its attacks. “It’s impossible to finish The Real Anita Hill without concluding that Hill failed to be fully honest in her Senate testimony, that she may well have harbored resentment toward Thomas . . . and that she was capable of making obsessive mountains out of ordinary molehills,” wrote a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times. (Brock later apologized for the book, founded progressive watchdog Media Matters, and became a Hillary Clinton surrogate.)
CLARENCE THOMAS’S PICKUP TECHNIQUE
Saturday Night Live’s interpretation of sexual harassment was that it was hysterical. Take the 1991 sketch “Clarence Thomas’s Pickup Technique.” Joe Biden thanks Anita Hill for discussing “penis size,” “the black man’s sexual prowess,” and “large-breasted women having sex with animals.” Then, the senators ask Thomas for sex and dating advice. Adult film actor Long Dong Silver takes the stand.
The sketch celebrates raunch, body parts, and men as dogs, while skewering Hill for being a killjoy. Her abuse accusations are an excuse for the senators to trade crude schoolboy jokes about sex. And Biden gets the biggest cheers of all. To be sure, this is comedy and meant to mock everyone involved. Yael Kohen, author of We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, told me this early 90s period of SNL was characterized by “teenage-boy humor.” This sketch exemplifies it. But SNL’s treatment is how many remember the Anita Hill hearings, and was instrumental in lampooning Hill’s legacy.
An SNL edition of “Weekend Update” stoops lower. Chris Rock attacks Hill’s appearance, observing that “Clarence Thomas could have picked a much better-looking woman to blow his career on.” He then equates harassment with amateurish flirting. “One thing Clarence Thomas is guilty of is using bad pickup lines,” he explains. Sex with Hill would have redeemed Thomas in Rock’s eyes. “He never ever touched her and he’s going to lose the Supreme Court and didn’t even get to sleep with her. And that’s the real tragedy,” he says. Sex with the victim would have bolstered Thomas’s reputation with other men, if not with the Senate. SNL scoffs at sexual harassment and claims that unattractive women deserve it.
Because she neither slept with Thomas nor projected sexual availability, Hill became the frigid bitch. The all-male Senate Judiciary Committee and the public saw her as “Medusa—the mythological lady with a stare so cold it turns men to stone” and the “vengeful woman of Fatal Attraction.” The lesson was that men—single or partnered—could have celebrated, prioritized sexuality while single women could not.
YEAR OF THE WOMAN
Today, Hill teaches law at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. In her office, a collage bearing the names of scorned biblical women, from Ruth to Jezebel, hangs on her wall. Her career was entirely rerouted on account of Clarence Thomas. She says it became “less about success than survival.” Hill’s voice would embolden women to share their own sexual harassment stories, inciting marches and protests and eventual policy changes. In the six years following the hearings, sexual harassment claims filed to the EEOC nearly tripled. When President Barack Obama moved to nominate another Supreme Court justice in 2016, following the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Hill supporters petitioned for it to be her.
It can be tempting to romanticize Hill’s story, especially now that her tale is being rediscovered and embraced, vindicating her and enlightening a new generation to the abuse and misogyny she fought against. In the celebrated HBO drama Confirmation, Hill’s bravery in her darkest days is channeled by the beautiful, talented actress Kerry Washington.
Hill is a true heroine in the crusade against sexual harassment, but she paid a horrendous price. By leveling a serious allegation against a high-profile boss, great forces—the powers that be in Washington, the media, and Hollywood—coalesced to discredit her, defame her, and destroy her reputation and her life. “Being consumed with anger is inconsistent with the goals I have for my life,” Hill said on the twentieth anniversary of the hearings. “But of course I’m angry. I’m angry with him, I’m angry with the senators—I’m probably less angry than I was 10 years ago, but it’s still there. The larger goal is both gender equality and racial equality, because both racism and sexism contributed to my being victimized.”
Sexual harassment and discrimination still plague the workplace. The #MeToo campaign, ignited by the fall of powerful men, like movie titan Harvey Weinstein, amid allegations of rape and assault, revealed just how rampant these practices remain. Sexual harassment continues to threaten women and their livelihoods. Hollywood, politics, media, STEM, food services, law, medicine, academia—no industry or woman is immune. In 2016, anchor Gretchen Carlson settled a sexual harassment suit against the ousted founder of Fox News, Roger Ailes, for $20 million. Carlson said that a reason the kind of harassment she experienced persists today is that companies employed insufficient policies for addressing it in the wake of the Hill hearings. She points to employment contracts that silence accusers as one example. As a result, she encourages women experiencing harassment to hire a lawyer, document it, take the documentation home, and tell two trusted allies.
There are new forums, too, where harassment can be frightening, insidious, and disempowering. Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate predated the internet as we know it. More than 70 percent of adults have witnessed online harassment, while 40 percent have experienced it themselves, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study.
SINGLENESS: A CAUTIONARY TALE
Those who did pity Lewinsky, or wished to throw her a rope, didn’t do so until years later. Once they did, they thought a nice young man her age was just the ticket, that he might lift her from ignominy. “Where is the guy brave enough, strong enough, admirable enough to take her as his wife, to say to the world that he loves this woman even if she will always be an asterisk in American history?” Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post in 2007. “I hope there is such a guy out there. It would be nice. It would be fair.”
The problem with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair wasn’t their relationship—the sex, or what it insinuated about abuse of power; it was them. Their bodies that ballooned and shrank for all to see. Their rapacious appetites. They succumbed to desires, addictions, out-of-bounds pleasures. Powerful men can fall prey to these things. Women are required to guard against them. In his 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that this is why the public became so fascinated with the scandal. Clinton and Lewinsky’s failing to be thin and therefore perfect resonated. They may have seemed to be different, special, for having power or hogging headlines, but underneath it all they were just like us. And we were disgusted. The scandal that impeached him, and yet is named for her, is a looking glass. Peer at their missteps, her missteps, and there we are, all of us.
It has become passé to blame women alone for political sex scandals. Former New York congressman Anthony Weiner and former governors Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford can attest to this. Weiner sent dick pics to a young love interest while his wife was pregnant. They split because he couldn’t stop. Spitzer patronized prostitut
es in an upscale Washington hotel. And Mark Sanford vanished with an Argentine mistress, reportedly using tax dollars to do so. Their sexcapades were laughable, and the women they slept with were hardly shamed into infamy. Name one of them. I can’t off the top of my head.
Perhaps the most homologous political sex scandal to Clinton-Lewinsky broke in November of 2012, when it was revealed that CIA director David Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, had an affair. Reports immediately focused on her clothes, her body, and her off-putting ambition. A general called her “immune to the notion of modesty” while traveling in Afghanistan, and the Charlotte Observer reported that she “favored sleeveless outfits that showed off toned, muscular arms.” As Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the producer of the media-sexism documentary Miss Representation, told me when I wrote about it at the time for the Daily Beast, Broadwell was being “Lewinsky-ed.”
Lewinsky is a woman who appears to have an exceptionally strong character. She knit scarves for friends while waiting to learn whether or not she would go to prison. She lied to prosecutors not for herself, but to shield the man she loved, and who many believe abused and then discarded her. Through tears, she thanked her own tormentors after they grilled and humiliated her during a merciless grand jury hearing. She feels deeply but does not begrudge her attackers. She is the type who bares her soul and apologizes to those who seem to want to stick her through like a voodoo doll. But these moments of humanity are not how we remember the scandal or the person.
Clinton’s sexual dalliances were first whispers, then jokes, and now footnotes. For her part, Lewinsky still struggles to build a public identity untangled from Clinton. Since 1998, she has drifted in and out of the public eye—launching a handbag line, starring in a documentary, moving to London, disappearing for nearly a decade, giving a TED talk, and, most recently, launching a line of anti-bullying emojis. Like Hill, she is spinning her story into a powerful message to help others who suffer from abuse, including on the internet. Sometimes Lewinsky is fully public; other times she’s more of a recluse. Who could blame her for being so schizophrenic? After all, we have yet to embrace her story.
Lewinsky became a 90s cautionary tale of singleness. Her sexual confidence and relationship with the most powerful man in the world made her into an erotomaniac and a target of slut-shaming and much worse. She was dehumanized for threatening male power. Two speakers at Lewinsky’s alma mater, Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, told me separately that they were explicitly forbidden from mentioning her in their remarks, nearly two decades later. At Donald Trump rallies in 2016, vendors sold shirts that read “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica.” Lewinsky remains a marked woman unable to secure a traditional job that doesn’t include the baggage of scandal that has been unfairly named for her, an intern who was seduced by the president of the United States. Nowadays we blame the boss. Perhaps one day students will learn about the Bill Clinton scandal. It would be nice. It would be fair.
4
Women Who Worked
The arrest and trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman in 1994 and 1995 captivated the nation, and begot an explosive new level of tabloid obsession, the aftershocks of which still pulsate today. Just three years after the Los Angeles riots following the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police, the Simpson trial presented the nation with a litmus test on race in America. The daily televised saga also turned on stereotypes of women.
During the trial, Marcia Clark became one of the most famous women in America, and maybe the world. As a prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, she was tapped to argue the “trial of the century.” Clark was not only the lead prosecutor; she was also the only woman. Initially, her boss didn’t want her to head the prosecution. He tried to assign her a partner to comanage it, since he wasn’t confident she could do it alone. Some speculated she was tapped not for her ability, but because, like the victim, Nicole Brown Simpson, she was a woman.
Twenty years later, Clark is constantly asked to relive a time in her life she describes as “a horrific personal nightmare.” She never returned to the courtroom. And with a record like hers—she’d won nineteen of the twenty homicide cases she’d tried by the time she got to Simpson—it was a loss for the justice system. She says she isn’t in touch with anyone from those days because, like for PTSD victims, any contact would be too painful a reminder, even decades later.
“What was it that I did personally to make this happen? What do you think I did?” she asks of those who blame her for losing the trial—but she’s saying it to me, as we sit in a booth at a Jewish deli in Los Angeles, where I have the salad she usually orders, and she has the chicken soup. “I’ve never gotten an answer to that question. Not one that makes any sense.”
Before Clark starred in the checkout-aisle rags, lawyers and journalists had praised her skills and speculated that she was more likely to win the Simpson case than her opponents. “It is true, too, that Clark is winning because she is every bit the equal of her more celebrated and more highly paid adversaries . . . she may even be better,” Jeffery Toobin wrote in the New Yorker during the trial.
“She had the energy of a hummingbird,” according to her former boss John Lynch. Even her courtroom adversaries agreed. “She gave the most powerful argument I ever heard to a jury,” attorney Madelynn Kopple, who lost a double homicide case to Clark, told the New York Times. “I was shuddering when I heard it . . . There’s nobody tougher than her. Nobody.” Clark was eight months pregnant at the time.
“Nobody has a mind like Marcia. She has a fabulous, phenomenal memory of case law, citations, case names,” colleague Susan Gruber shared in the Washington Post. NBC senior legal correspondent Cynthia McFadden has covered hundreds of cases in her career, including Clark’s prosecution of Robert John Bardo, the stalker and murderer who is serving a life sentence. “And I remember saying to people at the time, ‘This is the single best courtroom prosecutor I have ever seen in my life,’” she said.
LAWYERETTE
Clark’s perceived competence soon morphed into a threat. A mock jury described Clark as “shifty,” “strident,” and a “bitch,” while categorizing the defense attorney—a man—as “smart.” Clark watched the criticism on a video feed in an adjoining conference room. She says that it stung, mostly because it was coming from other women. “The black women in particular viewed me as a bitch in the focus group,” she says. “Black women had been some of my best jurors in previous cases.”
Being the only woman in courtrooms and at crime scenes full of men was a recurring theme of Clark’s legal career from its inception in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office in 1981. Older colleagues called her “lawyerette.” She worked in a world where the “standard treatment for a pushy babe is the cold shoulder,” she writes in her memoir, Without a Doubt. Clark thrived by matching male lawyers’ grit. She talked tough, drank scotch, and puffed Dunhills, which inured her to male superiors. Work was her life.
“Trial work is especially appealing to the workaholic,” Clark wrote. “I’d go through the docket like Pac-Man, grabbing cases no one else would touch, putting in ten- to twelve-hour days in the process.” Eventually, she earned a spot in the elite special trials unit, which investigated and tried the city’s highest-profile cases.
Among Clark’s accolades as a prosecutor was winning one of the early cases in which DNA analysis, then a new technology, was used to convict a killer even though the victim’s body couldn’t be found. She also won a murder conviction in the 1991 trial of the stalker who killed the actress Rebecca Schaeffer. The tough-to-get conviction won Clark plaudits from her bosses. “I’m more afraid of ghosts and vampires than I am of killers,” she jokes, touching her necklace—a silver bullet dangling from a chain.
SKIRTGATE
In 1995, the same year as the Simpson verdict, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, publish
ed Beyond the Double Bind. In it, she explores the “double bind” that women face in public. “Women who are considered feminine will be judged incompetent, and women who are competent, unfeminine,” she wrote. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, has also studied this phenomenon and cites how women are penalized when they attempt to exhibit both warmth and competence at once.
Clark was one such pinball dinging between these poles. The initial opprobrium Clark received from the test jurors was soon mirrored out in the general public. Critics called her ruthless, bossy, strident, snippy, chippy, dour, hard-as-nails, flint-hard, a tiger, a miserable wretch, and the chief bitch. Her detractors attacked her femininity, or lack thereof. A comedian recommended that Clark get “mole hair trimmers.”
During jury selection in the fall of 1994, focus shifted to Clark’s “daring” skirts, which were deemed “too short and too tight.” Throughout the trial, her colleagues anonymously pontificated about her “shapely” legs in the press. They were “her one vanity,” and earned her the courthouse nickname “Marcia mini.” Trial watchers were subject to daily “skirt-alert” analyses from scores of national publications measuring “how much leg the 40-year-old former dancer is showing.”
Clark’s colleagues in the DA’s office weren’t the only ones talking out of school about her looks. Simpson’s defense attorneys parsed Clark’s body as if it were relevant case law. She was “an attractive lady” with “great legs,” said defense attorney Robert Shapiro. It’s hard to say, in retrospect, if these comments were purely sexist or covertly tactical. He could have meant no harm, but to sexualize her was to puncture her credibility. If she could be reduced to miniskirts, legs, and the mole on her face, surely she couldn’t win the trial of the century.
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