by Anita Hill
CHAPTER TEN
I woke early on Wednesday, October 9. I had no particular plan for the day or for the next few to follow. Though I had been getting advice from Sue Ross and Charles Ogletree, I had not approached them to represent me at the hearing. As I was not a member of the Oklahoma bar, I had very few contacts among lawyers in Oklahoma. I had long ago left Washington, and though I kept my bar membership there, I knew few practicing lawyers there either. I had no idea whom to enlist in such a situation. Nor could I even think of an analogous situation. This was not a sexual harassment claim, which would be brought in court. But I was not just a witness giving testimony to a neutral Senate committee; the campaign against my testimony had already begun. And though I had not been formally indicted, effectively I had become the accused.
At dawn I was sitting in my kitchen with my head in my hands, trying to gather the energy to move. I did not even have reservations to travel to Washington. When the telephone in front of me rang about 6:00 A.M., I took only seconds to answer it. On the other end was Emma Coleman Jordan, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, whom I knew from my work with the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Jordan, a black woman, was then president-elect of that group, and an outstanding scholar of commercial and banking law.
In her calm, take-charge fashion, Emma snapped me out of the near trance into which I had fallen. “Do you have legal counsel?” she asked. “No, I don’t,” I said. Though my response must have shocked her, she remained calm. The hearing was to convene in forty-eight hours, and I had not even spoken to anyone about representing me. She told me that she had been in touch with several other law professors around the country and that they had proposed a list of people who would be good legal counsel in this situation. One of the people she spoke to was Professor Judith Resnik of the University of Southern California, whom I knew in passing from my days at Yale, where she had been on the law faculty. Judith Resnik had contacted John Frank, an Arizona lawyer whose firm would volunteer his time and the time of another lawyer to provide me representation. Frank, a constitutional scholar with expertise in the Supreme Court nomination process, had testified in the hearing on Judge Bork’s nomination but had not been involved in the Thomas confirmation hearing to date. He also had Yale connections, having taught constitutional law there.
I did not know any of the people on the list, but Jordan assured me that she would see to it that they were all contacted about their availability. Unlike me, Jordan, along with other women who were concerned that the Senate conduct the hearing fairly, had developed a plan. That telephone conversation—I refer to it as the telephone call that saved my life—gave me the energy to move into action. I took down the names and told her I would get back to her with any thoughts I had. I quickly got dressed and went to the law school to ask my colleagues if they knew any of the lawyers on the list.
Chaos doesn’t begin to describe the law school in the days immediately prior to the hearing. Reporters filled every open space; the telephones in the main office rang so often that the staff put them on mute; and emotions ran high, as everyone became consumed in the upheaval. My colleagues on the faculty pitched in to do what they could, taking telephone calls, fielding press inquiries, following up on leads, and trying to give direction to students whose concerns were quickly mounting. Some of the telephone calls and letters were from cranks; others, from people who wanted to offer information about Thomas’ handling of sexual harassment claims within the EEOC, took too long to verify. We only had twenty-four hours before I would have to leave for Washington.
Two letters that proved invaluable emerged from the morass of information and paper. The first was from John Carr, a friend whom I met when I worked for Clarence Thomas. He’d been getting his law and business degree at the time and I kept in touch with him. He wrote to say that he recalled my telling him about the incidents with Thomas and was available to support my claim if he could. By midmorning Emma Jordan had pulled together several lawyers to help me, but we had no place to assemble. An overnight letter from Don Green, who had been a partner at the now defunct Wald, Harkrader firm and was now with Pepper, Hamilton and Scheetz, offered the firm’s conference room as a meeting place for the legal team.
Ray arrived on schedule, and my nephew Eric picked him up at the airport. Poor Eric, then nineteen years old, seemed the one most baffled by the situation. He had always been very sensitive, and we had always been close, but I did not have time now to reassure him. The situation had us all baffled. Finally, it occurred to me that it might help if he could come along to Washington. He had to postpone a test to do so, but he got permission from his professor. Shirley Wiegand also asked if I wanted her to come along. At first I told her that I didn’t think it would be necessary, but then I caught on to what she must have already realized: if things were as chaotic in Washington as they had been in Norman, I would absolutely need her help. She became the fourth in the party to travel to the hearing from Norman.
Meanwhile I contacted my sister JoAnn in Tulsa and my sister Joyce in California. JoAnn arranged for herself and my parents to travel to the hearing. My mother would turn eighty in a few days; my father in a few months. It would all have been easier to bear if I had had time to explain to them what had happened. But there was no time. Moreover, I didn’t know much more than they did. No one had time for explanations; there was only time to organize ourselves. My brother Albert helped get my father to the barber and his suit to the cleaners. My brother Alfred picked up the dry-cleaned clothes and delivered them to my sister. Such was the level of our preparation for the hearing.
My sister Elreatha, also in Tulsa, decided to come as well. In California, Doris, Carlene, Joyce, and her daughter, Anita LaShelle, made plans for the trip. They would all arrive on Thursday evening. All the travel arrangements worked smoothly until JoAnn and my parents arrived at the airport in Tulsa to find that the charge privileges on my credit cards had been suspended. Even though I had not reached the credit limits, the number and amounts of charges for all the travel arrangements from around the country were such that the card companies were requiring a verification for any additional charges. Since they could not reach me, my parents’ and sister’s travel was temporarily stalled until other arrangements could be made.
With the help of campus security, Shirley, Ray, Eric, and I avoided the press on our way to the airport, but we boarded a plane filled with reporters making their way to Washington, D.C. On one leg of the trip, we sat in the rear of the plane and noticed that a man in our row was in handcuffs. I felt sorry for the poor fellow as the cameras panned to catch me and undoubtedly caught him too, handcuffs and all. Yet in a way I felt that we were all being taken into custody along with him. During the layover in St. Louis, airline security pulled a maneuver aimed at diverting the press in Washington to Dulles Airport instead of Washington National, where my flight would actually land. Some press people were fooled and so my arrival in Washington was perhaps the least publicized thing I had done in the last few days.
When we got to Washington that evening, airport security met us at the gate. We were tired, but all still fairly upbeat. Sonia Jarvis, my former roommate in Washington and friend since law school, and her friend Ray McFarland devised an ingenious plan to get me to the Capitol Hill Hotel without being followed by the press. It was worthy of a spy movie, requiring three vehicles and two drivers. One car followed closely the vehicle McFarland drove, in which I was a passenger. As we were about to enter the highway connecting the airport to Washington, the second driver faked a breakdown of his car, blocking the entrance ramp. This allowed McFarland and me to get a jump on the reporters and others who had been tailing the second driver. McFarland sped away, leaving his accomplice in a heated argument with the drivers behind him, and we had just enough time to switch to another car that was parked and waiting for us just inside the district. In a short time, we were at the door of the hotel. I checked in unobserved under the name J. C. West, conveniently borrowed from
my friend Joy, who had made the hotel arrangements.
I awoke on Thursday morning feeling the hearing would begin in just over twenty-four hours with the public badly misinformed about sexual harassment. The steady campaign to discredit me was in full swing. Its obvious purpose was to persuade the public that my claim was baseless and that Thomas should be confirmed. The second purpose of the campaign was intimidation. The senators still hoped that the battle would not be fought in a hearing. Senator Biden had originally told me the subpoena would be delivered to me prior to my departure from Oklahoma. In fact, it was not served until Thursday, the day before my testimony, giving me ample time to retract my statement or otherwise capitulate—or perhaps to get into a fruitless and damaging war of words with the senators over the truth of the allegations before a public hearing could be held. With their press experience and contacts, the senators would undoubtedly have won such a battle.
I still do not know whether Senator Simpson’s comment about the terrible treatment I could expect was primarily intended to keep me from testifying or merely to intensify anxiety during my testimony. But I do know that intimidating tactics are common in harassment suits. Defense counsel often issues warnings that range from manipulative (“You will ruin him and his family”) to threatening (“You will be ruined”). In any case, when I did not withdraw prior to the hearing, the hostile senators attempted to establish as menacing a forum as possible, making good on Simpson’s warnings of “real harassment.” Behind the scenes, they maneuvered to make the hearing procedure as detrimental to my testimony as possible, well before my attorneys even arrived in Washington.
Sonia Jarvis picked me up at the hotel and took me to the law firm office to meet with my attorneys for the first time. All day various people came in and out of the conference room. I was uncomfortable with so many strangers involved, but with so little time to prepare, I could not carefully screen each individual. By midday several attorneys including Jarvis were present. Sue Ross and Emma Coleman Jordan, who live in Washington, were two of the first to arrive. John Frank and Janet Napolitano, who had taken the red-eye from Phoenix, arrived in midafternoon. Charles “Tree” Ogletree came in from Cambridge. He introduced Michelle Roberts, a trial attorney from Washington, to the group. Warner Gardner and Lloyd Cutler came at the invitation of John Frank. The numbers concerned me, but before I went over the statement I had prepared, each lawyer agreed that the discussion in that meeting was privileged—not to be shared with anyone.
The discussion was free-flowing and lively. Even in this group, no one had been involved in a procedure quite like this. Some attorneys thought the opening statement should be as detailed as possible; others disagreed. Lloyd Cutler in particular seemed uncomfortable with the idea that I should go into detail about the nature of the conduct I was complaining about. Cutler, a partner at one of the leading Washington law firms, Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, had been counsel to President Jimmy Carter and had tried to save Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. After a break, he left the group. Though I never heard from him again, I assumed that he had made an assessment of the chances of my prevailing and had chosen not to be associated with my claim. At worst, I suspected that he would simply leave the team. But it was not crucial that he be there; though he had “insider” credentials in Washington, so did Gardner and, to a lesser extent, Frank.
In a clear breach of professional responsibility, however, Cutler went to the press and expressed concern about my testimony, revealing information that we had all agreed was privileged. He was cited as a source in a column by Lalley Weymouth that appeared in the Wall Street Journal after the hearing. The information Cutler had divulged was not only privileged but was largely erroneous. He told reporters that feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon had been at the meeting. I had never met MacKinnon, and at no time was she at the meeting. In fact, we later learned that she’d been three thousand miles away in San Francisco. Despite their falsity, Cutler’s disclosures would be used to discredit my claim—to suggest that others, like the absent MacKinnon, had put words into my mouth. My statement was based entirely on my own recollection. I made the decisions as to what to include in my testimony. Ironically, the one person who might have been described as a “handler” was the one who turned out to be the most untrustworthy. I learned that I was better off relying on my friends and other volunteers who were political amateurs than on Washington insiders skilled at trading information for political favors.
During the afternoon we decided that I needed more information to support my statements about how I spent my work time when employed by Clarence Thomas. I called Norman to ask Dean Swank to pick up the information. He was scheduled to arrive on Friday to serve as a character witness for me. When he and his assistant, Ovetta Vermillion, arrived at my home, they had to break into my house with a locksmith. They found the documents I needed amid the disarray I had left on Wednesday. Vermillion also found that a lighted lamp in my bedroom had been draped with a pillowcase. Under no circumstances would I have left a lamp in that condition. I concluded that someone must have broken into the house and attempted to set a fire. Any other time I might have panicked at the idea that my home was threatened while I was away. But at stake in Washington was something more important—my name, my integrity, and my right to be treated fairly. The situation at home was a disaster averted. Here, I did not know what disasters to expect, though I was certain they couldn’t be far off. I simply focused on the next day’s task.
Ellen Wells had been trying to contact me in Oklahoma, but was not able to reach me until I arrived in Washington. She, too, remembered my complaining about Thomas’ behavior while I worked for him. And she was one witness who knew both me and Clarence Thomas. I was glad to see Ellen, not only because she could corroborate my testimony but also because she was a link to my former work that had survived the politics of the Thomas nomination.
Don Green appeared in the conference room from time to time. I had not seen him for ten years. He offered the room as a matter of professional courtesy as part of his responsibility to the confirmation process. I would remind commentators who criticized the offer as a show of partisan politics that even the criminally accused are entitled to adequate representation. For me personally, Green’s offer was more than a courtesy. It was an offer of kindness, like so many during this time, that I will never forget and can never repay. At one point that Thursday, Green came in to advise me that the Senate had contacted him to ask why I had been “fired” from Wald. And though he told them that I had not been fired, they persisted with the accusation. Right after the hearing, John Burke, a former Wald partner, would swear that he had advised me to leave the firm—not the same as being fired, but enough to tarnish my professional reputation—though this wasn’t true either.
During the day the press discovered our location. Then, as they had at my home in Norman, they staked out the building, as security would not allow them to enter. By that time two women had volunteered to handle press requests. Louise Hilsen and Wendy Sherman were veterans of Washington politics and press relations, Hilsen working for DeVillier Communications, Sherman formerly on Senator Barbara Mikulski’s staff.
Though there was not complete disorder among my team, there was no clear order of command. Everyone did whatever was necessary to prepare me and the other witnesses for the following days and to provide the written material necessary for the hearing. Some talked to the witnesses, Hoerchner and Wells. Some focused on communicating with the Senate to get information about the process; others of us did things like copying and proofreading documents.
The day ended about 8:30, when I left to return to my hotel, escorted by Sonia and Anne Majorca, who had been on the Wald staff and was now working at Pepper, Hamilton. But the drama of the day continued when at least two vehicles followed as we drove away from the office building. Sonia evaded a van, but a motorcycle was harder to lose. She decided to pull into a police station on Capitol Hill, and as she did so the motorcycle d
river sped away. But her day did not end when she left me. She still had to supervise the physical preparation of my statement, which Leslie McFarland, Ray’s wife, would type.
By Thursday night a group of amateurs with very limited resources and not much time had accomplished a massive amount of work. The job they did would have been outstanding under any circumstances; under these circumstances it was nothing short of phenomenal. We were David against the Goliath of the White House, certain Republican senators, and, as I would later learn, the FBI. Yet when I went to bed that evening, I was content that we had acted with principle. And no matter the outcome of the hearing, my conscience was clear.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On Friday, October 11, 1991, following three days of utter turmoil, I woke quite early. Kim Taylor, having flown in from California, had spent the night in the adjacent room. With little to do and uncertain about when I would appear for my testimony, I ironed her suit and helped her get ready for an appearance she made on my behalf on CBS Morning News. Hours later, after Kim left and I had dressed for the day, Sonia Jarvis and Charles Ogletree arrived at the room. We watched on the television set in the Capitol Hill Hotel as the hearing that would become known as the Hill-Thomas hearing opened.