Speaking Truth to Power

by Anita Hill

  “Don’t move,” I told myself, freezing almost in midmotion. I resolved to become as motionless as possible. I had to be impervious to the lights and to the heat as well as the natural reactions of my body. Though I felt each one of the senators’ attempts to humiliate me, I vowed not to so much as twitch. I ignored the numbness in my legs and even the pain from the tumors in my abdomen. From that moment on, I did not even take a drink of water in front of the camera. I ignored my dry throat. I sat throughout the “conversations” with the Republicans and Democrats with my hands in front of me and only occasionally would I even lean forward. Oddly enough, this exercise in self-control enabled me to focus on the questioning. Or perhaps it was some sort of divine intervention, some force from outside myself that took over when I needed it. And, of course, years of being impervious to and immobile in the face of hurt.

  My family and friends gave me the only comfort of that day, though I grew more and more ambivalent about their presence in the room as the questioning became more invasive and the veiled accusations more apparent. I thought how hard this must be on them. They had to sit in silence throughout it. Behind me my father was seething with anger and frustration at his helplessness to do anything about what was happening to me—to his family. But I could not think of them any more than I could of my own personal discomfort.

  It was 1:10 P.M. I had been testifying for two hours. When we broke for the first time, I was able to talk to my family. Everyone put a good face on during the break. It is our way. In the Senate office room that had become our ad hoc headquarters, we talked briefly about nothing in particular, all of us remarkably calm. Or perhaps we were just numb. There was no time to analyze what we felt before. Reverend William Harris, a pastor from the church that Emma Coleman Jordan attended, came and prayed with us while my legal advisers dashed about trying to get copies of the statements Specter was using in his questioning. All except for Warner Gardner, who, over a tuna sandwich, engaged me in a pleasant conversation, relating to the hearing only minimally. If he was attempting to divert my attention from the raptures of the proceedings, then it worked, at least for the moment.

  But the processional of the twenty family, lawyers, and friends, led by two Secret Service escorts, wound its way back down the high-ceiling corridor of the Russell Building to the caucus room and the afternoon session. It was 2:15.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When the hearing readjourned that afternoon, Senator Heflin broached the subject of the USA Today report of the Henderson interview.

  “Well, during any conversation with Keith Henderson, did you tell him that certain staffers had told you that if you went ahead and signed the affidavit, that might be a way to get [Judge Thomas] to withdraw?” Senator Heflin’s tone was deliberate—confident. It was, in litigation terminology, an attempt to redirect—to clarify or reestablish the testimony I had given in the morning.

  “No, I did not tell him that,” I answered, grateful to be able to respond to a direct question about the newspaper article.

  “Well, did you tell him that that was mentioned or that it would have been mentioned relative to this?” Senator Heflin asked.

  “No, I didn’t tell him that.”

  “Do you know whether or not Keith Henderson talked to certain Judiciary Committee staffers?”

  “I don’t know whether he did talk to Judiciary Committee staffers.”

  “Well, do you know whether or not there was a conversation between Keith Henderson and some staffer in which they were discussing the affidavit and saying that there were certain possibilities, which included the possibility that Clarence Thomas might withdraw his name?”

  “That might have happened, but I haven’t talked with Keith Henderson about that,” I answered, hoping that this discussion would put an end to the matter. I did not know what any Senate staff had said to Henderson, nor what he might have said to them. This much I did know: no staffer ever promised me that Thomas would withdraw as a result of my statement.

  Later, Senator Specter would return to the same line of questioning. In that exchange I allowed that Thomas’ withdrawal might have been discussed because of the procedure which would follow from my raising the claim. This was a foolish concession, for I was uncertain whether that particular possibility was raised, and any concession on my part would only be used against me by the Republicans. At the time of my conversations with Senate staffers, no one had any idea of what was going to happen. When I gave my statement to the Senate on September 23, I am not certain that the staff even knew what process they would follow, much less how Thomas would respond. Nevertheless, Specter continued to press for a contradiction. “And now are you testifying that Mr. Brudney said that if you came forward and made representations as to what you said happened between you and Judge Thomas that Judge Thomas might withdraw his nomination?”

  “I was attempting, in talking to the staff, to understand how the information would be used, what I would have to do, what might be the outcome of such a use. We talked about a number of possibilities, but there was never any indication that, by simply making these allegations, the nominee would withdraw from the process. No one ever said that, and I did not say that anyone ever said that.”

  The tension between Senator Specter and me was measurable. The process seemed to break down completely. Senator Specter would repeat the same question until he got the answer he wanted—that a staffer induced me to come forward with the story with a promise Thomas would withdraw. Specter was only more provoked by admission that Thomas’ withdrawal might have been mentioned. In a court of law, Specter’s questioning would have been limited. A court might have stopped him from repeating questions asked and answered previously or even admonished him for arguing with or badgering the witness. But this was not a court, as Biden had informed us from the start, and Biden was exercising little authority as chairman to limit the form of questions.

  To the press and spectators, we must have sounded silly and ill tempered. More than one sigh erupted from the seats behind me as Specter returned to the questioning and I once more gave my explanation. Clearly, neither of us would budge from our position. Something in the back of my head said, “Just say what he wants you to say and get on with it.” But I was much too stubborn to do that. And the more he pursued it, the more inclined I was to resist. Digging in was, perhaps, for me one way of hanging on to some amount of my dignity. By now I knew that his questions were both insincere and ill informed. Though I tried to answer him, I was equally determined that the senator not put words in my mouth. With every question he asked, it became clearer that despite any declaration to the contrary, he viewed me as an adversary. Rather than seeking to elicit information, his questioning sought to elicit a conclusion that he had reached before the hearing began. When he questioned me about comments I had made to a Kansas City Star reporter, his purpose of finding some inconsistency in my account became ever clearer.

  “When you say that Judge Thomas would have made a better Supreme Court Justice, you are saying that, at one state of his career, he would have made an adequate Supreme Court Justice.”

  “Well, I am not sure that that’s what I am saying at all. I am sure that what I was trying to give to that reporter was my assessment of him objectively without considering the personal information that I had.” I had caught on to the fact that I could concede nothing in responding to Senator Specter.

  “Isn’t the long and short of it, Professor Hill, that when you spoke to the Kansas City Star reporter, that you were saying, at one point in his career he would have been okay for the Supreme Court?”

  Explaining my feelings to this man was useless, for whatever I said he would doubt. Even inconsequential responses met with his skepticism. “No,” I responded with no intention of saying any more. I had tired of his tactics. There was a pause of about twenty seconds. Perhaps the longest of the day. Neither of us spoke. The silence was palpable and intense. It seemed the room had grown accustomed to my explaining myself, but by no
w I was weary of it.

  Finally, the senator broke the silence. “What were you saying as to Judge Thomas’s qualifications for the Supreme Court when you spoke to the reporter in August?” For the first time in his questioning, Senator Specter asked me what I was saying instead of suggesting what I had said.

  “One of the comments that the reporter made was that some have complained that he has a set ideology and that he won’t be able to review cases on their own. My comment went to whether or not he did have that set ideology and it was that now he did, whereas a few years ago, I did not find that to be so.”

  Senator Specter’s more open-ended question gave me a chance to explain myself. This form of question is asked in order to elicit information from witnesses believed to be trustworthy. In a nonadversarial, fact-finding hearing, the more open-ended questioning is appropriate because it allows for a greater exchange of information without assuming a conclusion. This was a small victory in what had become a battle of wills.

  Senator Specter’s questioning on the USA Today article was an attempt to indict Jim Brudney of Senator Metzenbaum’s office. Senator Specter hoped to get me to say that Brudney had promised me that if I signed the affidavit, Judge Thomas would withdraw. This would lend support to the theory offered by Senator Hatch that my statement was a part of a Democratic conspiracy to derail the nomination. When the public demanded a hearing on my charges, Senator Hatch accused Senator Metzenbaum of leaking the FBI report to the press. Though Hatch offered no proof and Senator Metzenbaum had denied it, Senator Specter pursued Hatch’s lead, operating on the preposterous theory that I had been duped into raising the claim by a promise from Jim Brudney.

  Senator Specter’s theory assumed not only a level of naiveté of which even I was incapable but also gross dishonesty on the part of Jim Brudney. There was no such promise, nor would I ever have believed Brudney to be in a position to keep such a promise. Specter sought the answers needed to support the theories the Republicans invented to explain my statement—theories spun out of pure conjecture and off-the-record comments from obscure and unrelated sources. Before and during the hearing the Republicans paraded before the press every possible explanation for my complaint other than the truth. The “spurned lover,” the “oversensitive prude,” and the “political conspiracy” theories were to prove favorites.

  Though he never got the testimony he needed to support the conspiracy theory, Senator Specter soon found another use for his line of questioning on the USA Today article. These exchanges served as the basis for a charge on the following day that I had committed “flat-out perjury” in my testimony before the committee. The charge was baseless and, as I was not testifying when Specter made it, it was published by the press before I had any chance to respond. If I had won the battle of wills on the USA Today article, Senator Specter once again showed that the Republicans could prevail in the field of rhetoric. The headline would read, “Specter Accuses Hill of Flat Out Perjury,” and no one would need to read the details to know that Specter was calling me a liar. Thus, Specter left the public to infer that, as a perjurer, I must have lied about everything I described. I doubt he much cared what the public believed about me as long as they believed that Thomas was worthy of the position on the Court.

  Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy’s thirty minutes of questioning focused on the FBI interrogation of my claim and the charges that the report was inconsistent with my opening statement. He wanted to know “what happened,” but also why what happened was wrong—outside the realm of acceptable behavior for the workplace. Finally, he tackled the question “Why did you wait” to report the behavior? Once again I explained that I had always chosen the best way I knew to deal with the situation both while I worked for Thomas and later, when the Senate staffer approached me and asked about the behavior. Having dealt with the harassment, having dealt with the lack of process for investigation of the information, having dealt with the pre-hearing campaign, I was now having to deal with an irreparably flawed proceeding whose purpose was to investigate the claims. But even when the chairman announced that he planned to adhere to standard rules such as those regarding the relevancy of information, members would soon deviate from them.

  As Senator Specter continued his questioning in the afternoon, he raised the affidavit of John Doggett, a law school friend of Clarence Thomas and a passing acquaintance of mine from Washington, D.C. At the beginning of the hearing Senator Biden had announced: “Certain subjects were simply irrelevant to the issue of harassment, namely, the private conduct, out of the workplace relationships, and intimate lives and practices of Judge Thomas, Professor Hill and any other witness that comes before us.” The Republicans used this rule to protect Judge Thomas from the release of information about his habit of viewing pornographic material as well as his habit of describing what he had viewed in vivid detail to friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, the committee dispensed with the rule where it was convenient, allowing ready admission of manufactured information about my own personal social life.

  Perhaps the best example of the breach of Biden’s announced relevancy rule came in the affidavit and testimony of John Doggett. Nowhere was Senator Metzenbaum’s warning about opening the proceeding to “all sorts of sworn statements” more warranted than during Doggett’s testimony. Specter avoided the question of its admissibility as part of the hearing record in a way both sinister and unethical, as it had been distributed to the president, the press, and the public even before the entire committee was allowed to see it. Specter questioned me on the affidavit before I had ever seen it, though I would learn that within his statement, Doggett offered a theory about my mental state during the time I worked for Clarence Thomas. And despite Doggett’s lack of professional credentials as a psychoanalyst, the senators not only publicized it but called me to account for it. Considering that he based his assessment on only two exchanges, the very idea is shocking. Biden’s rules regarding competence and relevance of information had gone out the window.

  Doggett’s theory proposed that I had fantasized about a relationship with him. And when he heard about my charge against Judge Thomas, he deduced that it must have been born of the trouble he felt I’d had establishing relationships with men. Finally, Doggett concluded that what he had diagnosed as my mental instability caused me to send an affidavit to the Senate staff working on the confirmation hearing. Doggett’s reasoning was flawed at every step. During his testimony he recited many details of his résumé, but nowhere was there a reference to expertise in conducting psychological evaluations. Moreover, he showed himself to lack any objectivity in evaluating the level of his own attractiveness, asserting that women generally found him “irresistible,” a “fact” confirmed by his wife, who sat behind him at the hearing.

  Though Senators Danforth and Specter were quick to use the Doggett statement and testimony as evidence that I suffered from erotomania, neither of them suggested that Doggett himself might be suffering from erotomonomania. One reporter described the disease as “a male delusion that attractive young women are harboring fantasies about them.” Even without probing from the panel, applying the Republican standard of psychological evaluation, John Doggett showed himself to be a candidate for a diagnosis for this disorder. Had the senators been interested in a scientific pursuit, John Doggett would no doubt have made a good subject for their inquiry. Instead, Senator Specter took the offensive and went to the press to bolster Doggett’s pitiful account and defend the committee’s admission of it by describing it as “powerful” and “impressive.”

  In contradiction to the impression Doggett believes he left with me, my recollection is hazy at best. Nevertheless, the John Doggett whom I recall from my time in Washington was a man who often inflicted his attention on women even where it was not reciprocated. Following his testimony, several women callers to the Senate committee confirmed my recollection and challenged the notion that he was “irresistible.” Many of the callers had apparently found Doggett and his advances repulsi
ve. And one of the callers even sent in a sworn statement of an encounter in the workplace with Doggett during which he tried to kiss her against her will. Nevertheless, the evidentiary rules as enforced by Senator Biden allowed admission of John Doggett’s testimony and excluded that of the women who called with a contradictory point of view. The idea of the admission of testimony like Doggett’s in a proceeding as important as this is hard to believe. The reality of experiencing it, however, was completely appalling.

  Nearly nine hours after Senator Biden swore me in, I concluded my testimony. The Republican senators had raised questions about the veracity of my statements, my professional competency, and my sanity. At 7:40 P.M. I was exhausted, my head ached, and the pain in my side from the tumors was excruciating after sitting in one position for hours. Underneath my suit, my body was drenched with perspiration from both the tension and the pain. Emotionally, I was numb but relieved.

  As the procession filed out of the caucus room and down the hall to our “headquarters,” I knew that I would need to return to testify, but I was glad that at least the first day was over. Someone found me a Tylenol, which I took in the bathroom off the conference room where my team and family had temporarily camped. It was one of the few moments I had had alone. I looked at the face in the mirror and marveled that it could still be mine. So much of what had happened that day suggested that I was living someone else’s life. I splashed my face with cold water and prayed a short prayer. This time I was too tired to pray for understanding, and I just prayed for strength.