Is America finally ready to hear Anita Hill?

Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is being reframed by Hill’s experience in 1991

Hauntingly, above the political noise of today’s Washington, we can hear her voice again.

“Members of the committee, my name is Anita F. Hill, and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. I was born on a farm in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, in 1956, and I am the youngest of 13 children …”

With those simple words to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on a dramatic Friday afternoon in October 1991, the prim and polite lady in the teal blue dress set into motion a historic American exploration of the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment in daily life.

It led to hours of electrifying and often mortifying public debate, most of it broadcast on national television.

It nearly destroyed the career of a Supreme Court nominee.

And it brought into the open for the first time the daily torment of sexual harassment experienced by so many women in the workplace.

But, significantly, it also brought shame to the U.S. Senate at the time, a male bastion of privilege and misogyny, and that led a year later to a record number of women elected to Congress.

Dubbed then as “The Year of the Woman,” several of the women elected in 1992 are now in influential positions in Washington. Dianne Feinstein was elected senator from California, and is now the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Patty Murray, currently the seventh-most senior member of the Senate, became Washington state’s first female senator; she chose to run in 1992 because she was “appalled” at how Hill was treated.

Echoes from that explosive Senate

hearing 27 years ago can be heard today as the U.S., once again, obsesses over charges of sexual misconduct being levelled at a Supreme Court nominee.

But the context is different now, and so are the stakes. This means the political risks in mishandling this issue are even greater in 2018 than they were in 1991.

Not only has American anger at sexual misconduct deepened since 1991, the current #MeToo movement and the universal revulsion at sexual assault in the Catholic Church, in Hollywood and elsewhere have added to the rage.

There are many parallels between the two cases. In 1991, Hill accused nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment while they worked together. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University in California, accused nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape while they were both teenagers in the 1980s.

It is striking that a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week in- dicated that more Americans (36 per cent) oppose the Kavanaugh nomination than support it (33 per cent).

No other nominee who has been confirmed has ever polled so poorly.

In contrast, Thomas — even after Hill’s accusations — received majority support among Americans.

But this gradually changed after his confirmation. By 1994, an ABC News poll found that more Americans believed Hill (34 per cent) than Thomas (31 per cent).

This reflected the growing importance Americans attached to the issue of sexual harassment as a result of the Hill/Thomas hearings.

Well before the Kavanaugh accusations, there was renewed interest in the United States in the impact of the Hill case as young people became aware of it.

There are two recent award-winning productions that are particularly revealing. One is a 2016 HBO movie, Confirmation, that is based on the actual testimony at the 1991 Senate hearings. The other is a 2014 documentary, Anita, that is directed by Oscar-winning Freida Mock.

Both underscore the message that Hill herself brought to the debate this week in an essay in The New York Times.

She said the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in 2018 as they were in 1991, are partisan and unfair, and only a “neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct” can be trusted to make an enlightened decision about Kavanaugh.

“There is no way to redo 1991, but there are ways to do it better,” Hill wrote.

She is right, of course. But there is no indication that this year’s version of the U.S. Senate intends to “do it better.”

Tony Burman, formerly head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, is a freelance contributor for the Star. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyBurman