Commission to look at harassment

Anita Hill has been picked to lead a newly formed commission on sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.

As announced late Friday by the commission, the goal of the new group is to help combat the kind of sexual misconduct that has proven to be pervasive in Hollywood. Hill — a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University — most famously testified on Capitol Hill in 1991 during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

The commission is an initiative spearheaded by producer Kathleen Kennedy, along with attorney Nina Shaw, venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein and Maria Eitel, co-chairman of the Nike Foundation.

“It is time to end the culture of silence,” Hill said in a statement about the new commission. “I’ve been at this work for 26 years. This moment presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to make real change.”

In nearly every instance, the allegations in recent weeks came from accusers who were in far less powerful positions than those they accused — as in the rape allegations against music mogul Russell Simmons and film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Both men deny the allegations.

“You have to look at the power dynamics, the coercion, the manipulation,” said Jeanie Kurka Reimer, a longtime advocate in the area of sexual assault. “The threatening and grooming that perpetrators use to create confusion and compliance and fear in the minds of the victims. Just going along with something does not mean consent.”

Erin Murphy, a professor at New York University School of Law who’s involved in a project to rewrite a model penal code on sex assault, notes that half the states in the U.S. don’t define consent.

“It’s pretty telling,” Murphy said, “that the critical thing most people look to understand the nature of a sexual encounter — this idea of consent — is one that we don’t even have a consensus definition of in our society.”

The very word “consent,” actress and writer Brit Marling wrote in The Atlantic, “cannot fully capture the complexity of the encounter. Because consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it.” Marling has accused Weinstein of a 2014 encounter in a hotel room.

The differences in definitions of the term make for a situation that is “confusing as hell,” said Rebecca O’Connor, the vice president of public policy at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

North Carolina, for example, has a law that doesn’t allow consent to be revoked once it’s been given. In other words, if an encounter turns violent, as in a recent reported case, the accused cannot be charged with rape because the woman consented at the beginning. O’Connor said North Carolina is reconsidering that law.

“A lot of states are starting to move the wheels on this,” she said.

Information for this article was contributed by Ellen McCarthy of The Washington Post; and by Jocelyn Noveck of The Associated Press.