Former Colorado Sen. Hank Brown discusses October 1991 testimony. »
Twenty-seven years ago, Sen. Hank Brown of Colorado sat with the rest of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Anita Hill described how Clarence Thomas, her former boss and a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, sexually harassed her.
Hill told the committee that Thomas, after having called her into his office, asked her out repeatedly and more than once discussed pornography and specific sex acts. He also brought up his own sexual abilities on multiple occasions, she said.
Brown listened. He found Hill, who is an attorney, credible. But he found Thomas’ denial of the allegations credible as well.
“I think for most people it was a tight call,” Brown, a Republican, said in an interview Tuesday.
Brown voted in favor of Thomas, and the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the nomination on to the full Senate, which voted 5248 in October 1991 to confirm the judge to the highest court in the country, where he still serves.
Almost three decades later, Brown said he stands by his vote as senators again grapple with whether they believe accounts that a Supreme Court nominee was sexually inappropriate with women in the past and whether those allegations — believed or not — are enough to block a confirmation.
“I came away impressed with both (Hill and Thomas),” said Brown, who is now 78 years old. “I ultimately came away thinking that I just didn’t know for sure.
“But the fact that there’s been no report or even a hint of this kind of conduct (by Thomas) in 27 years seems to verify the fact that this wasn’t in his makeup,” he added.
Two women have said Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted or committed sexual misconduct against them in the early 1980s. One of them, Christine Blasey Ford, will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, one day ahead of a scheduled vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Ford, a California professor, said Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and attempted to take her clothes off during a party when they were in high school. Deborah Ramirez, a Boulder resident who works as a volunteer coordinator for Boulder County, said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a dorm party when they were freshmen at Yale University in the early 1980s.
Kavanaugh has denied both accounts.
The two 2018 reports are similar to Hill’s in a number of ways, said Brown, who also took over as president of the University of Colorado after a wideranging sexual assault scandal on the Boulder campus that stemmed from a football recruiting party in 2001.
The events reported by Hill happened in the early 1980s — almost a decade before she testified about them to the Senate committee. Also, none of the statements by Hill, Ford and Ramirez were reported to police at the time they occurred and the investigations into them fall outside of criminal courts, he said.
But there are differences between Hill’s described encounters and the reports of Ford and Ramirez, Brown said. The harass ment described by Hill took place on federal property and the parties involved were federal employees. Ramirez’s and Ford’s accounts took place on private property and none of those involved were government workers at the time.
Further, Brown said, Hill knew the time, date and place of the incidents she described. The memories of Ford and Ramirez are foggier and they don’t have all the specifics, he said.
“Anita Hill came well prepared to the hearings with a story that held together and is quite credible,” he said. “(Ford) doesn’t seem to have the credibility that Anita Hill did.”
But even Hill’s preparation wasn’t enough to persuade Brown.
Ultimately, he looked at the “total of Clarence Thomas’ actions” and found that there wasn’t any evidence suggesting a pattern of inappropriate behavior or sexual harassment. He acknowledged, however, that other women who said they would testify in support of Hill were not allowed to speak at the decision of thenSen. Joe Biden, who was chairman of the committee.