TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102191/1021101.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 18.7 KB | 386 lines

                                                                  ▐<            ╚NATION, Page 36

COVER STORIES

She Said, He Said


As the nation looks on, two credible, articulate witnesses
present irreconcilable views of what happened nearly a decade ago

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by Hays Gorey, Julie Johnson and
Nancy Traver/Washington


    It was hard to imagine two more unlikely or reluctant
witnesses. On one side of the divide was Anita Hill, 35, a
specialist in the dry area of commercial law, a reserved woman
who by all accounts is given more to listening than to talking.
On the other was Clarence Thomas, 43, a courtly man who from his
college days has enjoyed a reputation for treating women with
particular courtesy and respect. Yet there she was, this prim
law professor from the University of Oklahoma, seated in the
glare of klieg lights before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
calmly detailing graphic charges of sexual harassment against
the man who until last week seemed virtually certain to be
confirmed as the next Justice to the Supreme Court.

    He said, "I have not said or done the things Anita Hill
has alleged."

    She said, "I am not given to fantasy. This is not
something I would have come forward with if I was not absolutely
sure of what I was saying."

    For witnesses to this spectacle, whether there in the
Senate Caucus Room or at home in their living rooms, deciding
who was telling the truth was all but impossible. Viewers had
to weigh the testimony of two admirable people -- both of whom
had escaped, through diligence and perseverance, a background
of rural poverty to scale great heights, both of whom are known
to be grounded in strong religious and spiritual values, both
of whom have reputations for great personal integrity -- and
pronounce one of them a liar. In the final analysis, it would
come down to this: the specificity of Hill's charges against the
intensity of Thomas' denials.

    Before the days of exhausting and exhaustive testimony
would end, Hill would coolly and impassively detail the nature
of Thomas' alleged harassment while she worked for him in
government positions from 1981 to 1983. Words like "penis" and
"breasts" and "pubic hair" would enter the public record
repeatedly in so somber and untitillating a fashion that no one
in the hearing room would blanch, let alone smirk or giggle. It
was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions
on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of
differing sensibilities -- oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad
taste on his. If Hill's description of Thomas' words and actions
was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of
sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If
Hill's account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional
and a candidate for medical attention.

    During Saturday's session, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch
aimed squarely at the accuser, implying that Hill was working
in tandem with "slick lawyers" bent on destroying Thomas'
chances to join the court. Thomas appeared to endorse that view
when committee chairman Joseph Biden asked if he believed that
Hill had fabricated a tale of sexual harassment. "Some interest
groups came up with this story, and this story was developed
specifically to destroy me," the nominee responded.

    In the course of the hearing, which Thomas angrily
characterized as "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," other
witnesses would come forward. Some would try to buttress Hill's
charges either by affirming that she had complained of sexual
harassment at the time of the alleged incidents or by putting
forward their own allegations of misconduct by Thomas. Others
would seek to cast doubt on Hill's testimony either by dredging
up recollections that conflicted with hers or by offering
stories that aimed to weaken Hill's credibility.

    But nothing was likely to match the devastating effect of
both Hill's and Thomas' testimony. Cool and unflappable, Hill
looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question
without hesitation. Her hands folded on the lap of her teal blue
dress, her demeanor polite, cooperative and never defensive, she
painted a vivid and sobering portrait of what it means to be
victimized by sexual harassment -- from the fears,
embarrassments and humiliations she experienced to the
repercussions it had on her work, health and career choices.
Given the detail and consistency of her testimony, it was almost
inconceivable that Hill, rather than describing her own
experiences, was fabricating the portrait of a sexual-harassment
victim.

    No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were
Thomas' anguished statements and adamant denials. In his opening
remarks -- which he wrote himself, by a friend's account, after
telling the White House to "butt out" -- he said he felt
"shocked, surprised, hurt and enormously saddened" on learning
of Hill's charges. While Hill would maintain that he had asked
her out five to 10 times during the period in question, he
denied that he had ever asked her for even a single date.
Rather, he said, Hill was someone he had helped at every turn,
someone he considered a friend. That accusations of harassment
should come from her seemed to him particularly hurtful. "During
the past two weeks," he said, "I lost the belief that if I did
my best, all would work out."

    Then Thomas enlarged his field of pain. He spoke of the
long ordeal -- 105 days by week's end -- that he had endured
since his nomination to the Supreme Court, of reporters picking
through his garbage cans and poring over his divorce papers.
"This is not American; this is Kafkaesque. It has got to stop.
It must stop for the benefit of future nominees and our country.
Enough is enough," he declared, emphasizing each word.

    "No job is worth what I've been through -- no job. No
horror in my life has been so debilitating. Confirm me if you
want. Don't confirm me if you are so led." Said he: "I will not
provide the rope for my own lynching. These are the most
intimate parts of my privacy, and they will remain just that,
private."

    The tone of his opening statement was so bitter, in fact,
that many listeners thought he was leading up to a withdrawal
of his candidacy. But he stopped short of that, apparently
determined to clear his name even if he could not salvage his
place on the court. "I would have preferred an assassin's bullet
to this kind of living hell," he said the next day. But still,
he insisted, he would "rather die than withdraw."

    Friday night, after Hill concluded her testimony, Thomas
again took his place behind the green-draped table to answer
questions. But this time his pain had given way to raw anger.
"I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically,
that I deny each and every single allegation against me today."
He called the hearing a travesty, a circus, a national
disgrace. During his two days of testimony, Thomas returned
repeatedly to a central theme of his rebuttal: that he was the
victim of a racially motivated attack. "I cannot shake off these
accusations because they play to the worst stereotypes we have
about black men in this country," he angrily declared.

    In his second appearance on Friday, he made an astounding
statement: he had not even listened to Hill's testimony. Thomas'
wife Virginia, however, watched parts of it and reported back
to her husband. When Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama
suggested to Thomas that only he could put the lie to Hill's
claims, Thomas snapped back, "I am incapable of proving the
negative. It did not occur."

    Defiant, defensive and plainly fed up with the process,
Thomas answered further questions tersely, as the Senators
played back Hill's charges to him. "No." "Absolutely not,
Senator." "It never occurred." The process, he asserted, was
"drowning my life, my career and my integrity. You have robbed
me of something that can never be restored."

    At only one point did he offer a hint of anything that
might smack of a personal relationship with Hill. "I would drive
her home and sometimes stop in and have a Coke or a beer or
something and continue arguing about politics for maybe 45
minutes to an hour," he said. "But I never thought anything of
it." Later, Thomas elaborated on this aspect of their
relationship by stating that there were a "number of instances"
when he visited Hill's home while working with her at the
Education Department.

    Thomas' two sessions of angry rebuttal were compelling.
But even so riveting an appearance could not mitigate the
impact of Hill's own eight hours of virtually uninterrupted
testimony. In her own opening statement, she spoke first about
the general nature of her office exchanges with Thomas while
working under his supervision, initially at the Department of
Education's office for civil rights in 1981 and '82, then at the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982 to '83. "He
spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films
involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and
films showing group sex or rape scenes," she alleged. "He talked
about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large
penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On
several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual
prowess."

    The most charged moments came when she offered specific
details about Thomas' alleged behavior. One of the "oddest
episodes," she said, involved an exchange in Thomas' office when
he reached for a can of Coke and asked, "Who has put pubic hair
on my Coke?" (Later, Hatch accused Hill of stealing the story
from a work of fiction. Holding aloft a copy of the book The
Exorcist, Hatch quoted, "There seems to be an alien pubic hair
in my gin.") On other occasions, Hill maintained, "he referred
to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal" and
spoke of the pleasure he had "given to women with oral sex."

    Urged by Biden to recall her most embarrassing encounter
with Thomas, Hill responded, "His discussion of pornography
involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a
variety of sex with different people or animals." Under
questioning, she also recalled an exchange in Thomas' office
where Thomas alluded to the large penis of an actor in a
pornographic film by referring to the character's name.

    "Do you recall what it was?" pressed Senator Biden.

    "Yes, I do." Hill, permitting herself a rare display of
emotion, wrinkled her nose in disgust. "The name that was
referred to was Long Dong Silver." Hatch, who emerged as one of
the panel's most aggressive interrogators, later dug up a 1988
decision by a federal appeals court in Tulsa, citing an obscene
photograph of a character by that name. Hatch suggested it was
this court case that had brought the name to Hill's attention
-- not Clarence Thomas.

    Hill was also quite specific about her last encounter with
Thomas, in 1983, while still an employee at the EEOC. Up until
then, she said, she had declined all social invitations from
Thomas, explaining to the Senators that she had repeatedly told
him she did not feel it was appropriate to date her supervisor.
But this was her last day at the EEOC before proceeding to a
teaching post at Oklahoma's Oral Roberts University. So, she
said, after he "assured me that the dinner was a professional
courtesy only," they went to a restaurant after work. "He made a
comment I vividly remember," she said. "He said that if I ever
told anyone of his behavior, that it would ruin his career."

    The most moving aspect of Hill's testimony was the vivid
portrait she painted of the vulnerability, humiliation and
frustration she experienced while working under such conditions.
"It wasn't as though it happened every day," Hill explained.
"But I went to work during certain periods knowing that it might
happen." She spoke of her fear of being squeezed out of good
assignments, losing her job, maybe even not being able to find
any job at all within the Reagan Administration if she continued
to resist Thomas' alleged overtures. At one point, she said, the
stress she experienced from the tension of her relationship with
Thomas caused her to be hospitalized for five days with acute
stomach pains.

    Although the panel of male Senators seemed to have an
especially hard time with this part of Hill's testimony, her
tale struck a resonant chord with countless women across
America. Judith Resnick, a law professor at the University of
Southern California Law Center, characterized Hill's testimony:
"You're seeing a paradigm of a sexual-harassment case."

    The point most rigorously pursued by the Senate panel,
particularly Pennsylvania's Senator Arlen Specter, the chief
Republican interrogator on the committee, was why Hill decided
in 1982 to follow Thomas from the Education Department to the
EEOC. At that point, Hill said, she thought "the sexual
overtures which had so troubled me had ended." Besides, she
noted, there was talk that President Reagan was thinking of
phasing out the Education Department, and she feared she might
wind up jobless.

    Once she got to the EEOC, Hill said, the overtures from
Thomas resumed. If that was true, Senators wondered, then why
in the years since she turned to teaching had she remained in
touch with Thomas? Hill said she saw little harm in maintaining
cordial relations with Thomas now that she no longer worked with
him and no longer felt threatened by him. "I did not feel that
it was necessary to cut off all ties or to burn all bridges or
to treat him in a hostile manner," she said. "If I had done
that, I would have had to explain this whole situation that I've
come forward with today."

    Specter made much of the fact that while at Oral Roberts
University, Hill remained friendly enough with Thomas to
volunteer to drive him to the airport on one occasion. She
suggested that the university's founding dean, Charles Kothe,
had asked her to do so. (Kothe was not only her boss at that
time but a good friend of Thomas' as well.) She visited Thomas
another time after she left the EEOC, she explained, to get a
recommendation from him. And what of the 11 phone calls she made
to Thomas over a six-year period, publicized earlier in the week
by Thomas' Senate champion, Republican John Danforth of
Missouri? Those, she explained, were work-related calls, and
each "was made in a professional context."

    Specter questioned the validity of her memory eight to 10
years after the events, given that her recollections had changed
in recent weeks. As an example, he cited the fact that when she
spoke to the FBI agents in late September, she recalled telling
only one friend about the alleged sexual harassment. Now, he
said, she had two witnesses lined up to testify that she had
complained at the time. "If you start to look at each
individual problem, then you won't be satisfied that it's true,"
she said. "But the statement has to be taken as a whole." Then
she added forcefully, "There is no motivation to show I'd make
up something like this."

    On that point, Hill seemed particularly persuasive. Each
time committee members tried to probe her possible motivations
for denouncing Thomas publicly, they came up dry. It became
clear that it was members of various Senate staffs who had
approached Hill, not the other way around. She maintained her
silence publicly until her FBI statement fell into reporters'
hands on Oct. 5. At that point, she said, "I felt I had to tell
the truth. I could not keep silent."

    Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy confronted the issue of
motive and asked if she stood to gain in any way from coming
forward. "I have nothing to gain here," she said soberly. "This
has been disruptive of my life, and I've taken a number of
personal risks." She said she had been threatened, though she
did not elaborate on the nature or source of the threat. "I have
not gained anything except knowing that I came forward and did
what I felt that I had an obligation to do," she said. "That was
to tell the truth."

    The only moment when Hill seemed at all evasive came
during an exchange with Specter over an Oct. 9 account in USA
Today. In it, Keith Henderson, an old friend of hers who is also
a former Senate Judiciary staff member, is quoted as saying
Hill was advised by Senate staff members that her FBI affidavit
would be the instrument that "quietly and behind the scenes"
would force Thomas to withdraw, without her name ever becoming
public. Specter pressed her to recall discussing such a scenario
with anyone. First she demurred that she did not recall that
specific comment. Pressed again, she allowed, "There might have
been some conversation about what could possibly occur." On
Saturday Specter quickly attacked Hill's change in testimony as
"flat-out perjury."

    Senators returned to the point, plainly unwilling to
accept that Hill had not at least entertained this scenario when
she made her statement to the FBI agents. They, like many
viewers, could not fathom how Hill would have failed to
anticipate that her charges might not remain anonymous and that
at some point she might have to face Thomas. When asked by Biden
if she considered herself part of an "organized effort" to keep
Thomas from the bench, she said, "I had not even imagined that
this would occur."

    There was one attempt at producing a smoking gun:
Specter's presentation of an affidavit by John Doggett, a Yale
classmate of Thomas' and a Washington acquaintance of Hill's.
In it Doggett alleged that at a going-away party shortly before
she left the EEOC, Hill steered him to a quiet corner and
chastised him with the words "I am very disappointed in you. You
really shouldn't lead on women and then let them down." Doggett
called her charge "completely unfounded" and added that he came
away "feeling that she was somewhat unstable, and that, in my
case, she had fantasized about my being interested in her
romantically." Hill responded that she barely knew Doggett and
stated flatly, "I did not at any time have any fantasy about
romance with him."

    When the hearing concluded, everyone who had witnessed
Hill's and Thomas' dramatic testimony knew for certain only what
they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the
other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to
this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was
the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was
shouldering the burden unfairly -- and it may never be known
which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the
proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the
strength of a very convincing lie.