Sexual harassment and Judge Clarence Thomas - 11 October 1991

Firestorm is a colourful word, a metaphor. Unlike most colourful words, it's overused by journalists and politicians, but for once it would be correct to say that figuratively speaking Washington last Monday morning was engulfed by a political firestorm. A firestorm is literally defined as a fire started by a bomb that intensifies and spreads across the landscape by the in rushing winds created by the strong draught of rising hot air.

Well, Monday morning in Washington was comparatively calm and bright, the big the heartening topic over the weekend was Mr Gorbachev's response to President Bush's moves towards nuclear disarmament. The news from the United Nations inspectors in Iraq made many people who'd been hot for sanctions against Saddam but cold about fighting him change their minds, shuddering in hindsight at the thought of sanctions going on for years while Saddam developed an atomic and a hydrogen bomb arsenal.

The House of Representatives was beginning a lackadaisical debate on how to trim the 1993 budget and President Bush, having heard some nasty things about the civil rights abuses of Hiati's exiled president, declared that his return to power was no longer to be considered the same thing as restoring democracy. And then, sometime before noon, a very small bomb exploded way off in the southwest in Norman Oklahoma, a town so far unknown to worldwide fame. Now the University of Oklahoma founded there is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary. And it was on the campus of the University that the bomb dropped.

Since it was dropped on television, it took no more than half an hour for the shock waves to be felt everywhere and the rising hot air of indignation from women's groups to set the shocking topic ablaze throughout Washington. The senator abandoned its normal business, governments departments pretended to work as usual. Ordinary people across the continent from presidents of corporations to more players and truck drivers looked for the nearest television set or cut short their day and hurried home. I describe nothing less than the literal truth as it has been reported from the 50 states from the Florida Keys to Northern Alaska. A newly arrived visitor who knows his way around this country in October would have assumed that the world series, the baseball championship was tied at three games at each.

Well time to identify the dropper of the bomb. A very unlikely terrorist a pretty young black woman 35 years of age, a professor, a professor of law no less, at the university. She called a press conference and surprisingly the room was packed with the media. Now what was the word that had got them there? Well you've all heard of public television, the national network, non-commercial television network, there is a parallel public radio network and it has without question the best radio news in the country. And on Monday morning, it carried a bullet into the effect that this woman law professor a Miss Anita Hill had charged Judge Clarence Thomas with sexual harassment. Judge Thomas is the 43 year-old black man, a judge on a federal appeals court who is the president's choice to succeed a retiring justice on the Supreme Court.

And in accordance with the now well established custom, he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for five days. He was followed by witnesses for another nine days, distinguished people and known people, experts, friends, lawyers some for him, some against him. A few nominees I can remember have had such a thorough almost pitiless going over by the Senate committee that's required to question all presidential appointees as judges, that is. The committee of 14 then votes to approve or reject the nominee and pass its verdict on to the whole Senate. Whatever the verdict is, the 100 members of the Senate then vote and a simple majority either way will confirm or reject the president's choice.

On Judge Thomas, the committee wound up with a tied vote, seven to approve, seven to reject. The ones against him, all Democrats, complained that the judge had renounced the opinions he'd published in speeches and lectures or that he revealed no principles at all or that he was not sufficiently impressive as a legal scholar to be voted on to the Supreme Court. The vote of the whole senate was set for Tuesday, last Tuesday, 8 October at 6pm.

But as I say, the day before, Miss Anita Hill appeared in Norman, Oklahoma, and in Washington, political hell broke loose. How had national public radio got the news of her charge? The leaker has not been positively identified but as you'll see it was bound to come out.

In the beginning, another Senate committee, the Labour Committee, was on another matter interviewing people who had worked for Judge Thomas an aide to Senator Kennedy who was on both committees interviewed Miss Hill. That was on 5 September and she was asked if there was any truth to rumours that at sometime in the past she'd been sexually harassed by Mr Thomas when he was Head of EEOC – the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – which is the government agency that looks into discrimination in the workplace, racial, sexual, ethnic whatever.

So of course, the moment we heard Miss Hill's charge, the irony bloomed that the government's chief agent to police and punish discrimination of any kind should have been charged with, of all things, sexual harassment. At this point, you maybe anxious to know what exactly or vaguely is "sexual harassment"? Well that's the question, the answer to which will concern baffle or frighten millions of American men when this confrontation between Miss Hill and Judge Thomas is over and done with.

We're at the point where Miss Hill is being questioned by one of Senator Kennedy's staff and she replies, apropos of the rumours he's heard about sexual harassment when she worked for Mr Thomas, she doesn't want to go into it, she'd like to think it over, which she did. She was then telephoned by some unidentified aide to a Senator, some Senator on the judiciary committee and then she decided she would make a statement and sign it as an affidavit. In it she said that way back, that 10 years ago, she'd been sexually harassed by her boss, by which she meant she'd been invited out to dinner by Mr, then, Thomas and when she refused, he discussed sexual preferences with her and described or recounted pornographic movies that he'd seen that was all in the original complaint. Miss Hill stressed that there had been no attempt at physical contact not even touching, she also stressed that she'd not come forward on her own but been called by the committee.

Miss Hill's statement was circulated among the members of the judiciary committee and the chairman, Senator Biden, who of course is a Democrat and the Senior Republican Senator Thurmond agreed to have the FBI do a private investigation. I say of course, Senator Biden is a Democrat to remind you that the Democrats are the majority party in the Senate as in the House and therefore all committee chairmen are Democrats.

Anyway, the FBI completed its report, which involved naturally talking to Judge Thomas and Miss Hill separately and to any other people who might be relevant witnesses. By the way, when Miss Hill made her affidavit, she asked that the whole matter be kept confidential that her name be kept secret, that Judge Thomas should not be told. Well pretty soon several Senators reminded her – a law professor, remember – that under the law an accused person has the right to know the accusation and the name of the accuser, so that's how the whole thing eventually got out.

The judiciary committee had spent over two weeks publicly hearing legal and other relevant testimony about Judge Thomas and also in private wondering what to do with Miss Hill's affidavit and the FBI's report. Fatally, they decided to keep it under lock and key and the vote on Judge Thomas went forward seven for, seven against. Then the vote went on to the whole Senate, which as I say was to vote in all innocence so far as the sexual charge was concerned last Tuesday evening. I just said "fatally" … once the word was out on national public radio and then in every other news medium, the firestorm across the country was caused by the in rushing indignation of women and women's groups of every sort, lawyers, feminists, nurses, office workers, unions, housewives, columnists.

The Senators on the committee were by this Friday getting as many as 3,000 letters a day each in print, on the radio, on television. The Senate, the whole Senate was being forcibly, bitterly sarcastically reminded that the Senate consists of 98 males and two females, both of whom joined in the lamenting chorus that 42% of women working for the government declared in a hasty poll that at sometime or other they'd been similarly victimised – sexual harassment. That for various emotional reasons, only one case in a hundred comes to court for fear of humiliation, for fear of losing one's job. Miss Hill gave that as the reason for waiting 10 years before speaking out.

The Senate and I guess the rest of the male population was also reminded by a regiment of women lawyers that more than 50% of the people who vote in this country are women and that sexual harassment under a law passed in 1964 and refined three years ago, can entail anything from rape to certain forms of flirtation from, quote, "unwelcome advances" to create by word or deed for the victim, quote, "a hostile environment". The Senate vote for and against Judge Thomas was now awash in uncertainty, so the Senate agreed to put it off for a week till next Tuesday. New hearings were called for Friday morning at which both Judge Thomas and Miss Hill and maybe other witnesses would appear.

That is the background story that led us – us being by calculation more than half the population – to sit and settle down for the weekend hearings for what is historically the first big governmental effort to define for the public what is meant by sexual harassment.

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