(JOHN DURICKA/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Anita Hill testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court on Oct. 11, 1991.Surviving ClarenceThe Daily Beast

Anita Hill has a new book ‘Reimagining Equality’. A series of talks and seminars focused on the anniversary of the Clarence Thomas hearings for supreme court justice have returned Hill to the soft flow of the limelight, if not the harsh glow of cameras confronting her during her testimony about her experiences dealing with Thomas as his subordinate at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The hearings also changed the trajectory of Hill’s life. The questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then a panel of white men, was “hurtful,” she said, and she does not believe a white woman would have met the same reception. But she also said she does not regret her involvement.

Anita Hill will be delivering the keynote address at New York’s Hunter College Oct. 15 conference ‘Sex, Power, and Speaking Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later.’

Many women like myself who watched the Anita Hill interrogation in horror — by a panel of only white men — were stunned by their questions and know that the Daily Beast article is not an exaggeration.

… the Senate Judiciary Committee interrogated Hill with a ferocity that shocked even political veterans, impugning everything from her competence to her sanity to her sexuality. Like a horrifyingly mismatched gladiatorial contest pitting a powerful gang of well-armed men against a woman with no defense save her own account of what someone had done to her against her will, the televised hearings mesmerized the nation. Many female observers were aghast at the way Hill was bullied and demeaned by the committee, whose members seemed both hostile and clueless about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Anita Hill was smeared after the testimony “as a a man-hater, a crusading leftist, a feminist zealot, a spurned woman bent on revenge, and a delusional spinster unhinged by thwarted lust for her former boss, among other slurs—a “deranged liar,” as author David Brock wrote later in recounting the ways he distorted the truth in his bestseller The Real Anita Hill, a hatchet job that memorably described the reserved Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”’

David Brock Anita Hill Apology

In a later book ‘Blinded by the Right’, Brock apologised for his actions, but the deed was done.

The truth is that with my woefully inadequate training at the Washington Times and the American Spectator, I didn’t know what good reporting was. Like a kid playing with a loaded gun, I didn’t appreciate the difference between a substantiated charge and an unsubstantiated one. The cardinal rule of the journalism profession, that every allegation must have at least two sources before it may be printed, was not enforced at the Times, and it was unheard of at the Spectator. My sources did tell me all the things I quoted them as telling me. I didn’t have the judgment to know that people will say anything, particularly in an incendiary conflict such as this one. Every source I relied on either thought Thomas walked on water or had a virulent animus toward Hill. Already conditioned to think the best of Thomas and the worst of Hill, I did nothing to test these sources or question their motives. That almost all of the “kooky” quotes were voiced from behind a shield of anonymity gave me no pause. My incompetence was compounded by an uninformed bias, by the grip of a partisan tunnel vision that was by now such a part of my nature that it distorted my work, disabling me from finding the truth, without my even knowing it.

Anita Hill has remained unmarried and childless, and she believes this has affected public perception of her. In fact, she has a longtime partner Chuck Malone for 10 years, a man Hill describes as being “in the insurance business.”

If Anita Hill has tried to put the Clarence Thomas debacle in perspective, Ginni Thomas, the current wife of the Supreme Court justice has not.

In October 2010, Ginni Thomas left a voicemail on Hill’s Brandeis phone at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. Turned over to law-enforcement authorities, the message said: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of what you did with my husband,” Ginni said. “So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”

This message comes at a time when the right-wing activities of Ginni Thomas and their impact on her husband’s judicial neutrality are coming under their own scrutiny.

More Women Wanted to Testify Against Thomas

In his article for The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin reminds readers that:

Even near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to testify and corroborate Hill’s testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk. The group included Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett; other associates of Thomas, among them Kaye Savage and Fred Cooke, would have testified about the nominee’s long-standing interest in pornography, which would have corroborated Hill’s account. But Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, decided not to call these witnesses. This year, Lillian McEwen, a Washington lawyer who had a long-term romantic relationship with Thomas before he met Ginni, published a memoir, “D.C. Unmasked & Undressed.” She, too, remarked on the Justice’s “strong interest in pornography,” and she also said that Thomas scrutinized his work colleagues as prospective sexual partners. In short, virtually all the evidence that has emerged since the hearings corroborates Hill’s version of events.

Lillian McEwen & Clarence Thomas

After 19 Years, Anita Hill Gets Bombshell Backup from Clarence Thomas Ex

Lillian McEwen didn’t decide to write a book about her relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas because Virginia Thomas left a phone message on Anita Hill’s voice mail, asking her to consider apologizing to Thomas for her sexual harassment allegations against him during his confirmation hearings.

Lillian McEwen, the girlfriend and confidante to Justice Thomas, has been writing her memoirs. It does seem that the Virginia Thomas phone call to Anita Hill struck a sour note, given McEwen’s own experiences with Clarence Thomas, which she has now detailed in the Washington Post.

Anita Hill on ‘Reimagining Equality’

Anita Hill’s Long MemoryNYTimes

Your new book, “Reimagining Equality,” deals with how race and gender intersect. How do you think the reception to your testimony during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings would have been different if you were a white woman accusing a white employer of sexual harassment?

Let’s not be entirely deceived about this. I’m not sure that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate at large were really ready to deal with gender discrimination no matter who was alleging it. I don’t know that they understood how important the issue was to the integrity of the Supreme Court and to the fitness of the individual who was going on the court. Think about how it might have been different if I had been white and Thomas were, as he is, an African-American male. And just think about one particular senator, Strom Thurmond. Given his history and his constituency, I think he would have been hard pressed to treat a white woman accusing a black man in the same way he treated me.