Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [104]
Shirley Wiegand was my lifeline to reality—the person who kept me believing that the entire world had not gone mad, though it certainly seemed that way. An accomplished attorney before she entered law teaching, she stood away from the strategy and pace of negotiating my “case” with the committee. Instead she was stuck with the uninteresting job of hand-holding. Some in the press would even misrepresent that true friendship, to exploit the salacious and unfounded suggestion that our relationship was sexual in nature. But none of it, not the politics, not the media attention, meant anything to her. Shirley simply acted out of concern for me. Everyone should have a friend like her.
Saturday morning, Senator Hatch pulled one of the most dramatic and bizarre stunts of the entire proceeding. During the Friday session I had testified that Thomas had referred to a pornographic film character, Long Dong Silver, in his discussion of pornography. I had also testified that Thomas had made a remark about pubic hair on his Coke can. Hatch received information from a local law firm that the book The Exorcist contained a reference to pubic hair in a drink and that a reported court decision referred to “Long Dong Silver.” Based on the purportedly unsolicited information arriving mysteriously in his office, Senator Hatch asserted that I had fabricated my testimony based on the court case and the book. Hatch waved the book about during the proceeding as though it were the smoking gun found at a murder scene. It did not matter that I had read neither the case nor the book, or that the passage in the book differed critically from what I explained Thomas had said to me. What had come to matter was the theater of it all—and its impact on the public mind. And, despite his initial rule excluding irrelevant information, Chairman Biden entered the misinformation into the proceeding record.
The campaign continued with the Republicans taking the position that they had “to win at any cost.” Senator Danforth would admit later that he pursued this strategy with no regard to fairness for me. To suggest that he had no regard to fairness for me also indicates a lack of regard for fairness to the confirmation process itself, as a fair process generally requires fairness to all sides involved. And despite the successful smoke screens established by some members of the Senate, there was something that informed an increasingly impatient public that the senators had co-opted the process. I would not learn this until returning home when I’d begin to hear from people who wrote or called after watching the hearing on television. For now I was isolated in my hotel room with the sense that public sentiment was the same as the senators kept telling the public it should be.
A key part of the strategy to discredit me was to obtain statements from former students at Oral Roberts University. Senator Danforth seemed to be looking for statements from anyone who would attest to anything negative about my professional competence, my personality, or my sexuality. The senator received just the kind of information he wanted. (The positive, supportive comments he received in interviews with fellow teachers, he ignored.) These requests from members of the Senate gave students the opportunity to promote whatever comments or allegations they wanted to make. Senator Danforth did not care whether the allegations were steeped in racism or sexism so long as they reflected negatively on me as a person, generally, or on my credibility, particularly. Since the students would be accountable to no one for the comments they made, it gave those who may have harbored