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By Root 838 0

harassment, compared me to the journalist Janet Cooke. These two comparisons were to women who were found to have fabricated stories (one about her alleged sexual assault, the other about a child drug addict who didn’t exist but whom she portrayed as real) who were also black. Ironically, neither of these commentators compared me to Oliver North to make their point about truthfulness. If they wanted to pose that I was being untruthful on the stand, North would have served as a better comparison, since North admitted that he lied in his testimony before a congressional committee. The choice of two black women as comparisons had inescapable gender and racial implications. Unfortunately, this was as close as some commentators came to seeing the human element of my story. To prove that I could not be trusted to tell the truth, they recalled stories that they saw as examples of other untrustworthy black women. Either out of laziness, insensitivity, or malice, rather than write a story about me, they retold the stories of others.

Whether fueled by the press coverage or inciting it, Senator Danforth and Senator Simpson next began enlisting students at the University of Oklahoma to carry out their campaign against me. Chris Wilson, a law student with whom I had never had interaction, stated that his goal in the days following the hearing was “to go about the business of making [Anita Hill’s] life a living hell.” During the hearing, he was busy as well. He sought other law students who would participate in a letter-writing campaign aimed at painting me as a political partisan and radical feminist. His failure to find law students willing to engage in the task did not dissuade him. He went to an undergraduate fraternity, which sent pre-drafted letters to senators. They targeted the senior senator from Oklahoma, David Boren. Only one student who allowed his name to be used would assert anything about my politics. Yet neither he nor the student who was responsible for enlisting the fraternity participation in the campaign had ever been in one of my classes, and neither had I discussed politics with either of them. To the students involved, many of whom were eighteen or nineteen, the effort to discredit me must have seemed like sport. The letter-writing campaign might have seemed to them like a fraternity prank that they had all probably participated in at some point. It was, I am convinced, little more than a game to them—a game in which they had nothing to lose, but from which they could gain the political favor of a powerful Washington elite. The real pity is that these students were encouraged to participate in the sport by adult men who had been elected and sworn to protect the rights of the citizens of the country. It is a sad commentary and no coincidence that the students enlisted for this crusade, from both Oral Roberts and Oklahoma Universities, were all white males.

Senator Simpson used the letters solicited from the fraternity members to stage his dramatic claim. “I have all kinds of incriminating stuff coming over the transom. I’ve got letters hanging out of my pocket,” he said, flapping his jacket. “I’ve got faxes, I’ve got statements from her former law professors, statements from people that know her, statements from Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, ‘Watch out for this woman.’ But nobody’s got the guts to say that, because it gets tangled up in this sexual harassment crap. I believe that sexual harassment is a terrible thing … [but] I don’t need any test, don’t need anybody to give me the saliva test on whether one believes more or less about sexual harassment … So if we had one hundred and four days to go into Ms. Hill and find out about her character, her background, her proclivities, and all the rest, I’d feel a lot better about this system.”

To say that Senator Simpson was doing his typical grandstanding with the solicited canned information is to miss the point. Simpson was restating claims he had raised about my character and raising new ones as well as denigrating the whole concept of sexual harassment. When asked