Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [124]
The week of my return, Eric had minor surgery, the first in his life. Complications from the procedure landed him bleeding and in intense pain in the Norman Regional Hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. I could only pace the floor in the waiting room in response.
Prior to my testimony, University Media Services had coaxed me into appearing in a promotional video for the university. On Friday a member of the press informed me that the university’s president, Richard Van Horn, had withdrawn the video that was to be aired during the upcoming football game. Later the video would run without my brief and rather innocuous appearance. When I learned that the clip had been pulled, I was hurt. This editing was a shunning—a clear effort at disassociation by an institution of which, prior to my testimony, I had been such an integral part that I was asked to appear in the piece. And as I was working in the provost’s office on the same floor of the same building as the president’s office, the fact that I learned of the president’s decision from the press rather than from the university added insult to the injury. It was a thoughtless slight. Perhaps not a deliberate one, but one that nevertheless added to the burden imposed by every other. The university office of media services sent the following explanation to the dean’s assistant:
We have replaced the footage and voice of Professor Hill with new information strictly as an attempt to make sure our institutional message on undergraduate education is clearly understood and not overshadowed by the visibility of Professor Hill as a result of her media exposure nationwide. In other words, Professor Hill’s appearance on the tape would have changed the focus of the spot and diffused the institutional message.… Professor Hill is one our best and brighest and articulate faculty members, and we may use her in a spot later this year.
I supposed that some explanation for removing me from a university promotional tape was better than none. I assumed that I had been solicited to do the spot for the reasons spelled out in the last sentence of the explanation. Yet I knew that the university acted not simply because of the fact of media exposure, but because of content of the exposure. Explanation aside, there as no excuse for the failure of the public affairs office to communicate the decision to me directly. This simple act was the harbinger of a general distancing from me by some in the administration—of making me precisely the outsider the senators had portrayed.
I had been home for less than a week when a crank from Seaside, California, reported that I had sworn to him in August that Thomas had not harassed me. Norman Spaulding’s slanderous report appeared in a newspaper which he published and edited. Of all the allegations that were to appear about me, this story was the most preposterous. I have never been to Seaside and never gave an interview to anyone named Norman Spaulding. Had it not been so blatantly false and exploitative, it might have been almost funny. Spaulding claimed that I appeared in the Seaside City Council meeting on August 1 or 15 wearing a hot-pink suit and two-inch hot-pink heels. Though no record of any introduction appears on the audiotape of the meetings and everyone on the council denied it took place, Spaulding alleged that I was introduced to the City Council. Following the meeting, he claimed, he interviewed me for thirty minutes and gave me tips on how to fabricate a better sexual harassment claim. But however laughable it all was, Paul Harvey reported it on his nationally syndicated radio program, and the Washington Times ran a story on it in the newspaper’s A section. Norman Spaulding had no doubt achieved his goal, with the participation of the national media, and no one seemed concerned about