Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [53]
CHAPTER SIX
By midafternoon on August 19 the temperature in Norman threatened to reach one hundred degrees. My first class of the fall semester was about to begin. Outwardly, it was a typical beginning to a fall semester. As always it seemed too hot for fall, too hot to begin the school year. But despite the intense heat, more than two hundred students of the incoming class entered their first year, primed with anticipation. Their energy was contagious and the intensity of their enthusiasm and anxiety eclipsed the summer heat. Happy to be back in the classroom, I found myself ignoring the weather altogether. But some matters I could not ignore.
When Shirley Wiegand, my close friend and colleague on the faculty, returned for the school year, we charged back into our exercise routine—five-mile walks three times a week. Our feet slightly slowed by the heat, we recounted at full speed and in detail our respective summer experiences. After we had covered all the personal grounds, I finally asked, “Did I ever tell you that I worked for Clarence Thomas?” “No, you did not,” she said. The pace of our conversation slowed as I confided in her.
I told Shirley that I did not know what to do. Together we approached the situation as we had been trained—as attorneys, even law professors. True to our profession, we discussed the situation in a series of what-ifs. First, we discussed how I would go about raising the issue if I decided to proceed—to whom I might speak, how much I would disclose initially, whether my statement should be written or oral. Second, we tried to consider what might happen and who might be affected if I raised the claim. We reached no conclusions, and our intuitions fell far short of what was to come. Prepared to respond to an inquiry, but by no means eager to answer, I kept waiting for the call from someone in the government doing a background investigation of Thomas.
On the afternoon of September 5, 1991, the first call came. Gail Laster, counsel to the Judiciary Committee’s Labor Subcommittee, which was chaired by Senator Howard Metzenbaum, reached me in my office at the law school. I did not ask her how she had gotten my name and telephone number. I assumed that she had employed the same resources David Margolick had. My conversation with Laster began casually, almost pleasantly. I was not teaching on the day of the call and thus was a little more relaxed about spending time on the telephone. We recalled that we had been at Yale at the same time and had friends in common. Kim Taylor, whom I had known since law school, had supervised Laster at the D.C. public defender’s office. After some catching up on what each of us had done since our time in New Haven, Laster turned the conversation to the purpose of her call.
“Do you know anything about allegations of harassment at the EEOC?” she asked.
I responded with a question: “Do you mean allegations that Thomas harassed women at the EEOC?”
“We have heard rumors to that effect,” she said.
My immediate thought was that other women had complained and their stories had gotten back to the committee. Because Laster did not ask if I had been harassed, I assumed that she was referring to claims by other women. I knew nothing of such claims, but I did know that Thomas was capable of harassing behavior, so I told her that she should follow up on the rumors. But though I could not imagine how she might have known about my experience, in fact Gail Laster was referring to me.
While I had been wrestling with what to do and preparing for the new semester, my name was traversing the political circuit of Washington, D.C. Peter Fleming, the special investigator who was later assigned to determine who leaked my statement to the press, pieced together the story from his research. Not until May 1992, when I read his reports, would I find out what had led Gail Laster to telephone me. According to Fleming, “In July,