Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [65]
Students, staff, and my colleagues filled the classroom, along with the press. Eric was there with a college friend. Everyone except the press stood and applauded as I entered the room. The Student Bar Association, the Black Law Student Association, and the Minority Coalition presented resolutions supporting me. This at once bolstered my resolve and overwhelmed me with dismay. They did not deserve this massive intrusion of cameras and reporters; none of us did.
Yet I was in a classroom, a place where after some struggle I had finally come to feel at home. And my statement came more easily for that fact. Though this was one of the rare occasions on which I would receive a standing ovation in the classroom, it was only one of many at which I would be pummeled with questions, a fact I tried to remind myself of as the reporters’ questions began. But somehow the familiarity of the setting only heightened the surreal quality of the press conference. I could not comprehend that it was actually happening. When I think back on it, it is as though I am standing behind myself viewing the whole thing from over my shoulder.
“One or two more questions,” Dean Swank announced. Each reporter tried to make sure that hers or his was the last. In the statement, as in responding to questions, I tried to urge upon the press that in sending my statement to the Senate I had responded to the inquiry of a Senate staffer, that I was not acting to raise a sexual harassment claim but out of my sense of responsibility to the nomination process, and that I felt the Senate had an obligation to resolve the matter, since some of its members had already responded to the reports of my charges by impugning my integrity. This was the first time I asked for a public resolution, but at that moment I knew that if there was none, I would certainly live under the shadow of the accusations of fabrication forever. Even with a public resolution, the shadow might well continue for years. Without a chance to address publicly the allegations of those who called me a liar, I would spend my entire life addressing them privately. I wanted the matter resolved “so that all of you nice people can just go home,” I concluded. We all laughed nervously.
After what seemed an hour-long press conference, I went to the dean’s office. Ovetta Vermillion, the dean’s assistant, informed me that Tim Phelps was in the waiting room. She showed a man into the office whose face I had never seen but whose voice I recognized immediately. As he introduced himself, he seemed genuinely sorry for the way things had evolved in the thirty-six hours since his story ran in Newsday, or perhaps I wanted so badly for someone to feel remorse for the turmoil that I mistook what was only fatigue in his eyes. At the same time, I was sure that as a journalist he would have liked to get the “scoop” for his paper, and he didn’t get it. I was not trying to be evasive. I just had nothing to tell him, nothing more than I had said at the press conference.
Finally back in my office, I sat exhausted at my desk. I wanted at least to try to respond to the telephone calls I’d received that morning and to finish preparing for classes. Later in the day, a stereotypically arrogant ABC news correspondent interviewed me for the evening program. He seemed to see the story as an inconsequential Washington political scandal. Dan Rather interviewed me for the CBS Evening News. To my surprise, he conducted a sincere inquiry into the situation. It would be too much to say that I was pleased with the interview, but I was relieved that someone seemed to understand the real-life elements of what was occurring. After confronting