Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [83]
Sonia Jarvis picked me up at the hotel and took me to the law firm office to meet with my attorneys for the first time. All day various people came in and out of the conference room. I was uncomfortable with so many strangers involved, but with so little time to prepare, I could not carefully screen each individual. By midday several attorneys including Jarvis were present. Sue Ross and Emma Coleman Jordan, who live in Washington, were two of the first to arrive. John Frank and Janet Napolitano, who had taken the red-eye from Phoenix, arrived in midafternoon. Charles “Tree” Ogletree came in from Cambridge. He introduced Michelle Roberts, a trial attorney from Washington, to the group. Warner Gardner and Lloyd Cutler came at the invitation of John Frank. The numbers concerned me, but before I went over the statement I had prepared, each lawyer agreed that the discussion in that meeting was privileged—not to be shared with anyone.
The discussion was free-flowing and lively. Even in this group, no one had been involved in a procedure quite like this. Some attorneys thought the opening statement should be as detailed as possible; others disagreed. Lloyd Cutler in particular seemed uncomfortable with the idea that I should go into detail about the nature of the conduct I was complaining about. Cutler, a partner at one of the leading Washington law firms, Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, had been counsel to President Jimmy Carter and had tried to save Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. After a break, he left the group. Though I never heard from him again, I assumed that he had made an assessment of the chances of my prevailing and had chosen not to be associated with my claim. At worst, I suspected that he would simply leave the team. But it was not crucial that he be there; though he had “insider” credentials in Washington, so did Gardner and, to a lesser extent, Frank.
In a clear breach of professional responsibility, however, Cutler went to the press and expressed concern about my testimony, revealing information that we had all agreed was privileged. He was cited as a source in a column by Lalley Weymouth that appeared in the Wall Street Journal after the hearing. The information Cutler had divulged was not only privileged but was largely erroneous. He told reporters that feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon had been at the meeting. I had never met MacKinnon, and at no time was she at the meeting. In fact, we later learned that she’d been three thousand miles away in San Francisco. Despite their falsity, Cutler’s disclosures would be used to discredit my claim—to suggest that others, like the absent MacKinnon, had put words into my mouth. My statement was based entirely on my own recollection. I made the decisions as to what to include in my testimony. Ironically, the one person who might have been described as a “handler” was the one who turned out to be the most untrustworthy. I learned that I was better off relying on my friends and other volunteers who were political amateurs than on Washington insiders skilled at trading information for political favors.
During the afternoon we decided that I needed more information to support my statements about how I spent my work time when employed by Clarence Thomas. I called Norman to ask Dean Swank to pick up the information. He was scheduled to arrive on Friday to serve as a character witness for me. When he and his assistant, Ovetta Vermillion, arrived at my home, they had to break into my house with a locksmith. They found the documents I needed amid the disarray I had left on Wednesday. Vermillion also found that a lighted lamp in my bedroom had been draped with a pillowcase. Under no circumstances would I have left a lamp in that condition. I concluded that someone must have broken into the house and attempted to set a fire. Any other time I might have panicked at the idea that my home was threatened while I was away. But at stake in Washington was something more important—my name,