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By Root 929 0

was asking me to verify whether Henderson had made the statement to USA Today, whether I had made the statement to Henderson, or whether a Senate staffer had made such a statement to Henderson or to me. I had known Keith Henderson since my days in Washington, D.C., and despite our regular arguments about policies and politics, we were the best of friends. Keith, who is white and approximately my own age, had grown up in the South and was genuinely concerned about race relations and discrimination. But no matter how well intentioned he was, his solutions often seemed to rely on my willingness to adopt his thinking and approach to solving problems which I, not he, had experienced firsthand. I sometimes rejected his point of view on principle; other times out of my own sheer stubbornness.

After sending my statement to the Senate, I had spoken with Keith Henderson to determine whether he could discover whether the committee had received my statement. I knew that he had experience working on Capitol Hill, and I felt that I could trust him. My inquiry was not a request for substantive advice about sexual harassment or about the nomination itself. It was a request for information about the procedures for communicating with the committee. Never did I say to Henderson anything close to what the press account alleged. And a court of law would have regarded the newspaper statement as triple hearsay. It was what the newspaper claimed that Keith Henderson had claimed that a Senate staffer had said to me. Even if I had tried to make a comment testifying to what a staffer had told me, my own testimony would have been considered hearsay, since I would have been one party removed from the speaker, attempting to testify to what someone had said to me. And if a newspaper quotes me in an article or report, that quotation is, of course, hearsay, as are all newspaper quotes; they represent what the newspaper says someone else said.

Generally, the law assumes that hearsay is suspect. With certain exceptions, in a court of law hearsay is inadmissible. Rather than have one person testify about what someone else told them, the law prefers to have the party who supposedly made the statement testify. That party is then subject to cross-examination on that testimony. The problem with unreliability combined with the fact that no cross-examination is possible demonstrates why only excepted hearsay is admissible. By the time a comment attributed to one party gets repeated and interpreted again, it is likely to vary greatly from the original comment and may bear no resemblance at all to the original. The problem with the question about the USA Today quote, of which I was not offered a copy, was not only that it relied on triple hearsay but that it was confusing as well. The newspaper’s subsequent retraction of the attribution of these comments to Keith Henderson underscores the need for such rules that limit the kind of evidence that can be admitted. In this situation, absent any rules of evidence, Senator Specter was allowed to introduce gross misinformation into a public forum without any accountability for the accuracy or truth of the information.

Nevertheless, rather than explain the question or the point that he was making, Specter pressed forward, reading the newspaper account once again and making certain that the information was in the record, despite the facts that it was hearsay, that I knew nothing about it, and that there was no basis on which to cross-examine the source of the information.

“Well, let me go on,” he said. “Keith Henderson, a 10-year friend of Hill and former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, says Hill was advised by Senate staffers that her charge would be kept secret and her name kept from public scrutiny.” Senator Specter was once again able to introduce off-the-cuff comments into the record as though they had validity and relevance.

“They would,” he continued, apparently referring again to Mr. Henderson’s statement, “they would approach Judge Thomas with the information, and he would withdraw and not turn this into