Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [97]
Though he never got the testimony he needed to support the conspiracy theory, Senator Specter soon found another use for his line of questioning on the USA Today article. These exchanges served as the basis for a charge on the following day that I had committed “flat-out perjury” in my testimony before the committee. The charge was baseless and, as I was not testifying when Specter made it, it was published by the press before I had any chance to respond. If I had won the battle of wills on the USA Today article, Senator Specter once again showed that the Republicans could prevail in the field of rhetoric. The headline would read, “Specter Accuses Hill of Flat Out Perjury,” and no one would need to read the details to know that Specter was calling me a liar. Thus, Specter left the public to infer that, as a perjurer, I must have lied about everything I described. I doubt he much cared what the public believed about me as long as they believed that Thomas was worthy of the position on the Court.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy’s thirty minutes of questioning focused on the FBI interrogation of my claim and the charges that the report was inconsistent with my opening statement. He wanted to know “what happened,” but also why what happened was wrong—outside the realm of acceptable behavior for the workplace. Finally, he tackled the question “Why did you wait” to report the behavior? Once again I explained that I had always chosen the best way I knew to deal with the situation both while I worked for Thomas and later, when the Senate staffer approached me and asked about the behavior. Having dealt with the harassment, having dealt with the lack of process for investigation of the information, having dealt with the pre-hearing campaign, I was now having to deal with an irreparably flawed proceeding whose purpose was to investigate the claims. But even when the chairman announced that he planned to adhere to standard rules such as those regarding the relevancy of information, members would soon deviate from them.
As Senator Specter continued his questioning in the afternoon, he raised the affidavit of John Doggett, a law school friend of Clarence Thomas and a passing acquaintance of mine from Washington, D.C. At the beginning of the hearing Senator Biden had announced: “Certain subjects were simply irrelevant to the issue of harassment, namely, the private conduct, out of the workplace relationships, and intimate lives and practices of Judge Thomas, Professor Hill and any other witness that comes before us.” The Republicans used this rule to protect Judge Thomas from the release of information about his habit of viewing pornographic material as well as his habit of describing what he had viewed in vivid detail to friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, the committee dispensed with the rule where it was convenient, allowing ready admission of manufactured information about my own personal social life.
Perhaps the best example of the breach of Biden’s announced relevancy rule came in the affidavit and testimony of John Doggett. Nowhere was Senator Metzenbaum’s warning about opening the proceeding to “all sorts of sworn statements” more warranted than during Doggett’s testimony. Specter avoided the question of its admissibility as part of the hearing record in a way both sinister and unethical, as it had been distributed to the president, the press, and the public even before the entire committee was allowed to see it. Specter questioned me on the affidavit before I had ever seen