Senatorial harassment

National Review, Nov 4, 1991

ANITA HILL'S implausible charges, which senator after senator obsequiously thanked her for making, have apparently made her a star. On the afternoon before the Senate vote, she called a peculiar "press conference" at which no facts were imparted and no questions taken, apparently for the sole purpose of basking in her new celebrity. Glowing with a self-confident exultation, fresh from the covers of Time and Newsweek, she was the new national postergirl for sexual harassment. Her testimony may have been hard to square with either Judge Thomas's hyper-proper demeanor or her own conduct toward him over the years, but it was perfectly pitched to the ideological constituency she served and won.

Whether you believed Miss Hill depended mostly on whether you subscribed to (or were cowed by) the feminist mythology according to which even the most innocuous-seeming male is a rapist at heart and a presumptive harasser. Indeed, "sexual harassment" has joined the lexicon of catch-all concepts, like racism," that lack clear definition but whose content is supplied by free association. The media provided a chorus of sexual harassment "experts" to comment on the proceedings, all of whom were doctrinaire feminists who shed no light whatsoever on the point at issue: what Clarence Thomas did. Their sole function was to create a presumption of guilt against him qua male. Thomas's term, "lynching," was not a bad metaphor for this "process."

Thomas's opponents were right to say this was not a trial in which the guilt of the accused had to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, the uncorroborated and in many ways fishy testimony of a single accuser failed the even more modest standards of probation. The witnesses who "corroborated" it, according to the media, had not in fact been present to witness the alleged offenses and corroborated only the fact that she had made the allegations earlier. Weighed against ample testimony to his integrity, it was plainly insufficient. And weighed against the fact that Miss Hill actually followed her putative tormentor from one job to another and carefully maintained friendly social relations with him years after she had moved to a job across the country, it verged on the preposterous.

Her explanation that she was unaware of her security at the first job invites the charge of mendacity: no civil servant in Washington, let alone a lawyer, can be ignorant of civil-service prerogatives. She evidently felt perfectly safe with Thomas, and found him useful to her career then and long afterward. Had she been telling the truth, she would also have been inadvertently confessing to manipulating Judge Thomas to her own advantage by professing a false friendship. If her testimony was false, she was either in the grip of delusion or prepared to take her manipulation of him to the point of destruction.

Thomas won because he fought back. Stung out of the nervous demeanor that had disappointed even his well-wishers during the earlier hearings, he reacted to the Democrats' October Surprise with profound fury. He directed his rage not against his accuser but against the stage-managers of the process]" who had brought things to this pass, and the public shared his revulsion at the disgusting spectacle of televised libel. The most innocent of men would have been at a severe disadvantage in the circumstances Thomas faced, had he accepted the process as morally legitimate. But Thomas rightly rejected the role of defendant in a show trial.

His experience should prove consciousness-raising. It epitomized the degeneration of civil rights" not only into race and gender preference policies but into a perverted legality that requires the accused to prove innocence. The costly insights his ordeal has furnished should serve him well on the Court.