15-07-24, 08:40
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#27
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COVER-UP; Hearing on Clarence Thomas Sex Harassment Before Supreme Court Confirmation
DIRTY US Politics -Clarence Thomas Hearing on REPEATED Sexual Harassment of a Former Colleague BEFORE He Was Elected to The Supreme Court
Promotion to Supreme Court Hearing- 10 September 1991 & Looming Impeachment JUL 2024
AP 15 JUL 2024
The public confirmation hearings on Clarence Thomas' nomination began on 10 September 1991.
One month later, on 6 October 1991, NPR revealed that he REPEATEDLY sexually harassed a former colleague, Professor Anita Hill
The movie recreates the three days of Supreme Court confirmation hearings that riveted the country in October 1991, launching a national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace and helping to lead to a watershed year for women in elected office.
Twenty-five years later, these hearings still resonate as one of the greatest political, sexual, and racial dramas in modern history. Slate senior legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick recently spoke with Gillian Thomas, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project
Gillian: When Anita Hill appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, we were just a year and a half out of college. I had heard the term sexual harassment and knew vaguely that it was against the law, but I hadn’t had much experience in the workplace, and I hadn’t started law school yet.
I think the closest I had come to seeing harassment in action was Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5. Which, as we all know, has a happy ending—in that it does not have a happy ending for Dabney Coleman—so it hadn’t taught me much about how harassment plays out in real life.
But even by then, I’d experienced enough sexism that I instinctively believed Hill. And I recall my reaction when I read Sen. Arlen Specter’s explanation for why he hadn’t been troubled by the allegations: because Hill didn’t claim that Thomas had ever touched her or “intimidated” her.
I was enraged by Specter’s setting the bar that high. It was one of so many examples of the committee’s cavalier attitude toward harassment.
That attitude was especially galling when you consider that the Hill hearings happened five years AFTER the Supreme Court had found sexual harassment to be illegal.
The SLIMLY SLUG
Contrary to Specter’s suggestion, the court didn’t limit unlawful harassment to physical advances or to threats to fire the victim if she didn’t comply.
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