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Anita Hill

Anita Hill on O'Reilly harassment charges: People need to keep coming forward

Jessica Guynn
USA TODAY
Anita Hill

SAN FRANCISCO —  A quarter century after her testimony in Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill says it's time for a nation that's too easily accepting of men's excuses for sexual harassment to change the cultural status quo.

Take Donald Trump being elected president after a tape revealed his boasts of forcing himself on women. Or top-rated cable news host Bill O'Reilly, who was ousted Thursday after the report of multiple settlements involving sexual harassment allegations against him. Trump dismissed talk of grabbing women by their sexual organs as locker room banter, and O'Reilly called the claims against him "completely unfounded."

"We have a whole host of people accepting that as just something men do as opposed to understanding it as predatory behavior that is not only immoral but is also illegal," Hill told USA TODAY in a rare interview.

There is one big difference today. Even in a country still roiled by gender and racial tensions, women are finding their voices and telling their stories in ways that were not possible in 1991 when the nation was gripped for two nonstop weeks by Hill and her televised testimony, the lurid details of which Thomas vehemently denied.

Susan Fowler, a female software engineer, reached millions on her personal blog with a detailed account of rampant sexism at ride-hailing company Uber. And, in response to a unnerving string of revelations about workplace harassment, women have flooded social media with raw recollections ripped from their everyday work lives of being subjected to leering bosses and crude remarks, of being groped and assaulted.

"The idea that these kinds of behaviors can stay hidden is fading because there are ways to get them out. I think the key is to keep pushing," Hill says. "When you deal with someone like Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly, the key is for people to keep coming forward." Former Fox News CEO Ailes resigned last year after several claims of sexual harassment, which he denied.

Though some dismissed her testimony against Thomas as a partisan attack, for many Hill is a torchbearer in the decades-long fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace. Thomas had been Hill's supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Her testimony before an all-male panel in Congress put sexual harassment on the front page, replete with tales of pornography Thomas enjoyed watching and boasts of his penis size. It also put her reputation on trial.

To this day Hill does not believe a white woman would have received the same treatment. During the hearings, in which the late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, a former segregationist, was the ranking Republican, Thomas claimed that he — not Hill — was the victim of a “high-tech lynching." Despite protests of the handling of the Anita Hill hearings, the committee and the full Senate voted to confirm Thomas to a seat on the Supreme Court.

This Oct. 11, 1991 file photo shows law professor Anita Hill testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington in 1991.

Public outcry helped sweep four women into Senate seats and a record 24 women were elected to the House. The year 1992 was dubbed as the "The Year of the Woman" as hundreds more ran for state legislatures, school boards and county positions.

Now, with the election of Trump, the nation is seeing millions of women march in the streets and many run for office again.

In hindsight, Hill views the public nature of the confirmation hearings as a safety net, because it allowed people to see what was happening, even if they drew vastly different conclusions about her testimony. And Hill, who teaches at Brandeis University and advises the plaintiffs class action law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll on civil rights and employment cases, says she'd do it all again.

"The public spectacle is the thing that moved us forward," Hill said. "And, yes, I would go through that again."

She's not alone. Ellen Pao's unsuccessful gender discrimination lawsuit against one of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture capital firms triggered a national debate on the treatment of women, and women of color, in the tech world.

Hill, in San Francisco for a public conversation with Pao Thursday evening organized by the Kapor Center for Social Impact and moderated by journalist Michele Norris, spoke with USA TODAY earlier this week. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: For many in this country, you epitomize the fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace. Having gone through everything you have, would you do it again?

A: My answer is absolutely yes. Initially, I was concerned about the whole public aspect of it, but in fact what I have come to understand in the long run is that by being public there was a safety net, if you will, because everyone could see. People had different opinions about what it meant, but they saw what was going on. I can only imagine what things might have happened if everything had been behind the scenes.

Q: Do you have any regrets? Would you do anything differently? 

A: I regret that there still were some behind-the-scenes attacks and not just on me. There were people who came forward to support me because they really wanted my testimony to be heard. There were retaliations against them.

I regret those things but, after 25 years and after going over and over my behavior, I'm not sure I could have done anything different that would have changed those really adverse outcomes that need not have happened. I think the behavior that needed to be changed was the behavior of the Senate committee.

Q: Did intersectionality (a term that describes overlapping forms of discrimination, such as gender and race) play a role in how you were treated?

A: Absolutely.

I am absolutely clear that the senate judiciary committee was not ready to hear any claims of sexual harassment from anyone. I do think that some of the reactions that were so enlivened and robust and against my testifying were a reaction both to my race and to my gender.

Strom Thurmond was a strong supporter of Clarence Thomas. I suspect had I not been an African-American woman, had I been a white female, Strom Thurmond would not have so robustly embraced Clarence Thomas during that portion of the hearing.

When Clarence Thomas claimed to be a victim of a lynching, the reaction was very swift. It was almost as if people were repulsed by this idea of a lynching, but that metaphor was misused in ways that attempted to erase my racial identity, my whole history and family history of being people who had been threatened by lynching. It erased the ability for an African-American woman to be the owner of an African-American racial experience.

That is another factor and another way my intersectionality played. It gave him the opportunity to represent the race. So it alienated people of color, and some people in the African-American community. And it erased the history of sexual abuse of African-American women.

This 2013 file photo shows Anita Hill during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Q: Have things improved for women? Have we taken any steps backwards?

A: I don't think we have taken steps backwards. I think there have been improvements. But we are just now starting to understand how complex the problems are.

I think we view sexual harassment as an individual behavior problem. But what we are starting to really understand is that the problems are institutional.

The problem with sexual harassment isn't just because people behave badly. The problem is our inability to develop productive responses to it, and that exists because of our culture that accepts it, because that culture then gets built into how we approach solutions to it. It gets built into the choices we make about who can be believed. And even when we find sexual harassment exists, the solutions are very often to move the women who have complained to other positions.

The one example of that came from the blog by Susan Fowler. When she made her complaint, she was told her options would be to move to another group and move away from the job she wanted to do or to allow herself to stay knowing she would not get good evaluations. To me, what that says, is that it's not just a personal problem, it's an institutional problem.

Q: Speaking of cultural issues, what do you make of the allegations that were made against President Trump during the campaign? Why do you think those allegations didn't derail his candidacy?

A: I would just point to the explanation that Donald Trump gave for his behavior when he described being able or being privileged to grab women against their will and then said that this was locker room talk.

We have a whole host of people accepting that as just something men do as opposed to understanding it as predatory behavior that is not only immoral but is also illegal.

We had some social forces coming together but we had a cultural excuse that overlaid his statement or his explanation. People accepted it because these were people who were his political allies who had invested in him and they were willing to take that cultural excuse and buy into it.

We really do have to change public awareness. I think we have to have a better understanding of it and have different examples of when we are allowing cultural excuses and gender biases to supplant our understanding of facts and reality and appreciation of the harm that is done to individuals through that behavior.

We have seen many, many examples of how we are allowing people to get away with this behavior because in some ways we value them. Donald Trump was valued as a political candidate. We had a hard time accepting the very idea, not even talking about guilt or innocence, but the very idea that Bill Cosby might be a sexual predator. Roger Ailes was in a position of authority even though there seems to be clear evidence from the Fox network investigation that he was engaged in sexually abusive behavior.

Ellen Pao, whose discrimination lawsuit against her former venture capital firm drew attention to the treatment of women in the tech world, is now an  investment partner at Kapor Capital and the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact.

Q: Ellen Pao's lawsuit raised many of these issues in the tech sector. Did you follow her case? 

A: I did follow it and I found the information that she was presenting quite compelling on a number of different levels because it fit within the framework and our new understanding about sexual harassment and discrimination. Sexual harassment is just part of one aspect of gender discrimination that can be prevalent in a workplace. And what I heard from Ellen Pao's testimony, there were a whole range of behaviors that rose to the level of discrimination.

Q: In watching Ellen Pao's case, did it remind you of what happened to you and the personal toll it took? 

A: I didn't know Ellen Pao. So I don't like to assume that what is happening to me and how I felt is how everyone feels. But I think what was striking and similar to my experience was the real division, and it was men and women, who seemed to think that what they were hearing about was not discrimination. And in that way it felt very similar.

For me, it seemed quite obvious. I couldn't tell whether that was because, one, I had gone through a public hearing or, two, I had been thinking about these issues for years. But there was still that division and a failure to understand why her employment opportunities were being completely reduced by the behavior being widely accepted by the people around her.

Q: That division you experienced is still taking place today. Women can't count on being believed and that discourages many of them from coming forward. How do we break that cycle?

A: Well, I think we just have to keep telling the stories. We can't retreat.

Susan Fowler's blog is a new tool that wasn't available in 1991 to me. And we're finding ways to connect and to tell our stories.

The idea that these kinds of behaviors can stay hidden is fading because there are ways to get them out. I think the key is to keep pushing. When you deal with someone like Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly, the key is for people to keep coming forward.

We also know there are some institutional impediments to that, mainly these gag orders that people are under to not talk about complaints that have been filed, or arbitration where many of these arbitration agreements get sealed and no one knows what's going on in an institution. We've got to find more and more ways to get those stories out and to reveal what's going on in our workplaces.

More:

Bill O'Reilly ousted at Fox after sexual harassment investigation

Ellen Pao on Silicon Valley's Anita Hill moment

Sexual harassment still a reality in the workplace

Silicon Valley gender gap is widening

Silicon Valley's dirty little secret: The way it treats women

Trump apologizes for video bragging about groping women

How Bill O'Reilly's ouster will dent Fox News

Controversy has always hovered over O'Reilly's career

Bill O'Reilly: A timeline of the controversy surrounding the Fox News host

Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn @jguynn

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