Speaking Truth to Power (30 page)

The campaign continued with the Republicans taking the position that they had “to win at any cost.” Senator Danforth would admit later that he pursued this strategy with no regard to fairness for me. To suggest that he had no regard to fairness for me also indicates a lack of regard for fairness to the confirmation process itself, as a fair process generally requires fairness to all sides involved. And despite the successful smoke screens established by some members of the Senate, there was something that informed an increasingly impatient public that the senators had co-opted the process. I would not learn this until returning home when I’d begin to hear from people who wrote or called after watching the hearing on television. For now I was isolated in my hotel room with the sense that public sentiment was the same as the senators kept telling the public it should be.

A key part of the strategy to discredit me was to obtain statements from former students at Oral Roberts University. Senator Danforth seemed to be looking for statements from anyone who would attest to anything negative about my professional competence, my personality, or my sexuality. The senator received just the kind of information he wanted. (The positive, supportive comments he received in interviews with fellow teachers, he ignored.) These requests from members of the Senate gave students the opportunity to promote whatever comments or allegations they wanted to make. Senator Danforth did not care whether the allegations were steeped in racism or sexism so long as they reflected negatively on me as a person, generally, or on my credibility, particularly. Since the students would be accountable to no one for the comments they made, it gave those who may have harbored a grudge a perfect opportunity to act upon it.

The tone set by the senators in their own unsubstantiated remarks
encouraged them to do so. The law school environment fosters intense competition under the best of circumstances. Disappointment about a single grade, the most obvious competitive standard, often grows into a grudge. The environment at Oral Roberts University was particularly tense because of the uncertain future accreditation status of the law school and its ultimate transferral to Regent University. Students felt uncertain about where they would complete their education and whether doing so, under the conditions of the institution, would enable them to sit for the bar and to obtain employment. Students had no control over the accreditation of the law school or its transfer. Good grades, the mark of advantage over which they had some control, were seen as a way to maintain a competitive edge. And for some students, under these circumstances, grades took on exaggerated meaning. Under the guise of background information, any student who bore animosity toward me or the institution for something as unrelated as a disappointing grade might come forward. Given the lateness of the inquiries—coming on the weekend of the second round of the confirmation hearing—and the lack of will on the part of the Democrats to pursue my claim, they were virtually assured that their charges would not be investigated.

Thomas’ supporters sought out students who would provide statements asserting that I was a radical feminist, a lesbian, a sexual aggressor, or an incompetent teacher. Senator Danforth’s campaign included calling several of my former students ten to twelve times over the course of two days. Yet even with the breadth of his inquiry and persistence of his search, Senator Danforth was able to obtain only one affidavit, the contents of which were denied by the “witnesses” listed in the document. This affidavit was dubbed the “pube affidavit” because it contained descriptions of alleged sexual remarks, advances, and bizarre activity—including putting pubic hair in student papers I returned—that the former student attributed to me. The alleged remarks, according to the document, were made in the presence of the students named in the affidavit. But when the Senate contacted those named students, they denied witnessing any such activity. Still, despite the fact that no one questioned how the young man had concluded that the “short curly hair” he says he
and others found in their work was pubic hair, Danforth moved forward with them.

Moreover, Danforth disregarded the likelihood that a young black woman at a Christian university could engage openly in such activity without some institutional sanctioning or even castigation from the dean of the school. Yet neither Dean Kothe nor his successor, John Sanford, endorsed the affidavit. And despite the fact that Kothe testified as a witness for Thomas, he did so without impugning my character. John Sanford, who at the time of the hearing was at Regent University, an institution associated with the Reverend Pat Robertson’s ministry, gave a favorable assessment of my character, as did other former Oral Roberts faculty then at Regent. The Republicans on the committee ignored their statements as failing to fit in with their political objective, even though the statements came at considerable risk, given that Robertson openly supported Judge Thomas’ nomination. The word of the former student who submitted the affidavit was worth more to Danforth in a political sense even if not in a logical or moral sense. Senator Danforth used the document in an effort to bargain with the Democrats over control of the hearing, and the Democrats—unwilling to place any value in the word of a black woman or to pursue the statements of the white male colleagues who supported her—allowed it.

Even after Thomas’ confirmation when it was clear that Danforth had “won,” he was not satisfied. Danforth attempted to get the press to publish the more inflammatory contents of the affidavit. To complete the political task, it was not enough that Thomas was confirmed. From beginning to end, Danforth knew that my life—not just my allegations—had to be destroyed.

When I worked for Clarence Thomas, he entrusted me with keeping him informed about media reports that reflected on the agency. Each morning I read five newspapers from across the country—scouring them for stories about the EEOC or the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department. I was particularly watchful for negative stories. Despite some emotional attachment to the agencies, I did not personalize the negative stories. I enjoyed comparing stories from different newspapers
about the same event. Reading them and responding when necessary were part of my job.

As I sat in my room over the weekend of October 12, I was reminded of that part of my job. I attempted to keep up with what was occurring outside my room by reading two newspapers,
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
. I was so emotionally involved that reading the reporting was difficult—reading the opinion pieces, whether favorable or not, was almost impossible. The reporting of the entire episode had been disappointing from the beginning. It covered the allegation of harassment as a political scandal and my claim as a maneuver in a political cause. Lost was the report of the experience of an everyday person as a victim of harassment in 1982 or caught in the politics of the 1991 hearing.

Some individuals with political and legal experience worked behind the scenes talking to the senators about fairness in the process. Both Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center and Judith Lichtman of the NOW-Women’s Legal Defense Fund went to Capitol Hill daily during the hearings to help keep the Senate focused on the harassment issue. Marcia Greenberger would say later that she was never treated so well as she was by the staff of the Senate cafeteria once they discovered what she and Lichtman were trying to accomplish. But I was not in contact with either of them or their organizations, and their story, which seemed more likely to be reported, was not my story.

Though I am grateful for the work of both women and today count them both as personal friends, I confess that for me the complaint was personal and I did not want to lose that focus. I did not want to be involved in the politics of representing all women, nor did I have the energy to focus on the claim as a statement about the concerns of other workingwomen. At that point of the hearing, my interest was in surviving the immediate crises of an individual citizen who had gotten caught up in the game of Washington politics at its worst. Because it was poised to report the politics fed to it by the Republicans, the press failed in its coverage of the personal aspect of the story and only rarely made mention of the broader implications of harassment.

On Saturday night a group of Thomas’ witnesses had portrayed themselves
as average everyday working women in contrast with me—whom they portrayed as an elitist, intellectual university professor out of touch with the concerns of most women. Some members of the press seemed to buy their portrait, ignoring my background and accepting without question their qualifications for speaking on behalf of working-class women. Following their lead, many of the news stories that focused on harassment tended to present the issue as a class problem. A
New York Times
reporter suggested that most working-class women and black women, in particular, were unconcerned about sexual harassment in the workplace.

The very thing which made them valuable in Washington, their own insularity and tendency to see everything in decidedly political terms, skewed the perspective of the members of the Washington press corps. Yet the reporting over the weekend missed the point of view of the target of harassment as well as the private citizen battling the resources of powerful Washington politicians. Few were reporting on the lack of all the protections of a normal legal process or the Republicans’ subversion of the confirmation process. The Republican senators and their own point of view induced them to see and portray the hearing as a story about my participation in the “derailment of a Supreme Court nomination.” The press seemed to identify too readily with the politicians, and as one commentator put it, “reporters had once again bought the Republican sales pitch.”

The many complexities escaped the reporters and editorial writers covering the hearings. When I did read the editorials in
The Washington Post
, I was greatly disturbed. They seemed to convey an unwarranted animus toward me and the fact that the committee was hearing the claims that I raised. I later learned that Juan Williams, a journalist responsible for profiles of Thomas in the
Atlantic Monthly
and
The Washington Post
, wrote one of the editorials despite a clear conflict of interest. The editorial was entitled, “Open Season on Clarence Thomas” and described the charges as “a speck of mud [flung] at Clarence Thomas in an alleged sexual conversation between two adults.” The opinion piece asserted
that my claim arose as a result of Senate staff members’ search for dirt on Thomas. Williams dismissed my charges as much for what he saw as their insignificance as for my lack of credibility.

Interestingly, at the time, Williams was under investigation himself for allegedly sexually harassing one of his colleagues on the paper. And other women had lodged informal complaints about Williams’ behavior as well, alleging a pattern of unwelcomed comments and behavior which they found too intimate but which Williams defended as merely “socially awkward.” After some at the newspaper protested this lack of objectivity, the
Post
management disclosed the apparent conflict of interest and relieved him of his editorial duties on the matter, though it also ordered a reporter who wanted to do a story on the matter not to write it. By this time, however, Senator Hatch had already cited the article during the proceedings to support his conspiracy theory and Rush Limbaugh had read the column on his syndicated radio program.

Around the country, as the hearings were airing, editorials voicing opinions appeared even in small-town papers. And the
Post
was not alone in its irresponsible editorial decisions. An absurdly extreme example of messy journalism appeared in a student paper at the University of Utah. In articles purporting to present both sides, one columnist described me as “dirty, depraved, schizophrenic, and grossly sexual, a sheer idiot or a sore liar.” He described my charges as “sexual hallucination” and the testimony “the mere rendition of a mind obsessed with bestial bondage and influenced by definitions from the Sodom and Gomorrah
Anatomical Review.”
The “other side” posed the question of whether the behavior actually constituted sexual harassment and explained the definition of the behavior according to state and federal law. The piece also questioned my motives and my judgment in not coming forward previously. Clearly, a lack of balance existed. One columnist attempted to inform the public about the problem and give them a method for analyzing the issue. The other columnist followed the lead of the senators, invoking lewd and preposterous name-calling. The same paper suggested that the media, provoked by “female leaders, especially in Congress, and various
women’s groups,” were engaging in tabloid journalism by simply reporting on my claim. This newspaper’s best defense is that it is a student paper, a defense the
Post
could not argue.

Though it is difficult to say whether the attitude displayed behind the scenes by the
Post
and in public by other papers may not have influenced the reporting of the story, it does speak to the lack of sensitivity in and ignorance about handling claims of sexual harassment in one of the country’s most sophisticated and influential newspapers.

Television commentators voiced open hostility to my claim on “news” shows as well. Fred Barnes declared that I “was spinning a monstrous lie” and Morton Kondracke compared me to Tawana Brawley, while John McLaughlin, himself accused of sexual harassment, compared me to the journalist Janet Cooke. These two comparisons were to women who were found to have fabricated stories (one about her alleged sexual assault, the other about a child drug addict who didn’t exist but whom she portrayed as real) who were also black. Ironically, neither of these commentators compared me to Oliver North to make their point about truthfulness. If they wanted to pose that I was being untruthful on the stand, North would have served as a better comparison, since North admitted that he lied in his testimony before a congressional committee. The choice of two black women as comparisons had inescapable gender and racial implications. Unfortunately, this was as close as some commentators came to seeing the human element of my story. To prove that I could not be trusted to tell the truth, they recalled stories that they saw as examples of other untrustworthy black women. Either out of laziness, insensitivity, or malice, rather than write a story about me, they retold the stories of others.