With the title, “I was thinking about believing those of us who come forward,” Hill tells me by phone, “but it was also believing that we have a right to be heard, that we have a right to solutions; believing that we can do better than what we have done as a country, as a society.”
Hill knows too well what societal and governmental failure looks like. Her treatment (mistreatment) in the Thomas hearing has sparked cultural reexamination, akin to the redemptive narrative now surrounding Monica Lewinsky (whom Hill mentions in Believing). Three decades of hindsight reveal what should have been clear all along: that the Thomas hearing was a national embarrassment. Many moments do not age well: Hill testified that Thomas had discussed porn involving “women with large breasts” and “sex with different people, or animals” in vivid detail at work, and Republican Senator Arlen Specter later quipped in response, “This is not too bad.” Hill’s bravery in coming forward felt especially staggering when she writes in Believing that “Thomas’s protectors included the president, White House and Senate staffers and the FBI.”
Sitting opposite those power centers was Hill. “Deep inside, I knew that my chances of changing the outcome of the hearing… were pretty slim to none,” Hill’s voice softens into a little laugh. (She does not wear her status heavily, telling me, “You can call me Anita.”) Still, she says without a hint of hesitation: “I’d do it again. What I was saying was truthful, and it was important to the selection of a person who is going to sit on the Supreme Court dealing out justice in cases perhaps similar to my experience,” she said. “That was my responsibility as a lawyer. It was my responsibility as a citizen of this country.” She is careful to note that she doesn’t look down upon people who do not come forward as she did. “Everyone has to make their own choice.”
Hill’s predicament was rich with cruel irony: As a law professor (then at University of Oklahoma, and for the past 23 years at Brandeis University), she knew acutely that the Senate Judiciary Committee was denying her the rigors of legal process, declining to call “four independent corroborating witnesses,” she writes, who had similar workplace experiences with Thomas. In a particularly enraging passage, Hill quotes Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, in 1991, establishing a “new ground rule” that the FBI should first investigate any allegations against a Supreme Court nominee and submit their report to the Judiciary Committee before it proceeds. Twenty-seven years later, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford shared that she’d been raped by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Grassley, then chair of the Judiciary Committee, broke his own rule. “Nothing the FBI or any other investigator does would have any bearing on what Dr. Ford tells the committee,” Grassley declared.
There has been much ado about Joe Biden, who chaired the Thomas hearing, and his long-awaited apology to Hill. She and her partner, Chuck, had a running joke, whenever their doorbell rang unexpectedly: “Could that be Joe Biden coming to apologize in person?” Biden did call and deliver some version of a mea culpa in March 2019, weeks before announcing his presidential run. “I mean, to the extent that there was any apology, it was an apology for what he had done to me,” Hill said in our interview. She had endured a torrent of threats and insults after the hearing; even now, she writes, “I remain numb to offensive voicemail messages left on my office phone.” She was attacked by some members of the Black community who argued that accusing Thomas was tantamount to racial betrayal. “I had always felt a part of the Black community,” Hill told me. “To be kicked out of that experience, to say that my experience didn’t matter, it was very painful.”
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