Anita Hill’s act is getting very old. Actual victims of rape and sexual assault should reject her attempts to co-opt their pain.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Hill said her 1991 Senate testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas could have been the original beginning of the #MeToo movement. If only, she said, the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed at the time by Joe Biden, D-Del., “had done its job and held a hearing that showed that its members understood the seriousness of sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence.”
That’s where the record scratches. If Hill wants to proclaim herself the real founder of #MeToo, that’s between her and the movement. But she should never get away with attempting to redefine the term “violence” to include unwanted conversation, which was all she ever accused Thomas of doing.
#MeToo started with the shocking takedown of Harvey Weinstein, the hoggish movie mogul who was heard on tape admitting to having sexually assaulted a model by grabbing her breasts. Other claims against Weinstein were that he would invite unsuspecting women to his hotel room to watch him shower or give him a massage and that he would dangle movie opportunities over their heads so that they’d accept his sexual advances.
Hill, on the other hand, alleged that Thomas described to her a pornographic movie he had seen and she said that he once made a comment to her about pubic hair. She never testified that he so much as laid a finger on her.
[Also read: Jill Biden: ‘Look at the good’ that resulted from Anita Hill controversy]
There were also a lot of problems with Hill’s testimony — inconsistencies, contradictions, and a pattern of friendly phone calls she had initiated with Thomas. But even if you assume that everything she said was accurate, nothing Thomas is accused of could have rationally been described as “violence.”
Hill has also become a revisionist. In her op-ed she wrote that “The world didn’t really begin to come to grips with the prevalence of sexual abuse until 2017, when the millions of survivors who became the #MeToo movement demolished the myth that sexual violence was insignificant.”
The potency of the #MeToo movement wasn’t that anyone had previously considered “sexual violence” unimportant. It was that powerful men, including major Democratic donors like Weinstein, could finally be exposed and held to account for their misconduct.
Hill wrote that the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, accused of a sexual assault dating back to when he was in high school, meant that “a new generation was forced to conclude that politics trumped a basic and essential expectation: that claims of sexual abuse would be taken seriously.”
If the Kavanaugh hearing was in any way a setback for victims of sexual abuse, it’s solely due to the ridiculous nature of the claims he faced, which included allegations that he was involved in a gang rape and that he — sit down for this one — got drunk as a teenager. That those uncorroborated claims were considered at all is a testament to the gravity with which sexual abuse claims are regarded.
The real lesson from the Kavanaugh episode was that the accused are entitled to due process and a presumption of innocence, something Hill, as a law professor, certainly understands at least in theory.
“Survivors and their supporters need acknowledgment and justice,” wrote Hill. But she’s not talking about “justice” justice. The idea that “sexual violence” means anything you want it to mean, and that no accuser should undergo scrutiny, isn’t real justice. It’s social justice, a fraudulent justice that demands we reorder traditions of fairness and the right to due process so that anyone who claims to have been aggrieved has absolute power to take down their supposed oppressor.
Hill is appropriating #MeToo and the anguish of rape and sexual assault survivors for political purposes. For whatever reason, she’s still angry with Biden, and her attempt to kneecap his campaign is a proxy for promoting social justice. She shouldn’t get away with it, and real victims of sexual violence should stop her.
