Much more needs to be said about, or against, former Vice President Joe Biden’s ritual self-abasement denigrating “white men’s culture.” But for now, let’s just set the record straight on his breast-beating about the 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings.
Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who ran the hearings about Hill’s claims that now-Supreme Court Justice Thomas sexually harassed her. Liberal mythology demands obeisance to the idea that Saint Anita was terribly treated by the all-white-male committee. Biden, planning one last run for president, is trying to atone for that imagined sin.
“She paid a terrible price,” Biden said. “She was abused for the hearing. She was taken advantage of. Her reputation was attacked. I wish I could have done something. To this day, I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us.”
Nonsense. The reality is, Hill likely was more Jussie Smollett than Megyn Kelly. Other than reportedly passing a polygraph test she commissioned herself, Hill produced no significant evidence for the committee to support her claims, other than her own word. By contrast, committee Republicans persuasively punched numerous holes in her story.
Yes, many true harassment victims have no witnesses or other supporting evidence. Those who claim such victimization deserve an original (but rebuttable) presumption of truthfulness. Few victims, though, have as much evidence or logic produced to contradict them as was presented in defense of Thomas.
As a necessary reminder, then, against 28 years of furious media spinning in Hill’s favor, here once again is a bare-bones list of some key reasons many more Americans believed Thomas than Hill at the time, and why they were probably right.
The most important and most dramatic testimony in Thomas’ favor came, unexpectedly, from the one committee witness who claimed she could corroborate Hill’s story. That witness, California lower-court judge Susan Hoerchner, said that Hill had told her, contemporaneously, that Thomas had harassed her. The problem was that Hoerchner repeatedly and emphatically said she was in Washington D.C. when told about the supposed incident. In fact, she had already moved to California by the time Hill said the harassment began.
Then there was Hill’s claim that Thomas regaled her with exploits of a porn star called Long Dong Silver. Not only was her story remarkably similar to a federal court case from which she easily might have cribbed her whole story, but the likelihood that Thomas could even have seen this character by the time of the alleged harassment was very low. The character had barely appeared on film before Hill stopped working for Thomas, and the main film, eponymously called “Long Dong Silver,” didn’t appear until two years after she left his employ. (Note that in those days, you couldn’t just go online to find porn films.)
Also, when giving her story to the FBI, despite being asked for specifics, she never mentioned the Silver incident or several of the others she suddenly, vividly remembered later and described to the committee.
Twelve women who worked for Thomas said he never even came close to crossing the lines of propriety with them. The two FBI agents who interviewed Hill said her Senate testimony directly contradicted her sworn statements to them. And Hill denied five times that she had been “told something by a Democratic staffer that she later admitted, under oath, she’d been told.”
Those are just a few of the highlights, or lowlights, of Hill’s not-so-believable story. Biden’s Judiciary Committee didn’t mistreat Hill; it did its job of exposing her testimony for the false witness it almost assuredly was.
