Hollywood these days is investing more and more resources into rebooting old franchises. And not just in movies. Last week, a new blue-ribbon committee to investigate and eliminate sexual harassment in Hollywood announced that its chairwoman would be Anita Hill.
Twenty-five years ago, Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment failed to derail Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court—and for good reason. Hill declined to support her allegations with any actual evidence; her allegations changed significantly over time; her allegations seemed inconsistent with her own ongoing support of Thomas in the years that followed the alleged misconduct; her veracity was disputed by FBI agents handling the matter, who informed the Senate that Hill was not telling the truth about her statements to investigators; and her allegations were rejected by many other women who worked closely with Thomas (and often with Hill as well).
In light of all of the facts, it was no surprise that Americans overwhelmingly believed Thomas and disbelieved Hill, and that the Democrat-controlled Senate voted to confirm Thomas to the court, rather than allowing the confirmation process to become, in Thomas’s famous words, a “high-tech lynching.”
Nevertheless, some in Hollywood tried to reboot the Anita Hill franchise last year, in an HBO docudrama starring Scandal’s Kerry Washington. They failed; the movie’s premier barely outdrew TNT’s rerun of the truly timeless Back to the Future the same evening, as I recounted in an essay last year on Justice Thomas’s quarter-century on the court.
So when news broke that Hollywood was rebooting the Anita Hill franchise yet another time, this time to draw attention to the new ensemble project titled “The Hollywood Commission for Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace,” the country could be forgiven for ignoring Hill’s return altogether.
But as it happens, Hill’s return genuinely deserves public attention. That is, attention should be paid to how sharply her new role, as a proponent for sexual harassment allegations, contrasts with her post-Thomas role as an opponent of sexual harassment allegations—namely, the allegations against Bill Clinton.
In 1998, Hill appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, an interview that is archived on a web site created last year to rebut the HBO docudrama. Responding to questions by Tim Russert and Gwen Ifill, she endorsed Gloria Steinem’s now-infamous defense of Bill Clinton (a defense that even Steinem distances herself from today), and argued that even if Clinton had sexually harassed Paula Jones, he should be treated gently because of the way he has “been on women’s issues generally”:
Hill added that she doubted Jones’s allegations, and in any event doubted that Jones had suffered “any adverse ramifications.”
Twenty years later, Hill’s effort to protect Bill Clinton seems precisely the sort of rationalization that the Hollywood commission was designed to end; her appointment to lead the Hollywood commission reflects how well her late-1990s statements have been forgotten. Hopefully that new appointment will itself remind Americans of Hill’s full record, as memorialized at ConfirmationBiased.com.
