Anita Hill on Friday freshly assailed Joe Biden’s handling of her 1990s sexual harassment allegations, in a new op-ed – and argues that the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault could have kicked off decades earlier if not for the former vice-president’s missteps.
Hill accused then supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, and testified during his confirmation hearings before the Senate judiciary committee, which Biden chaired at the time. The controversy over Biden’s handling of the hearings, deemed harsh towards Hill, reignited after he jumped into the 2020 race for president.
“If the Senate judiciary committee, led then by Mr Biden, 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, the cultural shift we saw in 2017 after #MeToo might have began in 1991 – with the support of the government,” Hill wrote in an op-ed in Friday’s New York Times.
“Instead, far too many survivors kept their stories hidden for years.”
Biden has been criticized for not calling additional witnesses to testify who could have corroborated Hill’s accounts about persistent harassment by Thomas when they were colleagues.
While it was mainly Republican senators on the all-male, all-white committee who attacked Hill in their questioning, Biden has also faced criticism for failing to intervene.
“If the government had shown that it would treat survivors with dignity and listen to women, it could have had a ripple effect,” Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis University, wrote in her op-ed. “People agitating for change would have been operating from a position of strength. It could have given institutions like the military, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission greater license to take more decisive action to end the scourge of harassment.”
Biden recently called Hill, shortly before launching his campaign, to express “regret” over the way she was treated, but she said she was not satisfied with the conversation.
In public comments over the following days, Biden inched closer to an apology. “To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” he said.
“I take responsibility that she did not get treated well,” he later told ABC News. “I apologized for it … I apologize again because, look, here’s the deal. She just did not get treated fair, across the board. The system did not work.”
But Hill said that too little has changed, as demonstrated by the confirmation hearings of supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, where Dr Christine Blasey Ford testified that he sexually assaulted her as a teenager.
“A new generation was forced to conclude that politics trumped a basic and essential expectation: that claims of sexual abuse would be taken seriously,” Hill wrote.
She added: “Sexual violence is a national crisis that requires a national solution. We miss that point if we end the discussion at whether I should forgive Mr Biden.”
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