New York Times’ Susan Chira, a “senior correspondent and editor on gender issues,” interviewed Anita Hill for some reason for Friday’s paper, “Hill Reflects: ‘Clearly the Tide Has Not Turned.’” Hill is seen by the press as a victim of both Clarence Thomas and the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee who brutally questioned her and has achieved secular sainthood, so there are never any inconvenient questions.
Interviewing and citing Hill in the aftermath of sexual allegations against Republicans is a regular thing at the paper now. This one is keyed to the accusations hurled against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom the paper promises “we’re still investigating.”
There may be more women heading to Congress this year, but Anita Hill isn’t cheering yet. The woman who faced down the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 does not see transformative change on sexual harassment emerging from any branch of government in Washington for the time being.
During a lengthy conversation at Brandeis University, where she is a professor, Ms. Hill reflected on the aftermath of her own testimony, and of Christine Blasey Ford’s before the committee this year, and the unglamorous slog of what it would really take to confront and redress sexual harassment.
She was alternately tart and deliberative, contained but occasionally allowing a flash of anger to break through her carefully composed sentences.
Some of Chira’s questions with Hill:
Q. We’re at a bookend moment -- two women who endured public exposure and attacks, two Senate hearings that ended with the accused nominees’ confirmation. Has the tide turned and the momentum of the #MeToo movement slowed?
Chira later fretted over Christine Blasey Ford’s “experience,” in which she was treated with nothing but respect and deference by the Senate:
Q. Will Dr. Ford’s experience deter other women from coming forward?
Chira glibly skipped over President Bill Clinton and a host of accused Democratic politicians to focus on unsubstantiated claims against two sitting Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices.
Q. When you look at the government, there are now two justices who were accused of sexual harassment (both of whom deny the accusations) and a president who boasted on tape of being entitled to grab women. How do you assess this?
During the Kavanaugh hearings, Chira unloaded emotionally charged feminist propaganda: “The words they choose: Despair. Rage. Fear. Hopelessness. Determination. The bruising battle to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court may be over, but the reverberations for women who opposed him are not.”
Hill will always be a heroine at the Times and other liberal outlets, but she revealed herself as a hopeless partisan in two opinion pieces for the Times back in 1998, in which she alternately shrugged off and ignored credible claims of sexual assault by then-President Bill Clinton, doing her best to limit the damage of serious accusations by Clinton accusers Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick, all better substantiated than the ones laid against Brett Kavanaugh (or her own against Clarence Thomas). Only when Republican figures are in the crosshairs does the feminist outrage erupt.
