The liar this time
Richard Miniter adds to Paul Mirengoff's account of last night's event at the Heritage Foundation with Justice Thomas. Here is a highlight:
At a gathering of black lawyers, Thomas, from the podium, could see a man in the front row, with his arms crossed and his face cross. Naturally, he shot his hand up as soon as the question session began. A long speech in lieu of a question followed, essentially asking how he can interpret the law by relying so heavily on the Founding Fathers when they did not recognize the rights of blacks?Anita Hill returns with a column aptly titled "The smear this time" in today's New York Times. She gives us absolutely no reason to change our mind about her. She replies incredibly and unresponsively to the issues on the basis of which many concluded that her charges against Justice Thomas had been fabricated and leaked illegally for ulterior purposes by political assassins.“The 13th amendment,” Thomas said, citing the constitutional amendment that freed the slaves and provided for their equal rights under law. Thomas went on to take other questions.
At the end of session, the man again raised his hand. In the course of an hour, his view on Thomas had changed. “They lied about you. What are we going to do?”
To take one example from her column today, Hill writes about her departure from the law firm where she was working as an associate attorney when Clarence Thomas first hired her:
In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was “asked to leave” the firm.It's been a while since I had to analyze multiple levels of hearsay, but I believe that Hill's statement concerning what the partner in charge told her that he told Senator Danforth about Hill's departure is triple or quadruple hearsay which in any event far from makes out the point in issue. She might have been in good standing with the firm and still have had no long term future with it as a partner.
Some literarily inclined Times headline writer alludes vaguely to James Baldwin's apocalyptic sixties racial meditation The Fire Next Time in the headline for Hill's column. Hill's passé sexual politics don't quite cut it in terms of the apocalypse. "The liar this time" would be more like it. She concludes:
When sensing that others will believe their accusers’ versions of events, individuals confronted with their own bad behavior try to reduce legitimate concerns to the level of mere words or “slights” that should be dismissed without discussion.Anita Hill and her allies blazed the path subsequently trod by Crystal Gail Mangum and her fans in the university/media establishment in the Duke non-rape case last year. Among the most vicious malefactors in that case was the New York Times. If we have learned something about the search for truth in the past 16 years, it has been despite Anita Hill and the proprietors of the newspaper that furnishes her column its forum today.Fortunately, we have made progress since 1991. Today, when employees complain of abuse in the workplace, investigators and judges are more likely to examine all the evidence and less likely to simply accept as true the word of those in power. But that could change. Our legal system will suffer if a sitting justice’s vitriolic pursuit of personal vindication discourages others from standing up for their rights.
The question of whether Clarence Thomas belongs on the Supreme Court is no longer on the table — it was settled by the Senate back in 1991. But questions remain about how we will resolve the kinds of issues my testimony exposed. My belief is that in the past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these issues an honest search for the truth, which, after all, is at the core of all legal inquiry. My hope is that Justice Thomas’s latest fusillade will not divert us from that path.
UPDATE: NRO has posted Theodore Olson's review of the 1995 Jane Mayer/Jill Abramson book on the Hill episode. On the employment issue, Olson relates:
The authors similarly mangle their own investigation of Anita Hill’s 11-month law-firm tenure before her job with Clarence Thomas. This job was at one of the “most sought-after law firms in the country.” During her brief time there, the authors reveal, Miss Hill was believed to be “romantically involved” with one of the firm’s married partners, despite the firm’s policy against such liaisons. Her work was perceived by superiors as “satisfactory, but not outstanding.” Indeed, some graded her work as “uneven,” and there were “more than a few criticisms.” She tended to “disappear” into the library, “left work altogether” during one emergency assignment, and produced fewer “billable hours” than any of the firm’s other associates.Perhaps these facts explain Hill's weirdly remote testimony regarding her status at the firm.Any objective partner at any prominent law firm would have told Miss Mayer and Miss Abramson that only a miracle could have saved Anita Hill after such a miserable beginning, and would have had little trouble believing the affidavit of the partner who said she had been encouraged to leave. But the authors draw the revealingly untenable conclusion that Miss Hill was “not in any trouble” at the firm.
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