← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Twenty-Seven Years After Anita Hill, Brett Kavanaugh Faces a #MeToo Moment
00:16:45
Twenty-Seven Years After Anita Hill, Brett Kavanaugh Faces a #MeToo Moment
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, September 21st on Dorothy. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Last week, Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of drunkenly assaulting her at a party when she was 15 and he was 17. Most congressional Republicans continue to support Kavanaugh, and several have publicly dismissed Blasey Ford's claims as partisan opportunism. On Monday, Orrin Hatch, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told a CNN reporter that he had spoken with Kavanaugh on the phone.
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C
Well, he didn't do that and he wasn't at the party. So, you know, there's clearly somebody's mixed up.
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D
He said he wasn't at the party.
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C
That she's referring to.
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E
Yeah.
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C
And how long did you talk to him for? Oh, 10 minutes or so. It was. He could have been longer. Ride. He could have been longer. I don't know.
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D
Was he upset?
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C
Yeah, I'd say he's upset, but he handled it well. He's a very strong, decent man.
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E
And you believe him?
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C
Yeah, I sure do.
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B
27 years ago, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her repeatedly when he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hatch was on the Judiciary Committee back then, too, and argued that it was inconceivable, given Thomas record against sexual harassment, that he would engage in such conduct himself.
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C
We all deplore sexual harassment. We all deplore the type of conduct articulated here by Professor Hill. But the most ironic thing to me is it's easy for us on this committee to say that we deplore sexual harassment. And many on this committee have said it in the past and during these proceedings and before the media. But you, Judge Thomas, you've spent your career doing something about it.
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B
In 1994, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson published a book that investigated Anita Hill's allegations and concluded that the preponderance of evidence indicated that Thomas had been lying. Jane is a staff writer at the New Yorker and joins me to discuss how the Senate is responding to Blasey Ford's allegations and how they're affecting the Kavanaugh nomination. Hi, Jane. Welcome. Thanks for joining me on such a busy week.
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E
Great to be with you.
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B
So Blasey Ford has agreed to testify as of Friday morning, but the negotiations right now between her lawyer and the Judiciary Committee are still underway. It's clearly a very perilous political moment for Kavanaugh and Republicans. But given what we know so far, does his nomination seem to be at all in jeopardy?
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E
Well, it's incredibly volatile, so and hard to know exactly, but I would say that obviously it's certainly not helped. And I think the White House, from what I have heard, is very nervous about all of this and has been very anxious about whether there will be more developments that corroborate in some way Dr. Blasey Ford.
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B
A lot has been made of the analogy between Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas and Blasey Ford's against Kavanaugh. Could you tell us a little bit about what you think of all of that?
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E
I mean, I think there's kind of an eerie number of echoes of the two, which is kind of incredible because there's so much time in between them. I mean, we thought there was so much progress that had taken place since Anita Hill's era, but here we are again with the committee hearings into this nominee already having ended. It was exactly at that point that the information about Anita Hill surfaced and here we have information surfacing about another woman. And the committee was caught off guard. It's clear that they had a hearing without really looking into the background enough to have come across these women. And the question is whether or not they were going to reopen the hearings in both cases and try to take testimony from the women and possibly from witnesses. It's too much alike to believe in some ways.
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B
And they did reopen the hearings in Anita Hill's case. And the FBI spent all of three days there investigating her charges before delivering a report to Congress.
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E
Well, and that's a great difference. First of all, they were not going to open the hearings for Anita Hill until the, the men in the Senate. It was the Democrats who controlled the majority at that point, said, and it.
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B
Was an all male committee at the.
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E
Time and it was an all mail committee. And they said absolutely not. They were not going to reopen the hearings and hear from Anita Hill. At which point a delegation of women who were in the House of Representatives, these congresswomen marched over to the other side of Congress and demanded to be heard and demanded that Anita Hill be given a hearing. And their actions then triggered this huge national outcry, pounding on the male senators, who then were forced basically by public opinion to allow Anita Hill to have a hearing. But what happened next was they brought in the FBI. So the FBI did do an investigation, which is not happening here. The Democrats have called for the FBI to investigate and so have as has Blasey Ford. And so has Blasey Ford and her lawyer. And the White House is saying no, they will not call in the FBI, and the FBI will not do it unless the White House asks them to.
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B
So Kavanaugh's defenders argue that he has an unblemished record as a jurist and he has strenuously denied that this incident or any other incident of the kind ever occurred. Trump has been pretty quiet all week about this. Clearly, you know, been coached to stay low keyed. But yesterday he said, why didn't somebody call the FBI 36 years ago? And you know, he thinks it's unfair that a decades old allegation should derail the nomination. And he tweeted this morning, you know, that he has no doubt that if the attack on Blasey Ford was as bad as she said it was, charges would have immediately been filed with local law enforcement.
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E
This is, you know, it's not just a dicey issue for Kavanaugh. It's a very dicey issue for Trump to weigh in on. And his aides have been trying to keep him as quiet about it as they can because the Republican Party at this point has lost a lot of support from moderate Republican women, independent women, votes that they may very much need in the midterms. And this is not going to help them. So the political operatives are trying to keep Trump from getting too involved in this.
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B
And let's just reiterate that he himself has been accused by 24 women, I believe, of sexual harassment, and he's denied all of them. Everyone remembers the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about grabbing women, but a month later, he was elected president. Since then, of course, the MeToo movement has erupted. So the political calculus has changed quite a bit since then. And you mentioned how important the midterm elections are for Trump and Republicans. But the vote on Kavanaugh now hangs in the balance, too, with female senators. You know, they will be determining whether or not he is confirmed.
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E
Well, two in particular, Senators Collins and Murkowski, two female Republican senators who are the most moderate Republicans whose votes are needed in order to confirm Kavanaugh. Neither of them are on the Judiciary Committee. There still are no female Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Jeff Flake, who is there, is kind of their proxy. And he has been saying he thinks that there needs to be some kind of investigation or at least that Professor Blasey Ford should be heard from. And the only reason that there is going to be any kind of hearing on this is because of Flake. The political calculus is he's in touch with those two female senators whose votes are necessary, and so he is sort of the key pivot.
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B
What would it take for Republicans to abandon Kavanaugh at this point?
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E
You know, in all of these cases of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct, as Anita Hill told me in an interview we ran recently in the New Yorker, they really hang on the credibility of the accuser. So generally, what matters a lot is if their can be shown to be a pattern of behavior that undercuts the denials. So if Kavanaugh were seen to have behaved like this on other occasions, I think that would hurt him tremendously. And it's going to come down to the credibility of the two, plus the fact there was a third person in the room at the time that Lazzie Ford said she was attacked. And this is Kavanaugh's best friend in high school, Mark Judge. And so his credibility, too, is going to be important.
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B
And remind us what he has said, that he will not testify.
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E
He has said he would not testify, which many people have pointed out is really not up to him. It's up to the committee. They could subpoena him.
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D
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of consumer, Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech. Right. So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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B
So in 1992, a year after Anita Hill, that year was dubbed the Year of the Women, and it was after a wave of women got elected to Congress. Kind of an amazing spectacle. There were record six women were elected to the Senate, and both Senator Feinstein and Patty Murray won that year. And they've said that they were prompted to run by their outrage over the Judiciary Committee's unseemly grilling of Hill. So we're seeing a version of this. This year again, there are a record number of women running for Congress and for governor. And as you mentioned, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski could make the difference in the KAVANAUGH nomination. Claire McCaskill, by the way, a moderate Democrat in a very red state of Missouri, just announced that she won't vote for him, although she claims it's not because of these allegations. So certain things have changed in the past, you know, quarter century.
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E
Well, they certainly have. And of course, Dianne Feinstein is now the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Judiciary Committee. 27 years ago, there were no women on that committee. And she is the power on the Democratic side. And she's the person who first got the allegations from Christine Blasey Ford.
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B
And that's been incredibly controversial. At least the Republicans have tried to make it so. Could you tell us what you think about that and whether she did what she was supposed to do?
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E
Well, it's really hard to know because there's just a lot of confusion about the facts here. She says that she was protecting Blasey Ford's anonymity, that she was following through on the woman's wishes and trying to protect her, and that's why she didn't act on the Allegations that Blasey Ford sent to her. Others have suggested that when those allegations reached her, she sort of just took it and locked it away in her desk and that she should have, at the very least, investigated it quite a bit more and maybe shared it with the rest of the Democrats on the committee who were outraged when they learned of it. The allegations reached Feinstein in July, as I understand it, and the Democrats didn't learn of this until after the hearings were over into Kavanaugh. So they were really angry with Feinstein.
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B
Just looking ahead a little bit, insofar as that's possible, given how quickly this story is changing, how do you expect this to unfold at least, you know, through next week? Do you expect by the end of next week there will have been a vote?
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E
I think the biggest wild card now is whether more information will come out either on Blasey Ford that undercuts her or supports her or. Or more information on Judge Kavanaugh. We're at this incredibly volatile moment where pretty much anything could happen. But I think it'll be facts that will tip the balance here. I think if more troubling allegations are lodged at Kavanaugh, I think that would trigger, finally the FBI getting in. And if that were to happen, I think it's even possible that the White House would withdraw the nomination. But it will take more revelations and.
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B
It may take time, which there may not be much of.
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E
That's absolutely true. And that's why there's a sense that the Republicans are railroading this, trying to move it really fast, which is just what happened with Anita Hill. And of course, as we now know, and really, as Jill Abramson and I reported first in our book Strange justice, there were other women who wanted to testify against Clarence Thomas on behalf of Anita Hill who had pertinent information, and they never got the chance to be seen by the public because there was such a push to close down those hearings fast. And I think that is, to me, in many ways the most disturbing echo, because you're talking about an appointment that's going to be for a lifetime. And so what is the hurry here? Why not find out if there's something that really undermines this person's character and veracity? Why shouldn't we know that?
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B
Final question. Charles Grassley, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, was also on the committee during the Hill hearings. And on Wednesday, he sent letters attacking Democrats for using the Blasey Ford story to abuse the confirmation process. It's worth recalling that Grassley voted to impeach Bill Clinton on the grounds that the presidency, as he put it, is preeminently a place of moral leadership. But then he defended Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood video came out because he said there's only a few saints who have been president of the United States.
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E
You know, I mean, a couple things come to mind when you hear this. One is isn't it amazing that there are so many senators, such as Grassley and Hatch, who were responsible for the terrible treatment of Anita Hill, who are still in the Senate doing it all over again? It's just amazing to me that they haven't moved on yet. But there they are. And you know, it's so obvious there's a double standard that has to do with partisanship. It's probably true on both sides, but it' making them look so bad you can just throw their words back at them and it's an ugly spectacle.
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B
Thanks, Jane.
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E
Glad to be with you.
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B
Jane Mayer is a New Yorker staff writer and the co author with Jill Abramson of Strange the Selling of Clarence Thomas. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe by searching for the New Yorker and you podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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Right.
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So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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