Los Angeles Times

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate is now in limbo, as he and Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor accusing him of a decades-old sexual assault, are set to testify publicly about the allegations Monday. Ford considers the incident an “attempted rape,” while Kavanaugh says, “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone.” Read more>>

WVTF

Professor Christine Blasey Ford came forward on Sunday for the first time telling her story alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually attacked her 35 years ago when the two were both in high school. So how is this different from the sexual harassment allegations made against now Justice Clarence Thomas by law professor Anita Hill in 1991 at his confirmation hearing? Read more>>

The Week

Anita Hill knows a little something about senators, the Supreme Court, and sexual harassment. Before this past weekend, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was on track for a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation vote Thursday. But Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh upended the process, and now Kavanaugh and Ford are both scheduled for hearings with the committee next week. Read more>>

 

A few weeks ago, New York magazine ushered in Women’s History Month with a cover story on a man. “The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas,” by former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, opens with a fresh accusation against the Supreme Court justice. Moira Smith, a lawyer, says that Thomas groped her at a Washington dinner party in 1999.

The road from the Thomas hearings to #MeToo has been long. Yet for those who see the current moment as a watershed, it can be useful to revisit the storm surrounding his confirmation in 1991. Anita Hill’s testimony that he had sexually harassed her divided the country, arousing a fury that even now has not fully played itself out. Her 1997 account of the controversy, “Anita Hill: Speaking Truth to Power,” remains an important touchstone in the literature on harassment. Read more>>

Oakland Post

About 2,000 people filled the Oakland Marriott Ballroom last Saturday to hear Anita Hill speak about how racism and gender violence are intertwined.

“I will not talk about race, I will not talk about gender—without talking about them both. I’ve lived them both,” she said, “and I would say to every one of you—you live them both, too.” Read more>>

If you watched this year’s Oscars all the way until best actress was announced, you may have come away scratching your head. “I have two words to leave you with tonight,” Frances McDormand, who won the category for her role in Two Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, said in her speech: “Inclusion. Rider.”

Inclusion riders are brand new and haven’t been widely adopted yet. The idea piggybacks off of the often banal riders that Hollywood stars or their agents insert into their contracts; many actors already request things like a certain number of assistants or fresh flowers in their trailers every day in return for signing on to a movie or show, although some address compensation and other important terms. An inclusion rider uses the same vehicle for something entirely different: It requires an inclusive hiring practice for the project that brings on women, people of color, LGBT people, those with disabilities, and others from marginalized groups. It envisions demanding diversity not just in the on-screen hires, but for the off-screen crew as well. Read more>>

Driven by outrage and a resolve to correct a power imbalance that seemed intractable just months ago, 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers and entertainment executives have formed an ambitious, sprawling initiative to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and in blue-collar workplaces nationwide.

The initiative includes:

— A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.

— Legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment, and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

— A drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies that has already begun making headway.

— And a request that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes speak out and raise awareness by wearing black.

Called Time’s Up, the movement was announced on Monday with an impassioned pledge of support to working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of women in show business, many of them A-listers. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper. Read more>>

“There’s so much will and desire to end this problem,” said Anita Hill, who is heading a commission to address sexual harassment in Hollywood. Credit David Paul Morris/Bloomberg, via Getty Images
As a powerhouse producer for Steven Spielberg and now president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy has for decades tackled some of Hollywood’s most famous monsters: gremlins, poltergeists, T. rexes and the dark side of the Force.

Now Ms. Kennedy has set her sights on perhaps the most pernicious industry villain of all: sexual misconduct and abuse. She is spearheading the creation of an anti-harassment commission, backed by more than two dozen of the entertainment industry’s biggest bigwigs, that, in a stroke of marquee casting, will be led by Anita Hill. Read more>>

 

A commission headed by Anita Hill and composed of and funded by some of the most powerful names in Hollywood has been created to tackle widespread sexual abuse and harassment in the media and entertainment industries.

Called the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, the initiative was spearheaded by Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm; Maria Eitel, the co-chair of the Nike Foundation; the powerhouse attorney Nina Shaw; and Freada Kapor Klein, the venture capitalist who helped pioneer surveys on sexual harassment decades ago. Read more>>

For the second time in the past month, former vice president Joe Biden has tried to atone for his role in the aggressive questioning of Anita Hill during a now-notorious 1991 congressional hearing.

In an interview with Teen Vogue published Wednesday, Biden said he regretted the way lawmakers treated Hill when she appeared before a Senate panel to detail allegations that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her former boss, had sexually harassed her.

“I wish I had been able to do more for Anita Hill,” he said. “I owe her an apology.”

During Thomas’s confirmation hearings, Hill testified that he had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances toward her when she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas denied the allegations.

Hill, who is black, was grilled about her claims by an all-white, all-male group of lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who attacked her credibility and peppered her with lurid questions about her encounters with Thomas. Biden, the committee chairman, did little to temper the accusatory tone in the room.

The episode has received renewed attention as the wave of sexual misconduct allegations against powerful men has grown into a full-blown movement. Hill and her defenders have blamed Biden for letting the hearing spiral out of control.

Speaking with Teen Vogue editor in chief Elaine Welteroth, Biden defended some of his actions but said he wished he would have handled things differently.

“I believed Anita Hill,” he said. “My one regret is that I wasn’t able to tone down the attacks on her by some of my Republican friends. I mean, they really went after her. As much as I tried to intervene I did not have the power to gavel them out of order. I tried to be like a judge and only allow a question that would be relevant to ask.”

Thomas was confirmed 52-48. Biden voted against him.

Hill and others have said Biden was no innocent bystander during the hearing, which featured cringe-inducing exchanges about breast sizes, pornography and Thomas’s anatomy. At one point, Biden questioned Hill about how she felt during an alleged sexually charged moment, asking, “Were you uncomfortable, were you embarrassed, did it not concern you?”

This isn’t the first time Biden has revisited the hearing in the weeks since sexual assault allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein set off a deluge of misconduct claims, outing some of the most recognizable men in media, entertainment and government as alleged sexual predators.

Last month, in a discussion at Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year summit in New York, a reporter asked Biden if there was anything he would have done differently in his handling of Hill’s testimony, according to HuffPost.

Biden responded using some of the same language as in his Teen Vogue interview but seemed to stop short of apologizing outright.

“Let’s get something straight here. I believed Anita Hill. I voted against Clarence Thomas,” he told the audience, adding that he was “confident” that Thomas had sexually harassed his former aide.

Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive asked a follow-up question, noting that Hill has said she felt like the senators treated her unfairly.

“The message I’ve delivered before is I am so sorry if she believes that,” Biden said, according to HuffPost. “I am so sorry that she had to go through what she went through.”

Hill, now a legal history professor at Brandeis University, was asked about Biden’s remarks at the Glamour event in a Nov. 16 interview with The Washington Post. She was joined in the interview by five current and former Democratic lawmakers who helped persuade the Senate Judiciary Committee to let her testify against Thomas.

Hill said of Biden: “He said, ‘I am sorry if she felt she didn’t get a fair hearing.’ That’s sort of an ‘I’m sorry if you were offended.’”

“But I still don’t think it takes ownership of his role in what happened,” she added. “And he also doesn’t understand that it wasn’t just that I felt it was not fair. It was that women were looking to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his leadership to really open the way to have these kinds of hearings. They should have been using best practices to show leadership on this issue on behalf of women’s equality. And they did just the opposite.”

Published in the Washington Post.