Biden Wishes He'd Done More for Anita Hill in Thomas Hearings
Biden Wishes He'd Done More for Anita Hill in Thomas Hearings
(Bloomberg) -- Former Vice President Joe Biden said he regrets not doing more to ensure that Anita Hill was able to share her accusations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas nearly three decades ago.
“To this day I regret I couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved,” Biden, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Thomas hearings in 1991, said in New York on Tuesday at what could be one of his final public appearances before entering the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“I wish I could’ve done something,” he added. Biden has faced criticism from feminists and others for not doing more to help Hill tell her story and has offered public apologies in recent years, but it remains one of the vulnerabilities he’ll have to deal with if he enters the race. In retrospect, he said, he should have held a hearing “where the tone and questioning was not hostile.”
Hill, in her testimony before the committee, accused Thomas, who had been her boss, of sexual harassment, a charge he strongly denied. Members of the committee, all of whom were men, sharply questioned her account and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania accused her of lying. Thomas was later narrowly confirmed by the Senate, 52 to 48.
Yet her treatment at the hearing, which was televised nationally, angered women around the country, and the following year, 1992, which became known as the Year of the Woman, four women were elected to the Senate, and two dozen to the House of Representatives for the first time.
Biden on Tuesday said he also regretted that Christine Blasey Ford faced similar challenges last year as she sought to share allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by the Senate, denied her account.
After almost 30 years, “the culture, the institutional culture has not changed,” Biden said. “When a woman sees a distinguished professor or lawyer” face backlash, it’s understandable that they’re reluctant to step forward, he added.
For the Supreme Court confirmation process, having more women on the Senate Judiciary Committee would be helpful, he said, but broader change is also necessary. “We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country,” he said.
Public Apologies
Biden offered public apologies to Hill in late 2017 and again during the Kavanaugh confirmation process.
“Nearly 30 years later, I publicly apologized to Anita because she did not get the hearing she deserved,” Biden said on Tuesday. He spoke at an awards ceremony for college students organized by the Biden Foundation and It’s On Us, an initiative to combat college sexual assault that was begun by the Obama administration
Hill told Elle magazine last year that she had not heard directly from him and that “there are more important things to me now than hearing an apology from Joe Biden.” A Biden spokesman declined to comment on whether they’d had a conversation since then.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, John Harney, Colin Keatinge
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