When a fake industry wants to pretend to combat sexual harassment with a fake commission, who better to get to head it than a pretend victim? Come on down, Anita Hill.
Two dozen top entertainment executives have come together to form and fund the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, which will be chaired by Anita Hill. The attorney and Brandeis law professor was one of the first whistleblowers on sexual harassment, when she testified against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. She sits on the boards of directors for the National Women’s Law Center and the Boston Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and has also chaired the Human Rights Committee of the International Bar Association.
All of which happened because she served as a useful weapon for attacking a conservative African-American nominee. The attack failed, but she got enough cred to stick around.
“I’m proud to be leading this newly-formed Commission on a long overdue journey to adopt best practices and to create institutional change that fosters a culture of respect and human dignity throughout the industry,” Hill said in a statement. “We will be focusing on issues ranging from power disparity, equity and fairness, safety, sexual harassment guidelines, education and training, reporting and enforcement, ongoing research and data collection. It is time to end the culture of silence. I’ve been at this work for 26 years. This moment presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to make real change.”
It presents us with an opportunity to railroad some easy targets, implement an investigative process that deprives the accused of their civil rights, and ignores those who are well connected.
So, business as usual. After Hollywood helped revive the fake Anita Hill story, she's being put in charge of a Hollywood commission. Good luck with that.
Clarence Thomas said that Anita Hill had initiated a number of phone calls to him, over the years, after she had left the agency where they both worked. She said otherwise. But a phone log from the agency showed that he was right.
Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, has had exactly one woman accuse him under oath of sexual harassment in more than 35 years of public service: Anita Hill. Hill’s allegations never added up. The Yale-educated lawyer eagerly followed Thomas from one government agency to another, even after he had supposedly begun harassing her and even though her job at the first agency was protected by law. Her main witness repeatedly told the Senate Judiciary committee staff that the harassment took place before Hill even worked for Thomas. Hill was unable to produce any strong corroborating witnesses to Thomas’s alleged misconduct — indeed, when she gave FBI investigators the names of two women who could supposedly back up her story, they contradicted her claims. One of those women joined eleven other former female co-workers to testify on behalf of Thomas. None of Hill’s co-workers supported her claims. Not one.
It's a real Hollywood story.