Anita Hill doesn't have anything to say about her recent phone call with Joe Biden. But she does have some harsh, future-altering words for his time leading the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Then a Delaware senator, Biden led the committee during Justice Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and has since seen renewed criticism of how he handled Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by the nominee. But if Biden's committee "had done its job, ... #MeToo might have began in 1991 — with the support of the government," Hill writes in an op-ed published Thursday in The New York Times.
Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis University, centers her op-ed around the enduring threat of sexual violence. It's a crisis that "the world didn’t really begin to come to grips with" until the #MeToo movement launched in 2017, Hill says. But it "happens to people of all ages, races and ethnicities, whether poor, middle class or wealthy," Hill continues, adding that "some groups like women of color, sexual minorities and people with disabilities are more susceptible than others."
After #MeToo took hold, last year's Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the hope "that our political leaders would take up the challenge of confronting" sexual violence, Hill writes. "But that hope was dashed," Hill continues, and goes on to make a case for why "sexual violence is a national crisis that requires a national solution." And by focusing too much on "whether I should forgive Mr. Biden," Hill says we're "miss[ing] that point."
Read Hill's op-ed at The New York Times.
