Valley PR Blog

Anita Hill’s PR Nightmare

By Linda VandeVrede on October 2nd, 2007 In Hype!

When I read that Anita Hill is choosing to speak out against Judge Thomas and his latest round of book interviews, I silently said, “You go, girl.”   But I also thought, what a complete PR nightmare this has turned out for her.  I’m sure she had hoped the 1991 hearings were a thing of the distant past.  How strange and awful to have Judge Thomas bring them up again and re-open the wound with his new autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

When the hearings were held in the summer of 1991, I had just left Honeywell to start a freelance career.  Working from home, I was pretty much transfixed in front of the TV – no Internet news or blogs but just the regular news stations to carry the day.    In a nutshell, Clarence Thomas had been nominated as a Supreme Court judge by President Bush Sr., and Anita Hill had been asked to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee about her experiences of sexual harassment working with him years before as a 26-year-old aide at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.   It was a complete character probe into Clarence Thomas and his worthiness as a member of our most elite court.  The Senate at that time was 98% male, and the confirmation eventually passed and Judge Thomas became a Supreme Court judge.

The most common reaction I heard at the time from men and women alike was, “If he had truly done all those things to her, why did she stay in touch with him?”  They felt that the fact that she didn’t shun him or quit was evidence that the incident didn’t occur.

Throughout it all, Anita remained impressively calm, poised, and consistent.    Why do I believe her and not Judge Thomas? (who by the way, appeared on 60 Minutes this week and came across as extremely credible).  Three reasons:

1.   No one ‘funded’ her to come forth with the information

2.  She was 26 at the time of the harassment – not an age when you have truly learned how to handle such treatment

3.  It happened to me at age 26 and I behaved the same way. 

As a 26-year-old PR professional, I experienced my first harassment.   It was done in a public forum – my boss even witnessed it.   I didn’t go to HR, even when prompted by my boss.  Most horrifying of all, I even sent the culprit a congratulatory note month later when I had left the company and heard that he got a promotion.  Why?  This young PR professional could not comprehend that such an incident could occur in that “modern” day and age, unprovoked and unsolicited.  So the only way I could handle it was to pretend it never happened, and carry on.

Interviews and autobiographies aside, I believe Anita.   The question is, how will she handle this PR nightmare — and, will this issue be divided along gender lines the way the OJ Simpson case was divided along racial lines?  

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