Committee member Paul Simon (D-Ill.) says it wasn't until after Thomas had ascended to the high court that he learned that Wright's account had been corroborated by another co-worker. Biden says he is convinced it would have derailed the nomination. Several say that in retrospect they believe her testimony might have reversed the results of the narrow 52-48 Senate vote on Thomas's confirmation. Many of the key participants in the hearings, Democrats and Republicans alike, say today for the record that they always wanted Angela Wright to testify, to clear the air. To this day, few people outside the Beltway recall that there ever was another woman, that the great "He Said, She Said" showdown was at one point shaping up as "He Said, They Said." In The Post the following day, it was mentioned on Page A17. By bipartisan agreement, the 37-page transcript of her interview with Senate staffers was released to the press in the wee hours of the morning, and was effectively buried in the avalanche of more spellbinding telegenic events.
The hearings concluded without her testimony. For three days, she waited in her lawyer's Washington office, and then. News stories in The Washington Post and elsewhere reported her presence and summarized some of her allegations. Angela Wright, a journalist from North Carolina and a former employee of Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had been subpoenaed to appear. The expression "You just don't get it" entered the lexicon, a measure of just how profound was the chasm between the sexes.īut there was nothing theoretical in Wright's reaction to what she was watching on TV, nothing intuitive about her assumption that Hill was telling the truth.Īngela Wright remembers thinking: I believe her because he did it to me.įor four days, rumors circulated among reporters at the Thomas-Hill hearings about the existence of "another woman," a reluctant witness who would testify to Clarence Thomas's sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.
Many men saw in Thomas a symbol of their own vulnerability to character assassination: Here was a man of substance being publicly humiliated by unsubstantiated charges of misconduct that did not, even if true, seem to them all that terrible. The Hill-Thomas affair was a defining moment for relations between the sexes in the American workplace, the focal point of what Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Del.) would later call "a fundamental power struggle going on in this country between women and men." Many women who had silently suffered sexually belittling behavior by male colleagues intuitively believed Hill. People all over the country were watching the same events and drawing similarly strong conclusions. As she listened to Hill's allegations that Thomas had pursued her for dates and made explicit sexual remarks that she found demeaning, Wright remembers thinking: I believe her. There on the screen was a woman not unlike herself: young, black, headstrong, accomplished, attractive, poised. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, jeopardizing overnight an appointment that had seemed all but certain.
The story was breaking that a University of Oklahoma law professor had accused U.S. It was shortly after midnight three years ago this week that Angela Wright came home from work, clicked on her television and first saw Anita Hill. By Florence George Graves October 9, 1994
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