Lady Justice by Dahlia Lithwick

Author:Dahlia Lithwick [Lithwick, Dahlia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

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In 2019, after presidential candidate Joe Biden telephoned her to apologize for the way the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee had handled the process for the Thomas hearings, Anita Hill again insisted that none of this was a matter of personal forgiveness and that it couldn’t be corrected by expressions of empathy for her pain. The problem was, as it always has been, a deficient mechanism for discovering the truth. Writing once again for The New York Times, Hill argued that in America, formal systems for reporting, investigating, and redressing sexual harassment and abuse continue to be inadequate. “After Dr. Blasey’s courageous testimony, many saw the callous and ham-handed approach of Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s chairman, as a replay of the Thomas hearings,” she wrote. “Even worse, a new generation was forced to conclude that politics trumped a basic and essential expectation: that claims of sexual abuse would be taken seriously.”

If you are a person who believes that in a shape-shifting world, words, facts, and law matter, and that they matter most particularly to women and vulnerable communities that rely on the rule of law to vindicate their rights, the Thomas and Kavanaugh hearings are in fact worse than no process at all. They are show trials, with foreordained outcomes, that give the imprimatur of a legal inquiry, with none of its guarantees. The threat of “Lock her up”—so chilling to women who heard it hurled at Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Christine Blasey Ford—is the threat that what looks like law will become the mechanism for undoing the law. For the millions of American women who witnessed Ford’s testimony and Kavanaugh’s response, the icy realization that male entitlement, threats, and fury could still outrun and overmaster the truth, even in a process that purported to surface the truth, was another earthquake in the Trump years. Law or the trappings of law could be used to silence and sideline women. That isn’t a fight about equality; it’s a fear of retribution.

When Biden apologized for Hill’s pain, he performed a version of the dance that now passes for legal conclusions. Due process is for men; women can mostly just hope for sympathy. In a 2021 podcast conversation between Hill and Ford, Hill noted that the solution here is not for the next #MeToo victim to walk headlong into the wood chipper and then the next one after that. “I reject the idea that it will change if more women step up, I disagree. We need better processes and systems.” Neither Hill nor Ford wants to be told they were credible and to move on. Both just wanted to ensure that suspected sexual harassers and abusers are not the ultimate arbiters of what is lawful and what is not. Claims of sexual abuse remain dead serious, and our systems to redress them are not working. Among other things, Hill cited a recent survey by the Department of Defense showing that sexual harassment and assault in the

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