Speaking Truth to Power (20 page)

What is more important, DeConcini’s remarks reveal that he based his dismissal of my charges more on how he thought a woman should respond to harassment than on whether he believed that Thomas had actually harassed me. At one point in the days preceding the hearing, DeConcini said, “I don’t say it didn’t happen. I say there is another side.” Very often the responsibility for ending discriminatory behavior, in whatever form, is placed on the target of the discrimination, rather than the person who carries it out or those in a position of authority to stop it.

In his comments DeConcini described how a victim of discrimination should feel and act. First that person should “get mad,” and then she should “complain.” If she does not, according to DeConcini, nobody should care, even when a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court is at stake. In other words, those who do not react in the way prescribed by DeConcini deserve no attention from those who should be concerned about the problem. In focusing on the target’s reaction instead of the behavior of the harasser, DeConcini failed to understand that most
harassment victims experience a variety of emotions in the face of harassment; anger is just one of them. And different people deal with harassment in different ways. Some women internalize the anger; others deny it.

Filing a complaint in response to harassment is only one way of “getting mad.” As I said, it is one that many harassment victims feel would be fruitless. Only 3 percent of reported harassment incidents end in a formal complaint. DeConcini proposed this reaction as the only valid course in response to harassment, though it is one that few harassment targets ever take.

In addition to revealing real ignorance about the harassment issues, DeConcini’s comments reveal a good deal of arrogance. Given the negative reactions to charges of sexual harassment, telling women that they should angrily complain, without any consideration of the effectiveness of the complaint mechanism, is tantamount to telling them that they should subject themselves to further abuse.

DeConcini was not a trial judge responding to a plaintiff attempting to bring a claim in federal court ten years after events occurred. He was a member of a committee reviewing the entire record of a nominee for a lifetime appointment. The committee had spent the last few months reviewing Thomas’ life as far back as his childhood in Georgia. No one on the committee prevented Thomas or his supporters from bringing in character evidence dating back nearly forty years. Moreover, the committee had spent hours discussing Thomas’ role as assistant secretary of education and chair of the EEOC. Thomas’ performance in those capacities and his role as a member of the Reagan administration were chief topics of the first round of the confirmation hearing, during which the committee had also received and discussed evidence of Thomas’ improprieties in handling expense and travel reimbursement. There were claims that he was reimbursed by the government for what was essentially personal business relating to his membership on the board of his alma mater, Holy Cross University. No one objected that the material was outdated. Nevertheless, when the topic of his conduct in official positions
turned to sexual harassment, DeConcini and many other senators balked at the idea of hearing it.

DeConcini and some of his colleagues apparently had a double standard for receiving information, depending on the nature of the information. The committee seemed willing to exclude “old” information on sexual harassment while considering “old” information on practically anything else. If the Senate is unwilling to view evidence of sexual misconduct with the same openness as it views evidence of other types of improprieties, victims of sexual misconduct, most often women, will face trouble when they attempt to inform Senate committees of such behavior, whether in an information-gathering session for legislative purposes, a confirmation hearing, or a disciplinary proceeding such as the Ethics Committee hearings on harassment allegations against Senator Robert Packwood. The double standard casts harassment as “personal behavior” rather than behavior that reflects on professionalism.

DeConcini’s willingness to let harassers and those with the power to end harassment off the hook is not shared by the courts. One issue of litigation in the sexual harassment arena is whether an employer is relieved of liability after taking steps to end discrimination in the workplace. Courts scrutinize the employer’s sexual harassment policy to determine if it is adequate and evenhandedly enforced. The courts have concluded that it is not enough for an employer simply to say that sexual harassment is prohibited. The employer must establish a procedure under which targets of such behavior can come forward and state a claim without fear of retaliation, and the procedure must provide for the fair investigation and resolution of the complaint should the complainant prevail. The employer does not relieve himself of responsibility for ridding the workplace of harassment by declaring that the target of the behavior should get angry. Nor does the duty to an aggrieved employee end simply because the employee failed to avail herself of the employer’s grievance procedure. The employee may still file a lawsuit.

In his press conference DeConcini essentially claimed that the Senate had no duty to investigate my charges because I had not filed a complaint
against Thomas ten years ago. DeConcini should not have been allowed to sidestep his responsibility to me, or more important, to the American public, with such a bold assertion, which ignored one critical fact. The responsibility of the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the character and fitness of nominees to the Supreme Court is comprehensive in scope and time. It is by no means limited to formal complaints filed against the nominee, nor to events of two, three, or even ten years past.

During the hearing, when Senator DeConcini questioned me, our exchange would prove quite revealing. “And the fact that you admit that, in retrospect, maybe you should have done something, you have concluded that it is all someone else’s fault; none of it is your fault.” What was supposed to be a question became a statement—an accusation. “Yes,” I responded. If he meant that the harassment was not my fault, certainly my answer was yes. And if he was referring to the circumstances that brought me before the public, my answer was still yes. I had no say in how his committee had handled my statement, and certainly no part in the leak to the press. “Is that your frame of mind?” DeConcini’s dissatisfaction with my response was obvious in his tone. “That is my frame of mind,” I answered. Clearly, DeConcini wanted to blame me for what was happening in 1991 because I failed to file a complaint ten years earlier, but I held firm. The hearing was no more my fault than the harassment itself.

On Monday afternoon a group of women requested a meeting with the Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine, to discuss a postponement of the Senate vote on the confirmation. The group included black and white women from academic and political backgrounds. Their objective was to persuade Mitchell to delay the vote and allow time for a thorough investigation. They were asked to wait until the senator was available, and one of them finally had to leave because of a prior commitment. The meeting with Senator Mitchell was perhaps more frustrating because of the long wait that preceded it. “My hands are tied. I can’t do anything,” Mitchell declared. Despite his perceived power as majority leader, he would take no responsibility for the action the Senate was about to take in voting to confirm Judge Thomas to the
Court. The schedule for the vote was set, and according to Mitchell it could not be changed. Yet later when Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the senator in charge of the Senate Calendar, threatened to call a week’s recess, Mitchell exerted his authority, reminding his colleague that he, not Moynihan, was the majority leader. Senator Mitchell’s inaction opened the door for the Republican senators to go on the offensive.

Unconstrained by any sense of senatorial decorum, Senator Alan Simpson appeared on ABC’s
Nightline
that evening. He brought with him telephone logs that Thomas supporters had retrieved from his garage, hoping they would kill my claim. More numerous than the eleven calls I had made to Thomas’ office at the EEOC in the ten years since I left my job were the calls and remarks that had been blacked out, removed from any public scrutiny. Yet no one questioned Thomas’ selection of what the committee would see. Simpson implied that I had “pursued” Thomas. The campaign that began with DeConcini’s “blame the victim” remark continued with Simpson’s labeling me the aggressor in my relationship with Thomas. And the anticipation of a second round of the Thomas confirmation hearing, which might have been seen as an opportunity for responsible consideration of my claim, seemed instead to provoke greater irresponsibility among some senators. The press appeared to relish their remarks, calling upon senators from the Judiciary Committee in particular.

When Senator Simpson appeared on
Nightline
on October 7, armed with Clarence Thomas’ telephone logs, he raised another question I have been asked countless times since: “Why did you keep in touch with him?” To which I must say that I was not threatened by Thomas as a person. I was threatened by the power he had held over me as an employer. That threat ended when I left his employ. Tellingly, so did the behavior.

By no means were Clarence Thomas and I good friends. I did not invite him to my home during the time we worked together. I spent five weeks in Washington during the summer of 1987 without contacting him or his office. My telephone calls to him had each had a work-related purpose. Some commentators have described them as “opportunistic,”
suggesting that I was seeking something I had no right to expect, though I had worked for Clarence Thomas for two years and had performed my job conscientiously. When I called upon him or his office for information, or to pass along a legitimate request, I did so on the basis of that performance. Never would I have considered those solicitations opportunism. I received no personal gain. Besides, I had not been the one to behave inappropriately. So why should I later allow his behavior to deprive me of a job benefit I had rightfully earned?

Part of the answer to the complex question of why I stayed in touch has to do with the idea of control. By pretending that my departure from the EEOC was cordial, I denied to myself the significance of the harassment. But by staying in touch subsequently, I regained something I hadn’t been able to maintain working for Clarence Thomas: professional decorum.

In 1992 I met a retired man who had gone to fight in World War II and left his young bride, his high school sweetheart, at home. She worked to support herself while he was away. When we met, he appeared to be as in love with her as when they were newlyweds. During the hearing he asked her jokingly whether she had ever been harassed, fully expecting she would say no. To his surprise, she said she had been harassed, in fact by their high school principal for whom she worked while he fought in Europe. But he had revered the principal, now a good friend, and rather than cause tension between the two, she kept quiet. Throughout what they both described as a happy marriage, filled with love and open communication, she had denied her own pain to spare his respect for a man who was his “role model.” Paradoxically, I am both consoled and saddened by the fact that so many others do the same. I wonder if something in our training tells us to “forgive and forget” or “let bygones be bygones,” or any of the other clichés that allow us to deny our hurt.

In stark contrast to Senator Barbara Mikulski, Senator Simpson was exasperated by the prospect of reconvening the confirmation hearing. In a profoundly crass statement, following his
Nightline
appearance Simpson broadcast his ignorance about sexual harassment and the purpose of the
upcoming hearing. The tall Wyoming native, who projects a “cowboy” image despite his gray flannel suit and conservative necktie, warned of the treatment I could expect from the Senate:

I looked for some sympathy in Senator Simpson’s words. I found none. I took his message as an unfriendly warning, something just this side of a threat—an attempt to dissuade me from coming forward.

In distinguishing sexual harassment from “real harassment,” Simpson’s statement suggests that the former is tolerable, if not excusable—that it is mild or harmless, or at least less harmful than the “real” kind he had apparently experienced or inflicted as part of the politics of Washington, D.C. According to Simpson, being “injured and destroyed and belittled and hounded” is a consequence of “real harassment,” not sexual harassment. Perhaps because Senator Simpson never experienced sexual harassment, and is not likely to, he did not perceive it as real, injurious, or destructive. What
was
real to Simpson was “plain old Washington variety harassment.” The pity is that Simpson could not extend his understanding of Washington-variety harassment to sexual harassment to see that both have the same basis—abuse of power—and the same aim: self-gain through devastating or demoralizing the target.

Nor did Simpson’s personal experience with Washington-variety harassment relieve him of his responsibility to attempt to relate to the experience of the thousands of his constituents who understood well that sexual harassment is real harassment. Although Simpson apologized after the hearing for his choice of words, he could not take back the twin message they sent: that sexual harassment is not real and that complaints about sexual harassment should be met with “real harassment.” I will not count the number of times, even before the hearing, that I have been
threatened with sodomy, rape, assault, and other forms of sexual and nonsexual violence. Some of the callers have used almost the same words: “Now you will know what real harassment is like.”