The Hollywood Hit-Job on Justice Clarence Thomas By Stuart Taylor Jr.

Posted By on April 18th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hollywood-hit-job-on-justice-clarence-thomas-1460930701

I covered the confirmation hearings in 1991. HBO’s movie heavily edits history to favor Anita Hill.

The current battle over President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland is child’s play compared with the lurid brawl over George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas 25 years ago. On Saturday, HBO marked the quarter-century anniversary with “Confirmation,” a retelling of how Judge Thomas, a conservative, up-from-poverty black jurist from Pinpoint, Ga., saw his nomination nearly derailed by allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill, a black attorney who had worked for him 10 years earlier.

Ms. Hill’s calm, graphic testimony during the three-day hearing on her charges sparked a national debate about the then relatively little-discussed issue of workplace sexual harassment. Ultimately, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Mr. Thomas for the Supreme Court, 52-48.

As a reporter who covered the at times stomach-churning hearings, I wondered how “Confirmation” would handle a story that ultimately boiled down, as the saying goes, to one of he said-she said—he denied all and stunned the senators by accusing them of staging a “high-tech lynching.” She said he pestered her for dates and subjected her to disgusting, sexually charged conversation.

Despite a surface appearance of fairness, “Confirmation” makes clear how it wants the hearings to be remembered: Ms. Hill told the whole truth and Mr. Thomas was thus a desperate, if compelling, liar. Her supporters were noble; his Republican backers were scheming character assassins.

This is consistent with how the media conveyed the story at the time and, especially, in the years hence. Yet immediately after millions of people witnessed the hours of televised testimony, polls showed that Americans by a margin of more than 2 to 1 found Judge Thomas more believable than Ms. Hill. Viewers of “Confirmation” were deprived of several aspects of the story that might have made them, too, skeptical of Ms. Hill. The most-salient of many examples: CONTINUE AT SITE

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