https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/27/jor-biden-anita-hill-clarence-th...Joe Biden's non-apology to Anita Hill casts long shadow over 2020 run
Biden’s bid for president has invited renewed questions over his handling of Hill’s 1991 testimony – and his failure to say sorry
After Joe Biden failed once more on Friday to apologize to Anita Hill for his handling of a 1991 Senate hearing at which she testified about being sexually harassed by supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas, questions surged anew.
Why can’t Biden just issue a straightforward apology? To what extent might the episode trip up his presidential candidacy? And what, exactly, is Biden said to have done wrong at the time?
As he asks voters to choose him over multiple women candidates to run against Donald Trump, a president accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women, Biden has had to respond to complaints of unwanted touching. He has said “social norms are changing” and promised to ‘be more mindful of personal space in the future”.
But according to experts in gender studies and sexual harassment interviewed by the Guardian, his failure to apologize to Hill, in a recent personal call with her and on the national TV program The View on Friday morning, is particularly frustrating and potentially damning.
Hill told the New York Times this week that Biden called her and expressed “his regret for what she endured”. But, she said, it wasn’t an apology.
“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you,’” Hill said. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”
On The View, Biden did say he was sorry – but not for anything he had done.
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“I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated,” Biden said. “I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to try to stop things.”
But analysts questioned whether Biden had, as chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, done everything in his power to protect Hill.
“He was the chairman of the committee and it was up to him to do something, and there’s a kind of passivity about it, even in retrospect, and that’s really upsetting,” said Helena Michie, director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University in Texas.
He was the chairman of the committee and it was up to him to do something
Helena Michie, Rice University
“Biden has done things since that time – and it has been a long time – on behalf of women, and on behalf of mitigating violence against women. But I think what Hill was saying was that until he takes full responsibility for his role, until he stops saying he wished he could have done something, or kind of underplaying his agency in the structuring of that event, then she’s going to continue to be deeply suspicious of him.”
The event
While it might be hard to believe, given the hyperpartisanship of today’s Congress, in 1991 the Thomas nomination, put forward by Republican president George HW Bush, appeared to be sailing through the Democrat-controlled judiciary committee. At the head of the committee sat Biden, then 51, already in his fourth term as a senator.
Then Hill’s bombshell allegations emerged. She had told the FBI that Thomas, her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sexually harassed her.
“On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess,” she would testify, describing multiple other specific instances of alleged harassment which Thomas denied.
Biden called Hill to testify in an open hearing. What millions of viewers across the country saw was unforgettable: a young African American law professor – Hill was just 31 – facing a panel of mostly aged white men quizzing her about being harassed.
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