Anita Hill

Mike tells Sarah about the complicated legacy of Anita Hill and the not-particularly-complicated facts of her case. Digressions include “Tootsie," Garrison Keillor and the Donner party. Mike, for reasons unknown, seems to believe that one flies “down” from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C.

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Transcript

Anita Hill

Sarah: You know the teens that are like, “I'm not like one of those regular teens. I'm insufferable in an adult way.” 

Mike: Totally. I was extremely one of those teens. 

Sarah: I think that's why we're doing what we're doing now.

Mike: So, welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we circle back to people, places, and things that have been misremembered. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. 

Sarah: And I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer for Buzzfeed, the New Republic, and also some other places. 

Mike: And Sarah is joining us from a closet this time. Also with the flu.

Sarah: Well, I'm just getting over a cold. So I hope that I'm at the sweet spot of getting over a cold where you sound just vaguely like Kathleen Turner. 

Mike: So do you want to tell me what you remember about Anita Hill and her legacy? 

Sarah: Yeah. So when Clarence Thomas was being confirmed, I guess is the verb, as a Supreme Court Justice, Anita Hill, who had previously worked, I believe, as a subordinate of him came forward and accused him of sexual harassment at the time that they had worked together. And this became the aspect of his confirmation hearings that received the most attention. And what I wasn't old enough to notice at the time but feel like I've observed when I've researched the topic in a background way for other pieces in the past, is that she was really raked over the coals and that people really didn't seem to understand what sexual harassment was. And that it was one of those events that taught Americans what sexual harassment was, but where the person who made that lesson happen had to really suffer because of it. I mean, I know that he ultimately became a Supreme Court justice, but then I don't know what happened to her life after that. So that's what I feel like I know about it.

Mike: Yeah. I think the first thing we should do is there a number of Anita Hill debunkings on the internet, like on YouTube, which has become this cesspool now. And a lot of them are of the character of like, “Anita Hill had a parking ticket in 1984, so Clarence Thomas couldn't have sexually harassed her.” I want to be clear that that is not my project here. I spent about three months last year working on a video about the legacy of Anita Hill, and about just sexual harassment more generally. So I watched the entire hearing. I watched all four hours and thirty minutes. I also looked into a lot of what sexual harassment was like before Anita Hill, and what sexual harassment was like after Anita Hill. And so I want to be really clear that this is a “believe women, men are trash” podcast. This is not going to be a “let's be skeptical of Anita Hill's claims”, because basically I will get into eventually the contortions you have to do to not believe that Anita Hill is telling the truth. 

So, what I'm really interested in debunking or not even necessarily debunking but more like complicating is the legacy of Anita Hill. So one of the statistics that you often hear is that before Anita Hill, there were about 7,000 sexual harassment cases filed in the United States every year. Two years after Anita Hill came forward, there were 18,000 filed. So the number of sexual harassment cases almost tripled almost overnight. And so the legacy of Anita Hill has always been as this kind of breaking point. It's much more complicated than that, and I want to get into the interplay between law and these very prominent figures that we kind of hold up as the symbols of one issue. Kind of like we were talking about with the Matthew Shepard episode.

Sarah: So something that I have always vaguely associated with the case but don't know what the context of it was exactly, and I associate this in my mind with the way people alluded to cigars around Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Which was something I also didn't know what it was about for years and years. Okay, so in the allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace, what was the thing about pubic hair and soda? What was that? 

Mike: What's interesting is that the accusations that Anita Hill were leveling against Clarence Thomas, by the standards of today are not all that severe. 

Sarah: Because the standards of today are like, “Worst case scenario, he's been running a high-profile rape ring for decades, and all of your favorite actresses have been assaulted at some point.” Yeah. So by the standards of today it's like, you know what, if it wasn't like an episode of SVU then, eh. 

Mike: Well, yeah. So, yeah. That's one of the sad things about this is that Harvey Weinstein has now become the yardstick by which everything else gets measured. It's like, “Oh, it's only 20% of what Harvey did” or I”I's only 60% of whatever did.” 

Sarah: Yeah. It’s a milli-Harvey. 

Mike: So basically the pubic hair in the Coke thing was one of the examples that people latched on to as one of the things that Clarence Thomas said to her that is an extremely inappropriate thing to say to somebody at the workplace was, “Is that a pubic hair on my Coke can?” was apparently what he said to her in the office one day. And her accusations against him were essentially, he made a series of extremely awkward and extremely uncomfortable passes at her during – it was eight years before the trial – so when they were working together at the EEOC, which is weird, Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, which is the government agency responsible for adjudicating sexual harassment claims. This is one of the weird coincidences of this case, but it's actually interesting. This is one of the reasons why Anita Hill was so divisive, was because the accusations that she was leveling against him were the kinds of things that women recognize as really gross and really unwelcome in the workplace, but that guy's recognized as, “Oh, it's just harmless flirting.” It was the kind of thing that divided a lot of families, where women hear these accusations and they're like, “Oh, fuck this”, and men hear the accusations and they're like, “Well, what's all the complaining about?” 

Sarah: Well, I bet some women also heard about it and were like, “This is the kind of shit that I had to put up with with my boss for forty years, so why is it that you get to block someone’s Supreme Court nominations, sweetie?”

Mike: There was a lot of that. It broke down on super generational lines, too. That a lot of these people who had maybe worked as stewardesses, you know, stewardesses used to get fired when they turned thirty-two or got married, and so a lot of people that had begun their work lives in this context we're kind of like, “Well, that's how men are. That's what the workplace is. It’s like complaining about filing your expenses or something. That's just a component of the workplace, like, men trying to sleep with you.” And it's kinda like, you know, what are these millennials whining about? There was a little bit of that tone in it, of just, “Well, why can't you just get used to this? It's really not that big of a deal.”

Sarah: And so if we take Anita Hill's narrative of it, did he say any other memorably weird or awkward things? 

Mike: Yeah. He talked a lot about his porn habits. So he would come in and he'd tell her about, “Oh, I watched the hottest porn the other day.” And he would talk about, there was a character in these pornos that he was watching called Long Dong Silver. 

Sarah: Really?

Mike: He would talk about this at the workplace and kind of hold it over her head and make comments about her appearance, make comments about other colleagues’ appearance. It sort of is the definition of the term “hostile work environment” that it just created this sort of tone where her colleagues, she could tell, we're being judged on their looks, and she could tell that she was being judged on her looks, and he would flirt with her constantly and he would just talk about liking porn. He would talk about having sex with his wife. I think he talked about masturbation at one point. Just things that were icky. 

Sarah: And he was her boss?

Mike: And he was her boss at the EEOC. Yeah. I think the first thing to debunk about the trial is that Anita Hill didn't come forward. So this was not a case of Anita Hill is watching TV and she sees this guy on CNN and she goes, “Hey, that's my former boss. I'm going to call up the Washington Post.” That's not what happened at all. 

Sarah: And that’s totally my assumption and that's, I think, totally the cultural narrative. And that's probably because I assume that's what I would want, and that I would see him on TV and be like, “I'm not allowing my grossest boss to be a Supreme Court justice.” 

Mike: To me it seems like a little bit of laziness by journalists, that it's very easy to say, “The year that Anita Hill came forward” Right? You always hear that verb, “Anita Hill came forward” 

Sarah: Right. Because it's the “Sexual harassment is over.”

Mike: Yeah, exactly. And you know, it gives her agency, right? That it's like she wanted to break her silence about this asshole that had been harassing her and do her duty to keep him from getting into power. But what's actually really interesting about this is that he harassed her eight years before his confirmation hearing. All this EEOC nastiness took place. And then she basically told people at the time. She wrote in her diary at the time, but that was it. She just went on. She lived her life. She became a law professor in Oklahoma and then she was interviewed for, they were doing a background check on him as part of this process where they were just interviewing a lot of his old colleagues. And so she had an interview with the FBI in which it is illegal to lie. So they asked, “What is your work relationship with Clarence Thomas?” She told them the accusations of harassment. Someone at the FBI leaked her testimony to the press and then this is why her hearing took place on a Saturday because she was not scheduled. She was not part of this hearing. She was not part of the narrative. This was never supposed to be the sexual harassment confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. It was already after the hearing had already started when we found out, “Oh, wow, there's this person out of nowhere.” 

Sarah: Literally nowhere. If you're quietly being a law professor in Oklahoma, what could you do to greater decrease the odds of being of consequence to things happening in Washington?

Mike: Yeah. And it seems like that was the first detail that got lost, right? That she was not someone who wanted to come forward. She was also subpoenaed. So again, it's not like she was like, “Oh, I can't wait to fly to Washington and stick it to this guy.” She got a knock on her door and a subpoena, so she had to show up. So, this is not a case of someone who was like a crusader. And this is, again, why all of these accusations of her being a women's lib superhero, she's a radical, she's trying to change the country, it just doesn't make any sense. Basically – I was thinking about this – to believe that she made up the accusations, you would have to believe that she made up harassment by Clarence Thomas, wrote it down in her diary, told four of her friends about these made-up accusations, then didn't tell anyone for eight years. 

Sarah: Then waited for him to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice, which there are very long odds on that. 

Mike: Right. Then waited for the FBI to contact her, then waited for someone at the FBI to leak her testimony so that she could then bring forward this narrative that she had concocted. So that is literally what you have to believe if you think that she's making this up. So this was not a case of someone who wanted to be the center of the story. It's someone who really was very reluctant to be there. And when you think about it, handled herself with incredible grace. If you see her testimony, she's super smart. She's not having any of their shit. She's constantly asking clarifying questions. She's like, “I don't understand. Can you please rephrase that?” She's super, total badass and not accepting any of the framing that any of the Senators are giving to her. For someone who's never given testimony before, for someone who's not used to this level of attention, it's actually amazing how poised she remained and how cool she is after four and a half hours of being questioned by this incredibly hostile panel of old, white dudes that clearly do not believe a word that she's saying. 

Sarah: Yeah. So what, I mean, is there a lot of advanced press before the testimony? Are people excited and tuning in to watch it? How does that go down?  

Mike: It's one of the most watched events of that year. It's like Super Bowl level ratings. 

Sarah: That's amazing. 

Mike: A lot of people aren't necessarily watching it live because it's on a Saturday, but CNN, I mean all the networks are covering it. It's the front page. There's all these kind of whispers and innuendos in the press that she has something called ‘erotomania’, which is something where your crush on somebody is so bad that you make up this whole narrative in your head. So basically, she is in love with Clarence Thomas. He rebuffs her advances of which there is no evidence, but she came onto him. He said he wasn't interested, and then this was so stressful to her that she made up this entire thing. 

Sarah: Who could resist Clarence Thomas, Michael? Like, if you were working with that hot hunk of brisket. 

Mike: Right. And so this narrative that she has erotomania has as much evidence behind it as that she is a vampire or that she is a werewolf. This has literally no evidence behind it, but it becomes these whispers that are starting to circulate around the hill. That, “Well, she's a little loopy. She's a little skanky.” There are some rumors from her students at the university that she shows up to class drunk. Again, no evidence. We have no idea where this is coming from or if that was even ever said by somebody. It just kind of circulated. 

Sarah: Isn't it telling that the most plausible counter narrative is that she's just completely insane.

Mike: Right? 

Sarah: Like, totally out of touch with reality, you know? It's like, well either, you know, this series of completely plausible things happened or she's completely insane or she's in love with Clarence Thomas and then has been striving through sheer spite and an incredibly complexly laid plan to destroy his life for no personal gain of her own. Also, these plots where a woman is supposed to have had this great plan, you know, it never works out. Like, Tonya Harding was supposed by people to have this arch plan to sucker everyone and get all this money and win the Olympics and it's like, well that really didn't work out if that was the plan that she had, you know? It’s like, “Oh, we caught them. We caught these women who had these terrible self-serving plans” and you just look at it and you're like, you know, if the American public was smart enough to figure out this diabolical plan, like, that suggests that maybe there was never a diabolical genius plan in place. Maybe it's just all some stuff that happened and we made it up so we could feel like we were catching someone at it. 

Mike: Yeah. One of the other weird things looking back is that it's obviously very risky now to come forward with the claim of sexual harassment against a high-profile person, right? If you want to accuse somebody of sexual harassment, your name is in the media, your face is in the media, you're going to get dragged through the mud. But think about how much more high risk it was back then, right? That sexual harassment… the term sexual harassment was only coined in 1975. The vast majority of the population didn't even know what sexual harassment was and even trial judges and juries at that point didn't accept that sexual harassment existed. So to come forward in 1991 and say, “I was sexually harassed by this extremely prominent, extremely well-liked public figure” was much more high risk than anything like that would be now because the entire concept of sexual harassment was not acceptable to people. 

So another thing that nobody said at the time that, you know, it's the same thing. “Why is she choosing now to come forward? What does she really want?” And the idea that you would have a dick boss and not make a big stink about it, but then when your dick boss was about to become super, super powerful, you would come forward, like, that's when you would want to tell people that. That actually seems perfectly logical to me. That's not that difficult. Like, I've had mean bosses in my life. I have not made a federal case out of it. If one of them was about to become president, I hella would come forward with it because they were dicks, and I don't want them to have any more power. Like, it's not that hard.

Sarah: Well, why do you think we remain so attached to this idea that a woman has something to gain by coming forward with accusations of abuse that she levels against a powerful man who's usually entrenched in society in some way and who people really want to believe would never have done that kind of thing? Because the big stories were always about men who the community looks at and finds it to be unimaginable that he could have done what he's accused of either because of the position he holds in his community or what he represents or his public persona so… 

Mike: I think that there's a misconception among the public that coming forward with sexual harassment claims is really lucrative. It's actually much less lucrative than we think it is and it's really only lucrative for people who come forward against public figures. So I do think that there is some incentive to basically hold public figures hostage, right? That George Clooney is really rich and I could say that George Clooney groped me somewhere and maybe he would want to settle out of court with me because he doesn't want the trouble and maybe I can get a million bucks out of it. That's fine. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: I can see that there's that incentive. I still think that happens much less than we think it does.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mike: With things like regular work at an insurance company, that incentive is not there to accuse your boss of sexual harassment when he's not a public figure. You're not going to get anything out of it and you're going to get all this negative publicity and you're going to be known within your field as someone who “makes trouble.” So the incentives don't make any sense for anybody, and it especially didn't make sense for Anita Hill. Because first of all, she didn't come forward, obviously. Secondly, there was never going to be any money involved. Third, the amount of publicity that she was getting, it was like Monica Lewinsky level fame at that time for this essentially random person who was just a quiet lady. Like, she never had stepped out into any public debates. She'd never printed op-eds in the local newspaper. Like, she had been super chill. 

Sarah: Well, just going through and looking at the archival material about this event. How did you see that viewpoint represented? Was it newscasters saying “Some believe that Anita Hill blah-blah-blah…”  You know, how did people communicate that?

Mike: I was watching the hearing looking for clips that I could use in this video of mine. So I kind of wanted to find clips of senators being the worst because I wanted to demonstrate just what Anita Hill had to sit through and so I was watching this looking for these clips and what was interesting was it was actually really hard to find kind of smoking gun clips that showed just how dickish these guys were, but when you actually sit down and watch it, the entire tone of it is just this intangible negativity where they're interpreting everything she says in the least charitable possible way. So there's this entire line of questioning where he sexually harasses her at the EEOC. They vaguely stay in touch. He writes her a letter of recommendation at some point. He is in Oklahoma for a conference or something. He mails her to let her know, calls her to let her know whatever and she's like, “Oh, hey. Let me pick you up at the airport. You're going to be in town. We can catch up.” And the senators are like, “What? But you said he sexually harassed you. Why would you possibly keep in touch with a man who had sexually harassed you?” and Anita Hill is basically saying, “Well, look. He's my former boss. He's a really prominent person. This is how professional life works. You just have to be in contact with people even when you don't like them to live your life. This is something that I just had to do.” And so of course, the way that they paraphrase that back to her is they're like, “Oh, so you're saying you had to stay in touch with your harasser to advance your career. Is that what you're saying?” And it's like, well, yes, I guess. Whatever, like, we can all name ten people in our professional field that we do not like and yet we remain cordial with because they might be helpful at some point. Like, this is not immersion behavior. 

Sarah: Yeah. If women didn't constantly smooth over sexually inappropriate behavior from male colleagues and superiors, then no academic department would get any work done. No factory would produce items. You know? No store would be able to sell merchandise. Our entire economy and systems of government and order in America are glued together by women ignoring gross things sexually that happened to and around them. Like, that's just how we're trained as workers. 

Mike: Another thing that's really important here is there's another accuser. 

Sarah: Hmm.

Mike: So even at the time, we knew that there were two other accusers. One of them, whose name was Sukari Hardnett, sent a letter to the committee saying, “I saw Clarence Thomas treat women like shit. If you were young, black, female, and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female by him. Women know when there are sexual dimensions to the attention they are receiving and there was never any doubt about that dimension and Clarence Thomas' office.” So she's on record with her name, the whole thing. 

Another accuser is named Angela Wright, and she is a reporter for a newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina. Weeks before the trial one of her colleagues mentioned they're looking, they have an opening for a columnist on the opinion page and she goes, “Well, let me try writing a sample opinion article. I've never written an opinion article before but let me just try it.” So she writes an opinion article saying, “Clarence Thomas is unqualified for the nomination. Here's why. He sexually harassed me.” So this is a bombshell accusation, but she just types it up as an opinion column, gives it to her editor not intending it for publication, not intending it for anything. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: Two days later she gets a call from the Senate. So, someone at her paper somehow got it into the hands of some Senate staffers. The Senate staffers have an hour and a half long interview with her in which she's under oath and she talks about exactly the same thing, that he would comment on her breasts. He would comment on other people's breasts. He would talk about women. He would talk about her. He once showed up at her house unannounced late at night. He just showed up. 

Sarah: Oh no. 

Mike: He kept saying “Oh, soon you'll be dating me. Like, he just made these kinds of Donald Trump-ian and kind of gross, like, used car salesman remarks. 

Sarah: Yeah or like the old actor in Tootsie who shows up at, at Dustin Hoffman's apartment and won't stop singing, you know? It’s like it's just this sad spectacle of grossness. Like, it's not threatening, but you had to work with that. Ugh. 

Mike: It is exactly that sound. It's “Ugh.” Like, that's basically... everything she’s grabbing is basically just “Ugh,” but what's really interesting about this is they take her testimony. They ask her, ‘Are you willing to testify?” and she's like, “Fuck, no, I don't want to be a public figure. Like, why would I want to be thrust into the national spotlight? Of course, I don't want to testify.” Hours later she gets this subpoena. So she's like, “Oh God damn it. So now I really have to testify.” So they fly her down to Washington for the hearing, but they never call her.

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Mike: So she literally sits in an office in the Capitol waiting to be called for the hearing and she never does, and the reason is basically that she is a complicated person. She was fired from her previous job at USAID and when she was fired, she sent a letter to her boss about bad management practices, about the fact that her boss was terrible, about the fact that they were running the department really poorly, and she – this was back in the memo days right before emails – and she cc’d, like literally carbon copied, all these other people in Washington. 

Sarah: Is that what CC stands for? I'm having a moment of feeling my age. 

Mike: Yeah. It's a literal carbon copy. 

Sarah: Wow. Okay. So she carbon copies… 

Mike: All these other offices, like, all these other agencies to her boss's boss. It's, you know, people do this with email now. They'll do a “reply all.”

Sarah: Yeah, the performative bcc. 

Mike: So she does this. She gets a reputation as being a firebrand, but apparently her criticisms of that agency were correct. Clarence Thomas sees this mail and is like, “Well, she seems really smart. She seems really cool. I want to hire her.” So at her interview, he's like, “Look, I know about the letter. I know you're a firebrand, but I also know you're super smart and I want you working for me.” So he hires her. Then, you know, we get all the sexual harassment stuff. Then she gets fired. So this is another reason why the committee doesn't want to call her to testify because she's been fired. I love – I read the Senate interview with her and this is another thing to just like – all the people that came forward with sexual harassment claims back then were just such badasses. So, the Senate people are like, “Oh, you got fired by Clarence Thomas. You're saying he sexually harassed you. Obviously sexual harassment is the reason you got fired. Right?” And she's like, “No, absolutely not. I was bad at my job.” Like, immediately just insisting. She's like, “Nope, I was bad. It had nothing to do with sexual harassment.” 

Sarah: Well, he did hire her because he decided she was a firebrand. So it makes sense that he might be not qualified for exactly that thing.

Mike: All she says is that she was ineffective. Although what's interesting is that then apparently, they contact Clarence Thomas and he says that he fired her because he caught her using the word “faggot.” This is another weird, like, wrinkle to this that Clarence Thomas, who has voted against every gay rights case that has come to the Supreme court, back then branding himself as a gay rights crusader.

Sarah: That’s so weird. Yeah.

Mike: That to me just seems weird. So what's really interesting… I read this great profile of Angela Wright from five years after the trial. So the journalist who's writing this profile asks Angela Wright about this. They're like, “Umm, Clarence Thomas says he fired you because you use the word ‘faggot’,” and she's like, “Oh, I did use the word ‘faggot’.” She's like, “That's true.” She's like, “Yeah, I was super homophobic back then, but that doesn't have anything to do with my firing and he's just using that as ammunition, and I don't think he ever heard me use the word ‘faggot’.” 

Sarah: So she’s sort of bizarro Mark Fuhrman, just like a cheerful black woman whose slurs had nothing to do with the actual case and is just like, “Oh yeah, I did that. Irrelevant.” 

Mike: So it was a specific incident in which she called one of her colleagues a faggot. So it was directed at a specific person. So this journalist – I love this kind of journalist – somehow tracks down this random employee who, like, fifteen years ago may or may not have been called a faggot by Angela Wright. They track him down and he's like, “First of all, Angela Wright is awesome. I believe everything she says. B, I heard her use the word ‘faggot,’ but never about me and she's fine. I don't really mind.” So that's the level that we're at of complexity now, where it's like, okay, she did use the word, but not in the actual specific incidents that Clarence Thomas referenced.

Sarah: They really fact-checked that.

Mike: Yeah. Like, they really went for it. Like, they really investigated the use of the word ‘faggot’ in 1986 or whatever. But all of this, all this complication, is basically the reason why the Democrats did not call Angela Wright and left her sitting in an office for sixteen hours waiting to get called because they knew that the Republicans were going to bring all this stuff up, that if they put her on the stand as a credible witness that then the Republican smear machine would go into hyperdrive and all of this stuff would come out and this would be litigated in public. “Why was she fired and what was the letter?” And to me this whole thing is an example of capitulation. All of the accusations against Angela Wright, and she points out in her testimony, she's a hella smart lady. She knows that she would be a “bad witness.” So she's like, “Look, I know all this stuff is going to come out if I'm on the stand. I know I'm a somewhat controversial figure among people that I've worked with, and I know that Republicans are going to use that.” 

And so the Democrats basically cave. They don't want to have the fight. They know that these accusations against her, which, when you think about it, are pretty specious. Either Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her, or he didn't. Whether she used the word ‘faggot’ has nothing to do with that. Whether she wrote a letter to her previous boss has nothing to do with that and neither one of them dispute that her firing had nothing to do with sexual harassment. So, it really doesn’t have any bearing on her testimony and yet they know that the way that politics was beginning to work at that time was that they would have had to have this fight in public.

Sarah: And it seems like you tend to end up with one totemic figure. There was a case that was advancing toward the Supreme court at the same time as Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade just got there faster and that's why Norma McCorvey and Sarah Weddington are the women who are iconically tied forever to that Supreme court victory, but that's arbitrary and that was timing. So, it feels like that there was some knowledge that they had to get, like, the best one, the best accuser. This may be also proof that you just shouldn't be too good or too tirelessly quiet and virtuous at your job. Like, maybe be a little bit of a pain in the ass and a little bit, you know, fireable because then you won't be the perfect person to give politically fraught testimony before people who want to tear you apart. Like, maybe be the person who doesn't get called. 

Mike: This is one of the things that struck me watching the hearing, that you really don't get better victims than Anita Hill. I realize that that's a crass way to put it, but, you know, she went to Yale law. She's this quiet professor in Oklahoma. She didn't want to be a crusader with these accusations and yet the smear machine still happened. That to me just shows that there's no such thing as a victim who's not going to get these smears, so you might as well just come forward with every victim. 

Sarah: And it's going to get spread out more if there are more people. 

Mike: Yeah. You always hear, “Oh, let's not give them ammunition,” but Anita Hill is an example of not giving them ammunition and yet they went with what they had and I think one of the aspects of Angela Wright's testimony that I thought was really interesting – again, this woman is blatantly honest about everything and just super cool– and her whole thing is she's like, “Yes, Clarence Thomas sexually harassed me, but I don't actually care.” She's like, “I received that from every boss I've ever had. The reason I think he's unfit for the Supreme court isn't actually the sexual harassment. It’s because he was a terrible boss. He was a dick. He took credit for other people's work. He was really vindictive. He ruined the careers of people he didn't like. He was in it for himself. He was basically just a workplace bully to me.” To me, it's this fable about how we play sexual harassment in this very specific category of wrongdoing that we have no tolerance for and yet workplace bullying and just being an insane dick boss is in this category of “Eh, it happens.” And to me, it seems like I don't want to take sexual harassment out of the no tolerance box, but I would like to put workplace bullying into it. I think of workplace bullying as a gateway drug to sexual harassment that most of these sexual harasser guys from Harvey Weinstein on down also have a history of just insanely abusive behavior to everybody and it's terrible and then it manifests itself partly as sexual harassment. It's basically just a dehumanization of women especially, but of everybody around you at work. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: To me, it's really compelling that she makes all of these also substantiated accusations about him being terrible and nobody cares about them. They have disappeared into the winds of time. 

Sarah: That's true. 

Mike: Another reason why those are really relevant is because why did Anita Hill pick him up at the airport? Because if she didn't, he would ruin her career. We know from Angela Wright that he has a history of ruining the careers of people that he doesn't like. When people get on his bad side, he's really vindictive. So, that is exactly the reason why you would have some sort of testimony from Angela Wright at the committee hearing so that she can say, ‘Yeah, if Anita Hill had come forward with these accusations eight years earlier, he would have ruined her career. She never would've gotten a letter of recommendation from him. So, of course she had to be nice to him. It actually bolsters her case of why she had to be nice to this dickhead and pick him up at the airport.” 

Sarah: Yeah. Speaking of having multiple people able to come forward, this also makes me think about how there's no one iconic victim of Bill Cosby who has to wear that victim mantle. Like, one of the iconic images I think is that New York magazine cover where they had something like thirty-five women on the cover and so the sense is not of one person, but of a mass and of person after person saying “I experienced this pattern” and just if we have that breadth of testimony I think people were more inclined to, you know, if we hear it from just a few people, it's just harder for us to say, “Well, that person is an outlier. That person is the problem.” 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. We also have now the testimony of Clarence Thomas’s girlfriend at the time, who also says he used to come home and talk about the women at work all the time and he was kind of a sleazeball. We really have evidence of a pattern, whereas at the time all we had was an isolated incident and it really was seen as an isolated incident and that made it so much easier to smear Anita Hill because not only are her accusations not super Harvey-ish, not super severe, but she's also the only one making them. 

Sarah: So how does Anita Hill get smeared? What does that look like?

Mike: Oh my God. This is the most frustrating and obnoxious aspect of this whole case because, you know, I'm always obsessed with the media thing. So, there's a journalist for the American spectator called David Brock. 

Sarah: I can tell that you just love him, and you think he’s great.

Mike: I know, from my growling his name. So he writes an article for the American Spectator called, I believe, The Real Anita Hill, in which he prints a bunch of sort of hearsay whatever. It's very machine politics. It's very “let's take everything we have that makes this woman look bad and let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” This gets the attention of a right-wing donor called John M Olin. We didn't know this until years later, but he gives David Brock a bunch of money to take a year off and write a book also called, The Real Anita Hill. 

Sarah: Oh boy. 

Mike: So he writes a book about how one of his theories is that the whole thing was the result of a miscommunication, that apparently Anita Hill was on the phone with somebody who asked her… I'm going to get this wrong, but it was something along the lines of someone asks her “Did Terrance sexually harass you?” and Anita Hill couldn't hear because she was on the phone, so she said yes, because she had some other boss that was named Terrance. Then, according to David Brock, it was like, “Ooh, but by the time anyone realized that she had misspoken, it was too late.” So, his whole theory is that she is so embarrassed about mishearing her friend on the phone that, you know, she has to testify for four and a half hours.

Sarah: That’s like a runaway Seinfeld episode. Jerry accidentally accuses someone of workplace sexual harassment. 

Mike: Exactly. And this is where we get the accusations from her students. Like, one of her students says “She came onto me,” but then it's not clear if he ever even was her student. It's literally just like the worst hearsay, but what's interesting about it is that the book comes out. The book gets reviewed everywhere. It gets reviewed in the Washington Post, the New York Times. Most of the reviews are negative, but the fact that they're reviewing it gives it prominence. It tells people, “This is an important book. Maybe this book is bad, but it is important.” So it becomes a runaway bestseller. This guy, David Brock, buys a house in Georgetown, in DC and calls it “the house that Anita built.”

Sarah: Oh no.

Mike: He makes his entire career on this bestseller. So, fast forward ten years later. He writes a book called, The Conscience of a Conservative, where he says, “Oh, I made it all up.” 

Sarah: Oh my God! Dude! I can't believe that happened and no one ever– there was never a big media moment of, you know, “This just in! That thing you based all your beliefs on in the nineties was faked!” This keeps happening and we never hear about it.

Mike: This is what's so insanely frustrating to me about this, that it's sort of like one of the chapters of this book where he talks about being a movement conservative, whatever, and you know, there's all these other examples and Anita Hill is one chapter of this book and it's to the point where he writes a note, a handwritten note to Anita Hill saying, “Look, I'm really sorry for what I did to you.” 

Sarah: Send it in the fucking mail, David Brock. 

Mike: And I'm like, well, did he give the fucking house back? Does he still have the house? What level of assholery where, like, Anita Hill – it's actually really fascinating – Anita Hill really could have cashed in. She was getting all kinds of job offers. She was getting book offers. She's never sold the film rights to her story. Maybe she did recently, but she didn't at the time. She did write a book, but it was a relatively modest book contract, and it was only after David Brock's book came out that she wrote a memoir to correct the record of what David Brock had said about her. 

Sarah: Yeah. What a law professor thing to do. Like, “Well, I'm going to write something very measured now about what factually did or didn't happen and I will do so without any expression of fury even though everyone richly deserves it in all directions.” 

Mike: Totally. And she has been such a class act. I mean, she never does interviews. She has not become someone on like the Ted Talk circuit about sexual harassment, which she easily could have become, right? If she wanted to, she could have made a real career out of this and being a professional pundit on this and, you know, she's smart. She's awesome. Like, she would have been great at it, but again, that's not the kind of person she is. It's very clear now what kind of person she is. So this guy cashes in. She never cashes in and then this book comes out ten years later saying it's all hearsay. It's all nonsense, but like, you can still buy the book on Amazon. It's still around.

Sarah: Of course.

Mike: The fact that this book is based on total bullshit has not seeped into the public consciousness.

Sarah: It's part of the record. 

Mike: I guess it's an example of you can't undo what's already been done. Like, people can't go back and unread that book. Even if you hear, you read a book and then ten years later you're like, “Oh, the author says it was bullshit,” you're probably going to have a sense of, “Well, some of it's bullshit, but doesn't she seem sketchy?” Right? You're going to have the sense that she seems a little wacko. I'm sure some of the details don't check out.

Sarah: Right. “Maybe she did come on to her student. Who can really say?” 

Mike: That's the taste that he's left in everybody's mouth. 

Sarah: Right. 

Mike: And then he's now cashing in on the “I used to be a conservative and now I'm not anymore,” which is its own brand of bullshit. But that, to me, is the saddest legacy of this. It was that it really was very obvious, even at the time, that there was no incentive for her to lie. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: All of this information was known at the time, and nobody pointed out the obvious things, which was that if she was lying about this, she has nothing to gain from it and when that's the case, you really do have to take what somebody's saying pretty seriously. 

Sarah: Yeah. And we have such a belief in just the woman who's totally insane and brilliant, but it's like insane people aren't brilliant. Like, we really don't know that in America. It also seems relevant that this is a situation where… was this really also just the Democrats? You know, weren't they just trying to block a political Supreme court justice nominee and we're just scrabbling around for stuff and we're like, “Anita Hill. Let's throw her under the bus.” Like, is that what happened too here? 

Mike: Well, my understanding is that nobody wanted to do this.

Sarah: Right.

Mike: There's a lot of academic articles on this that talk about how behind the scenes the Democrats didn't want to be seen as blocking the nomination of an African American justice. They were beginning to be the party of social justice at this point. They didn't want to drag this out and so that's the weird thing about the whole Anita Hill hearing is that they wanted this to be a quick confirmation hearing. It was kind of already a done deal and yet, because it came out in the press… so, the press was printing these FBI leaked transcripts and so the Democrats were under all this pressure like, “Well, I guess we have to call her now. I guess we have to hear from her.” But they did it in this half-hearted way where they didn't really want it to derail. I mean, this is another sort of conspiracy theory explanation for why they didn't call Angela Wright because that's just going to drag it out. It's going to bring it on longer. It's going to alienate African American voters. 

Sarah: Who are already pretty fucking alienated in 1991. 

Mike: So, the Democrats basically made this calculation. They were like, “Well, look. The press is pressuring us. We have to hear from her, but we don't actually want to investigate this too much and we don't want to get at the scope of this. We just want to give her a platform. Give her some time and then move on to the nomination.” Although, his nomination or his confirmation was one of the closest. It was 48 to 52. 

Sarah: That is close though. That's surprising. What were the other issues that came up?

Mike: It's actually interesting. The only other controversy before, and this is one of the reasons why the committee hearing was supposed to be taking such a short time, the only other controversy was that he wouldn't go on record as having an opinion on Roe vs. Wade. So, this was like the beginning of this template where every justice in their confirmation hearing just pretends to be a blank slate. They're like, “Oh, Roe vs. Wade. I don't know that one.” 

Sarah: “I've never thought about that one. When was that? ‘73?” 

Mike: That was literally his argument. He's like, “Well, I haven't, you know, I haven't looked into it. I haven't formulated an opinion on it.”

Sarah: Oooh.

Mike: He's a master. They're all masters at this point. They know exactly what you have to say. You can't say yes. You can't say no. He was doing this tactic. That was the controversy before all of this, right? Like, it was pretty boring. The rest of the country was not really tuned into this.

Sarah: Great week for women. 

Mike: Yeah. So, to me, the most debunkable element of this is the legacy of Anita Hill, where we talk a lot about the way that in the years after Anita Hill came forward – ah, sorry, I just said came forward.  

Sarah: Yeah. The years after she was pushed forward or dragged forward or forced to walk the plank.

Mike: That is a better way of putting it actually. So in the years after Anita hill walked the plank, it is true that the number of sexual harassment cases filed nearly tripled. That's actually a real thing, but what's really interesting about Anita Hill is that there's this figure who kind of puts sexual harassment on the cultural consciousness, right? Nobody is talking about sexual harassment in 1990 and then the whole country was talking about it in 1992 and most people give the rise in sexual harassment cases… they give that credit to Anita Hill. People started having difficult conversations with their husbands, difficult conversations with their bosses, et cetera based on the inspiration from her. 

However, what was actually going on behind the scenes was for years before Anita Hill ever had to walk the plank, sexual harassment law had been terrible in the United States. It basically wasn't illegal for about thirty years until 1981 was the first case where sexual harassment was actually tried under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So before 1981, sexual harassment wasn't illegal. It was just something women had to deal with in the workplace and the legal argument was always that it's not discrimination. So, you can't try it under discrimination laws because it can't be because you're a woman because a man could get groped at work too and then women would be like, “Well, men aren't being groped at work,” and then the males would be like, “But they could. So it's not because you're a woman, it's just something bad happened to you and we're terribly sorry.” 

So basically the argument for decades was that groping is already illegal. Sexual assault is already illegal. Rape is already illegal. We don't need this whole set of laws just because it's happening in the workplace. They're already illegal, so everything's fine and what are you complaining about? So it was only in 1981 that we finally got this quid pro quo harassment standard of saying, “I will only give you a promotion if you sleep with me.” That doesn't become illegal until 1981 and then in 1986 we get the hostile work environment standard, that it doesn't actually have to be this blackmail model. It can also just be, “Everyone is being terrible to me at work because I'm a woman.” 

Sarah: And then have we had any advances in the kinds of sexual harassment that are illegal since then in the workplace federally?

Mike: Well, this is what happens with Anita Hill is that basically there's drip, drip, drip of cases and eventually somebody's going to have to make a movie about this because all of these early cases in the seventies and eighties are all low-income women of color. It's case after case of women who are bank tellers and truck drivers and one of them is a prison guard. These are women who are not privileged and women who are coming forward at intense personal costs, right? So many of these cases make it to the Supreme Court. Many of these make it to circuit courts. It's huge risk. So there's this kind of drip, drip, drip of legal developments. But the law, the actual law that they're trying these cases under, the court keeps interpreting the law in better and better ways, but the law itself just sucks ass. 

So the 1964 Civil Rights Act, women are not entitled to jury trials. So all of the cases that are being decided are being decided by judges. Like, one judge decides whether you got harassed or not and he decides the damages. So, of course, it's the same kind of questions that Anita Hill got. It's “What were you wearing?” There's one case, Michelle Vinson, who was basically held hostage by her boss for four years. He said almost explicitly “I will fire you if you don't sleep with me.” They ended up sleeping with each other more than fifty times over four years and at the first trial when she finally filed suit, the judge is like, “Well, why did you sleep with him? I don't understand. If you didn't like it, why did you sleep with him then?” They just don't understand. 

Sarah: So it's like someone asking you to explain the entire experience of coercion to them, but they're not actually giving you enough time. 

Mike: Exactly. You know, it's mostly male lawyers. It's all male judges. So one of the big fights is over jury trials and trying to get juries involved in the sexual harassment process, but then another problem is damages. So the most insane thing to me and I had to call lawyers to confirm this was that before 1991, there was no such thing as punitive damages or compensatory damages for victims of sexual harassment. So, if the sexual harassment was so bad that you quit your job, you would get compensated for that. So you would get back pay, but if you didn't quit your job there's nothing to compensate you for because there's been no damage. You can't sue for emotional pain and suffering, and you can't sue for punitive damages. There's no such thing as either of these things. So there's literally cases where judges find miraculously in favor of defendants and give them nothing. They're like, “Well, you didn't quit.” 

Sarah: Right. They're like, “So you choose literally being able to feed your family over being subjected to traumatic and degrading conditions at work. Sorry.” That's amazing. That's terrible. 

Mike: Right. So basically there's these legal cases that are making the conditions better. Like, we finally have the hostile work environment standard. We finally have companies can be held liable. We finally have quid pro quo harassment, but the law that all of these are being tried under, like, just sucks. It's super deficient. So after the creation of the hostile work environment standard in 1986, the National Organization of Women and all these other feminist groups do a five-year campaign to lawmakers to be like, “Guys, we need an actual law on this. Like, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was not designed for sexual harassment. It wasn't even designed for sex discrimination. It was primarily a racial redress law and sex got literally thrown into it in the middle of the night basically right before it was passed.” So, the law isn't fit for purpose. 

So there's this five-year campaign by feminists to actually create a law that would allow women to get jury trials, allow women to get punitive damages. They hold congressional hearings. They do all these letter writing campaigns where you write a letter to your congressman, and you write a letter to two of your friends telling them to write to their congressmen. There's all this pressure, super behind the scenes. There's not, like, public billboards and stuff. It's all this, like, using the levers of Washington to try to get this stuff passed. So, in 1990, there's an update of the Civil Rights Act which has all this stuff in it. It has punitive damages. It has jury trials. It's a huge improvement and it passes the house. It passes the Senate. George H.W. Bush vetoes it.

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: Because sexual harassment isn't really on the agenda. Like, he can quietly veto this law and no one cares because nobody really knows what sexual harassment is. It's this weird, fake thing and he's just like, “No, no, no, we're not going to do it. No, there's no headlines.” Like, no one really notices that this law dies.

Sarah: So he's just passing legislation on something that nobody actually cares about that much.

Mike: Exactly. So they're not under any pressure. They can do this quietly. It's not a big deal. Then Anita Hill happens. So what's really interesting is this law gets written and negotiated, passed, then it dies. It's kind of bouncing back and forth and they try renaming it and passing it again and nothing works and then Anita Hill comes forward and all of a sudden, the whole country is talking about sexual harassment. All of a sudden sexual harassment is a thing. They're getting thousands of calls from female voters. All of a sudden, they're all under all this political pressure. So a month after the Anita Hill hearing, they passed the law.

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: So, starting in – Anita hill was October of ‘91. The law passes in November of ‘91 and starting with the passage of that law, women can now bring suits and have them heard by juries and they can receive punitive and compensatory damages for the first time. So, this is my thing with the slightly more complicated version of the Anita Hill story is that it is clearly true that women were inspired by Anita hill. How could you not be? Society is finally admitting that what Clarence Thomas was doing, the kind of behavior that women had to experience in the workplace, was wrong, but without all of these supporting institutions and procedures behind it, all of those cases would have just been thrown out or they wouldn't have gotten any compensation. They wouldn't have been heard by juries. None of those cases would have gone forward without the laws that supported the cultural shift. For any social change to happen, you can't have these turning points. You need to have turning points backed up by actual laws, especially procedural things that make it easier. 

Sarah:  And it feels like an Anita Hill figure is someone who maybe comes in at a moment when there is all of this momentum and all of this accrued change over, you know, legally taking place over decades at this point and we're right on the cusp of another significant push and we need someone to galvanize the public and make us be like, “Okay. One last step.” You know? Like we're doing some horrible CrossFit thing and it's like, “‘One more for Anita,” because I actually remember Sarah Weddington talking in her memoir. She has this very charming little description talking about watching those hearings and how, to her, like, Anita Hill looked alone and without a champion and it seems like that's the impression that she made on people. It seems like that's another thing we took away from it and that's in keeping with the fact that she didn't go out there on purpose. That this is what sexual harassment does to women. Not only do you have to have a hostile work environment, but then there's that spectacle that I can imagine galvanized American women of, you know, being questioned by a panel of old white men who just literally do not understand what you're talking about because they've never been in a coercive - well, they've been in coercive work environments - but they haven't been the one who's being coerced all the time.

Mike: To me, I always think of, you know, watching that footage, how power is always invisible to the people who have it. You never think “Maybe the reasons why my former colleague is picking me up at the airport are complex. Maybe it isn't that she loves me unconditionally. Maybe it isn't that she thinks I'm charming and witty.” It's difficult for people, especially in power, to admit that or to come to grips with that and really internalize it. Where you're realizing that maybe people aren't nice to you because you're so charming. Maybe they're not laughing at your jokes because they're hilarious. It's stressful to admit that and your entire psychology is set up to prevent you from realizing that.

Sarah: Yeah. And that need to believe that your random whims and the things that it occurs to you to say to a subordinate, you know, the ways that you make a pass at a woman. I mean, of course your psyche would protect itself from realizing that that can be an absolutely terrorizing force in someone's life and it's weird because I feel like a lot of the rhetoric around workplace sexual harassment and sort of abuse of these power dynamics is this idea that the abuser loves to use their power over the victim and it's like, you know, sometimes they do, but I think sometimes people just abuse their power without seeing themselves as being particularly powerful. 

Mike: It’s like people that flirt with waitresses. 

Sarah: It is like that.

Mike: You know those goobers that are like, “Oh, she likes me man” and you're like do you really not understand that she's obligated to be nice to you? Is that really not something that you perceive? Those people baffle me. 

Sarah: Isn’t it? It’s, again, a very straight male thing and this is true just of what America is, that if you're a straight white man in America, you can live your entire life with only one persona because if you're anybody else, I think that you have to dabble in persona a little bit. 

Mike: And constantly aware of how you're being perceived by others. I feel, as a gay guy, I think about that constantly and much more than my straight friends do, of kind of how am I seeming right now? Am I dressed appropriately? Am I acting appropriately? You're always watching yourself from outside. One of the really sad legacies of the Anita Hill hearing, and this isn't obviously her fault, but the way that she was framed as a kind of, “He said, she said” situation is this idea, this extremely pernicious idea, that you can't even tell a female colleague that she looks nice anymore or you can't even hug a female colleague if she's having a bad day, because she's then gonna sue you for sexual harassment. When you look at the sexual harassment laws, it's really depressing. So, I was saying before Anita Hill, there were about 7,000 cases filed a year and then Anita Hill, it went up to around 18,000. You know how many cases are filed now? 7,000. 

Sarah: Ooh. Wow. So did we just have a temporary bounce and then it went back to pre-Anita numbers?

Mike: So what happened is basically we had this huge spike for Anita and then every year since, I think, 2001, fewer and fewer and fewer cases, just like drip, drip, drip, fewer cases. Part of it is arbitration clauses, where more and more companies are putting these clauses into contracts where they say, “If you want to take your boss to court for sexual harassment, for whatever, you have to go through the company's system.” So if you work at Disney World, you have to go through Disney justice to take this if your boss harasses you in your Goofy costume or whatever, 

Sarah: Disney Justice coming soon on Hulu. 

Mike: Yeah. And then as part of going through Disney justice, you're signing away your rights to ever go to justice-justice.

Sarah: Right.

Mike: Companies get nervous about these punitive damages. 

Sarah: It's like, “Oh shit. These women could get some money maybe. We got to reign this in.” 

Mike: Exactly. That's what starts happening. Another big thing is that way more cases settle out of court now. That is complicated. I don't understand all the reasons why, but it's like 2% of cases go to trial now. It's a vanishingly small number. One of the really pernicious aspects of this for sexual harassment specifically is that most of these settlements are done with nondisclosure agreements. So, as we've seen with Donald Trump, with Harvey, with all these other cases, is that part of the consequence of these settlements is that women can't talk about it because they're legally bound from doing so and men get to keep doing it. So structurally, when you have all these settlements coming out that we don't know what the amounts are, we don't know what really happened, it's not technically an admission of guilt. So we don't really know what the extent of the behavior is. We never learn and so these guys get to establish this pattern and get to continue this pattern.

Sarah: That is how you maintain a system, right? If so many of the people who were being held up by societal power are abusing that power and you don't want to take apart the entire infrastructure, you just quiet a lot of it right down. 

Mike: So another, just to get really depressing…  

Sarah: Yeah. Let's just twist the knife. Let's just get in there. 

Mike: Another reason why this has disappeared off the radar is that all this stuff about punitive damages, so obviously it was a huge, you know, decade long fight to finally get punitive damages for sexual harassment. No one ever tells you that punitive damages are capped. There is a limit to how much you can actually get for a sexual harassment claim. The federal limit is $300,000 if you're a large employer. So McDonald's, any company with more than 500 employees, the most they can pay out in punitive damages is $300,000. So there's this cap on punitive damages, but this was so insane that I had to actually call lawyers to check it. They don't tell juries what the cap is. So if you're on a jury for a sexual harassment case, you can award the plaintiff $10 million, but she's only going to get 300,000. 

Sarah: Oh, for Pete's sake. 

Mike: This is… I was like, “This can't possibly be true. Can it?” and this lawyer that I interviewed in Massachusetts was like, “Yeah, no. That's how it works.”

Sarah: What is the purpose of this charade? 

Mike: Exactly! Why wouldn't they just tell them? It's not that big of a deal! Just tell the juries! To me, this is the heart of this ridiculous thing that men can't even say somebody looks nice in the workplace anymore is whenever there's a large sexual harassment settlement, we read about it, right? A hundred million here, 55 million there, whatever. 

Sarah: Right. 

Mike: You never read about the fact that the majority of those, over half, of awards of punitive damages and sexual harassment cases are significantly reduced or thrown out on appeal. So one of the largest one’s ever, so this was a guy called Richard Moore who sexually harassed a woman called Ashley Alford. He was a manager at this retail store that she worked at. So, he groped her. Then he yanked up her shirt. He masturbated and ejaculated on her. This was the incident. So, she sues him. She originally gets a $95 million federal court verdict. $95 million. Then it's reduced to $41 million. Then they come to an agreement with the company for $6 million. So, this is what often happens in these cases. The $95 million settlement makes headlines. Like, “Oh, another woman who experiences something bad and then she got super rich,” but then this kind of tick tock, nickel and dime, reducing the award or throwing it out altogether never gets reported. 

Sarah: No. 

Mike: So, $6 million is still a lot of money and, I don't know, maybe there are people that think that $6 million is too much. But fuck those people. I don't care. But we don't hear about all of the cases that get thrown out and all the cases where the damages are reduced. So, this idea of getting rich through sexual harassment cases isn't a very good strategy. Like, it doesn't really happen to the extent that men basically want you to think that it does. 

Sarah: Speaking of one of the refrains that we've returned to, this idea of people revealing the way that they think. You know, people who assume that you would only report sexual harassment to get some kind of bonanza settlement are saying essentially, “Obviously we all want to tell an elaborate series of lies in order to bilk blameless people out of money for personal gain” or, you know, people who don't say that these women are making anything up, but are just like, “You can only get $200 to be masturbated on.” You know, this idea of “Look, sometimes in America…  everyone gets abused at work” and the funny thing is that I do understand that argument because the whole American way is go get abused at work and then if you do it long enough and hard enough, maybe you'll be able to abuse others at work. So this idea of women joining the workforce and being like, “I would not like to be abused at work. Thank you.” Like, I can understand how that seems fundamentally un-American 

Mike: One of the statistics here is that the median award settlement for sexual harassment cases is $250,000. These women are not getting huge “I struck it rich. I won the lottery” type payouts and $250,000 for a very large company is not actually that much to pay. So, it's not all that punitive. 

Sarah: No. For McDonald's it's probably, “Oh, well, you know, we duked it out in court and we finally had to pay the equivalent of all our hot coffee sales for a day in Cleveland. Still cheaper than training people not to harass anyone.” 

Mike: The case that I always think of, the case that was the most chilling to me was earlier this year was Garrison Keillor, you know the guy radio host?

Sarah: Oh yes. I was raised by boomers. 

Mike: Yes, exactly. I know. We listened to those on all of our road trips growing up. When he got me too-ed, he was let go from Minnesota public radio. They do it quietly. They're like, ‘Due to a complaint against Mr. Keillor. We've asked him to leave.”

Sarah: Sincerely yours, Minnesota public radio.

Mike: Literally. It was very classy. It was like, “We're going to keep all this private, whatever.” So then he issues a statement a couple of days later where he's like, “Look, you can't even do anything in America anymore. What really happened was I was with a female colleague. I considered her friend. We've worked together for ages. I went in for a hug. While we were hugging, my hand accidentally slipped down her. She was wearing some sort of backless shirt. My hand accidentally slipped on the shirt. Immediately I said, ‘Oh my God, I'm so sorry. That's really inappropriate.’ She said, ‘Hey, it's not that big of a deal.’ Next thing you know, I hear it from her lawyer.” His statement is the perfect, like, “There's a witch hunt for men.” 

Sarah: Yeah. Poor old Garrison Keillor has fallen under the witch hunt and oh no. 

Mike: Yeah. It’s like the day the witch hunt came for Garrison Keillor, and I love the detail that she was wearing a backless shirt.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mike: Right? Because then immediately you're like, “Why was she wearing a backless shirt at work? That seems a little inappropriate. Wasn't she a little bit… ?”

Sarah: Don’t stand so close to me, young, backless shirt woman. 

Mike: Yeah. He, of course, will play a saint in this situation because the only person we're hearing from is him. We haven't heard anything from the company. She is not named. We do not know anything about her. Then, like a month later, because poor Minnesota public radio was getting so many comments on their Facebook page and nasty emails and whatever about firing him over this witch hunt, they release the information that actually there was a female colleague of his. She filed the complaint against him. They hired an independent legal team to investigate the claim. So there was due process. There was not. this is not like they heard a complaint and reacted. There was a three-month independent investigation that found an eighteen-month campaign of harassment. Like, I'm going to get the details wrong, but it was like he showed up at her house. He was writing her disgusting emails. He was fucking with her boyfriend. So, this entire narrative of “it's all just a big misunderstanding” and “I was doing my best, but she overreacted,” it feels to me like this is something that is made up by men who get caught. The first thing you do when you get caught is you make it seem like a big misunderstanding, right? You're like, “Oh, I wasn't shoplifting. I had something in my hand and then somebody called, and I had to run outside.”

Sarah: You strategically admit to something smaller because then it seems like you're being honest because you're like, “Look, I'm admitting to this thing I did. It's quite embarrassing. Don't I have egg on my face?” 

Mike: Again, I think it's really important to understand that the only two forms of sexual harassment that are illegal are quid pro quo harassment, “Have sex with me or else you're fired”, and hostile work environment standard. Hostile work environment is very difficult to prove. It basically means that there is something happening at work that is so bad that it interferes with you doing your job and it makes you, as a woman, wildly uncomfortable. To prove a hostile work environment standard, you have to show that you've made the complaint to the higher ups at management, and nothing was done. So, there is no way that the scenario that Garrison Keillor describes could ever have been a legal case. Right? I don't know how lawyers work, but if a woman came to a lawyer and said, “A guy accidentally put his hand on my shirt, then apologized,” I don't think very many lawyers would actually take that case because that's not a hostile work environment. 

Sarah: I didn’t know that, and I think that that's something that is a very basic point that a lot of Americans don't know, where it's just you're not gonna destroy someone's career over, you know, an allegation that they did a single thing. It's who they are.

Mike: There’s been cases where isolated incidents have gone to trial, and they've been struck down. So more than half of the cases of sexual harassment filed every year are thrown out and, of course, we never hear about those cases. You know, this is an obvious point, but what courts have said is ,“The conduct complained of must illegally poison the atmosphere from the viewpoint of a reasonable victim.” 

Sarah: A reasonable victim.

Mike: This is a controversial thing. There's something called, “the reasonable woman standard.”

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: This is how you define the hostile work environment standard, and this is actually useful in that if there's one person who's super, super, super sensitive and was like, “You wearing your perfume today is sexual harassment to me,” that's not reasonable. So again, this stereotype of somebody who's being hypersensitive at the workplace, courts have already ruled that if it's a specious claim, then it's a specious claim. It has to be that a reasonable person would consider this to be something that's poisoning the environment. Like, the evidence that there's a witch hunt against men, there just isn't any. I am sure that on planet earth someone has brought specious claims of sexual harassment. I'm sure that on planet earth companies have fired people preemptively to try to avoid a specious lawsuit. The culture has shifted. The needle has become slightly more sensitive to sexual harassment. I don't think it's anywhere near being oversensitive to sexual harassment. 

Sarah: No, isn't it just the best way to try and preemptively end a culture becoming more receptive to something by saying “We are too receptive already. Like, we're already witch hunting and having all this PC stuff and it's too much backlash, you know?”

Mike: Exactly. Yeah. 

Sarah: And it's also funny to think about men saying, “Won't it be terrible if we're living in an America where men have to be incredibly careful all the time about everything they do at work because, you know, their least behavior or statement could be misconstrued in a way that would ruin their career and discredit them in the eyes of their colleagues?” And it's like, yeah. What does that sound like? Are you just afraid of working as women? 

Mike: Like I said with Anita Hill, you've got this cultural shift that leads to all these policy changes underneath it and right now we've got all of this ‘Me Too’ stuff happening against high profile, very, very visible men, but I don't know if we muster policies behind that anymore. You know, it's great that there's so much press attention on this. It's great that this has become such a giant scandal, but we can't rely on press attention to change our laws in the same way we can't rely on court cases to change our laws and if your boss is just as monstrous as Harvey Weinstein, but he's not a movie mogul, he's an insurance adjuster, this ‘Me Too’ moment isn't really helping you. I know other people have pointed this out, but we need to get these policy changes behind these cultural shifts or else there's no point in having them.

Sarah: Do you feel as if we're also living in a time where we have the power to generate great momentum in terms of cultural conversation? And I think we're still extremely prone to this sort of cycle of catharsis and burnout around our big issues and I don't know if we're less prone to that than we were say in the nineties, but we're capable of generating a lot of force, you know, with the media, with the press culturally, with social media, but we're so divorced from government. That's why watching the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary is weird because you have the sense of nostalgia of looking back at a time when, you know, there was a little bit of give or when Orrin Hatch said positive things about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and you're like, “Wow.” There's nothing to be nostalgic for, but it's, you know, being in the daughter party thinking about a really nice piece of toast you had once. 

Mike: I read this fascinating description of the debate over the 1991 Civil Rights Act, and it was fascinating to me how civilized it all was. Republicans wanted a lower cap on punitive damages, and they wanted it to apply to companies with, like, more than 250 employees and the Democrats wanted it to be companies of more than a hundred employees and that was the level that they were debating on. They weren't debating on first principles. It wasn't like “Harassment exists.” “No, it doesn't!” Like, that's what we debate now. It was like, everyone agreed that sexual harassment was bad. Everyone agreed the law needed to be better, but there were these details and some of them were ideological, and it was positions that I don't necessarily agree with, but “well, we need to do something.”

Sarah: Like, let's agree about the conversation we are having. 

Mike: So what did you learn? 

Sarah: Well, I learned there’s just really not very much money in the sexual harassment accusation game although that was never my plan, but there definitely, I mean, $250,000, right? 40% goes to a lawyer. Say 25% for taxes. You end up with a little over a hundred thousand dollars. The worst part of that is that I think of a hundred thousand dollars as pin money in America that you keep around so that you don't die of, you know, some form of cancer that your insurance is like, “Sorry, butterfingers!” You know, like, that's not money that I would even think to do something fun with. It's like, “Okay, now we can all go to the doctor.” you know?

Mike: That's like ‘pay off your student debt and go to the doctor twice’ money. 

Sarah: Right. And then, like, get a smoothie. So I'm not doing that. What did you learn? 

Mike: I learned that David Brock is a huge asshole and… 

Sarah: I did, too. 

Mike: So I want you to go egg his house or something. 

Sarah: Go egg his Anita house.

Mike: I hope Anita Hill has done that, just thrown eggs at his house. 

Sarah: And you know that she would never ever do that. She's probably sitting somewhere in a nice suit, you know, reading a nice book and if it's a library book, she would never dogear a page, even briefly. Like, she's just that kind of woman.