US law professor Anita Hill takes the oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington DC on October 11, 1991 before testifying against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas
(JENNIFER LAW)

Washington (AFP) – In 1991, a visibly uncomfortable law professor named Anita Hill swore to tell the truth before an all-male panel as she levelled detailed allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Nearly three decades later, the stage is set for another eerily similar high stakes, high profile showdown: this time, Christine Blasey Ford, a research professor from California, is preparing to testify against conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s pick for the nation’s highest bench, after accusing him of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers.

The public hearing, scheduled for Monday, has sent a feeling of deja vu through the US capital, and in the context of the #MeToo movement, has raised the obvious question: will this time be different?

Hill herself expressed skepticism, observing in a New York Times opinion piece Tuesday that lawmakers appeared to have “learned little from the Thomas, much less from the more recent #MeToo movement.”

But she added: “With the current heightened awareness of sexual violence comes heightened accountability for our representatives.”

On October 11, 1991, Hill faced a grilling over her accusations that Thomas, her boss in the 1980s, repeatedly made sexually explicit remarks to her at work over an extended period of time.

Thomas, who was president George H.W. Bush’s pick and like Hill is black, flatly denied the allegations and denounced the proceedings as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”

The hearings reached some 20 million American homes as Hill’s testimony was met by palpable skepticism from the 14 white men on the Senate Judiciary Panel, who spent much of the three-day event probing her credibility.

“Are you a scorned woman?” she was asked. “Did you have a militant attitude towards civil rights?”

“How reliable is your testimony?”

Thomas ultimately prevailed by a narrow vote of 52-48, and sits on the Supreme Court to this day.

But though Hill lost her fight, she became an inspiration to many Americans.

The following year was dubbed “The Year of the Woman,” as 1992 saw a record number of women voted into office.

And in the years to come the number of workplace sexual harassment complaints doubled.

Now, 28 years after Hill, another academic is following suit.

– A new era? –

Ford, a 51-year-old psychology researcher has accused Kavanaugh, 53, of sexually assaulting her at a party in the 1980s.

She says that Kavanaugh and one of his friends — both “stumbling drunk” — pinned her down, groped her and tried to pull off her clothes. When she tried to scream, she said, Kavanaugh covered her mouth.

Ford said she managed to get free and fled the house.

Like Hill, Ford initially sought to preserve her anonymity and her accusations leaked to the press, as the nomination process was well underway.

And again like Hill, she took a lie detector test at the request of her lawyer to prove her credibility.

And perhaps the strongest, though perhaps most predictable, similarity: like Thomas, Kavanaugh strongly denies the allegations.

Next Monday, Ford and Kavanaugh will face the same committee Hill and Thomas did — but the United States of 2018 is not that of 1991.

The number of women elected — although still markedly lower than that of men — has increased, and the judiciary panel now includes four women senators.

And the #MeToo movement has sparked a national conversation over entrenched sexual violence and gender inequality, triggering the ouster of dozens of men from power positions since Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s fall in October 2017.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican, canceled Thursday’s vote considering Kavanaugh’s nomination, saying “anyone who comes forward as Dr Ford has done deserves to be heard.”

And senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway said Ford should neither be “insulted” nor “ignored.”

But whether she will be taken seriously remains an open question.

Many Republicans and conservative voices have already labeled the proceedings a last-ditch bid to derail Kavanaugh’s court appointment.

Writing in the Times, Hill said the fact that the committee “still lacks a protocol for vetting sexual harassment and assault claims that surface during a confirmation hearing suggests that the committee has learned little from the Thomas hearing, much less the more recent #MeToo movement.”

“The public expects better from our government than we got in 1991,” Hill said, emphasizing that her own hearing “gave employers permission to mishandle workplace harassment complaints throughout the following decades.”

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