Anita Hill, who once accused Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings in 1991, said on MSNBC’s “TheReidOut” on Friday that President Joe Biden needed to do more than just apologize for the past.
Hill asserted Biden needs to put together a plan to eliminate sexual harassment.
Hill said, “There has been greater awareness of the problem of sexual harassment and all gender violence over the past 30 years and, you know, that is tremendous. We shouldn’t overlook that. However, when we witness the Kavanaugh hearings, you are correct. It was just like nothing ever happened.”
Anchor Joy Reid said, “If we put back up the list of people on the Judiciary Committee at the time that Clearance Thomas was approved, you can see at the top of the list is a guy named Joe Biden then a senator from Delaware and chairman of the committee. He’s now president of the United States. He, of course, wrote the Violence Against Women Act and the response responsible for that being passed and fought for that act. Have you had and had the opportunity to have conversations with the president either before he was elected for president or since about this very issue, about what can be done to make things actually begin to change? And if you have, can you tell us what he had to say?
Hill said, “Yes, well, I had a brief conversation with him before he announced his presidency or run for the presidency. And he did apologize for the way he managed the hearing in 1991. What I need to hear now and I think what the American public needs to hear given his role in ’91, even given his role with the Violence Against Women Act and the efforts on college campuses to stop sexual assault, all of those put him in the position to be a leader for change, to be a leader that acknowledges the enormity of that problem and I mapped the enormity out and the pervasiveness of it throughout the institutions. Given the reality of today, it’s no longer acceptable just to apologize for the past. What we need to be doing is looking to the future and acknowledging the problem and putting together an agenda to eliminate it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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