Anita Hill says Christine Blasey Ford hearing ‘cannot be fair,’ demands ‘real investigation’

The woman who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment decades ago said Thursday’s hearing on sexual-misconduct accusations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh “cannot be fair.”

Anita Hill, now a professor of social policy, law and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University, said the hearing at which Judge Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford are slated to testify needs to be preceded by an outside investigation.

The eventual hearing would also have to include “experts on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” Ms. Hill told National Public Radio.

But as is, the hearing cannot give senators “enough information to reach a reasonable conclusion,” she said adding that only a “real investigation” by a “neutral body” can provide that.

“It’s only that kind of a situation, if it’s set up as that kind of a situation,” she told the show “All Things Considered” about the concerns of an impossible-to-prove “he said, she said” situation.

“In a real hearing and a real investigation, other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well as experts on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” she claimed.

Republicans are resisting Democratic demands for an FBI investigation as a mere delaying tactic. Ms. Blasey Ford has gone back and forth with the Senate Judiciary Committee on the terms of her testimony, demanding at times that only senators could question her, that Judge Kavanaugh not be able to rebut her or be in the room at all, and bypassing deadlines for a final “yes or no.” And whether Deborah Ramirez, who also claims that a young Judge Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct against her, would testify at all remained at best uncertain Tuesday afternoon.

Ms. Hill similarly made salacious claims about then-Judge Thomas that, like with Ms. Blasey Ford’s claims about Judge Kavanaugh, were first made privately to lawmakers, then leaked to the press after the Judiciary Committee held hearings on the the man’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Also like Judge Kavanaugh, Justice Thomas emphatically denied the charges and was backed by numerous female co-workers who said his accuser’s claims were out of character for the man they knew. Justice Thomas famously called the new hearing a “high-tech lynching.”