This will not go away

A very compelling movie about the 1991 Supreme Court of Justice Nomination Hearings.

Yale University Law Professor Anita Hill came forward to tell the world that Judge Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her 20 years back, when they worked together in two offices.

Sexual harassment cases in court are inevitably caught in the he-say-she-say whirlpool of accounts. The most ridiculous reasons of indictment, narratives that anger the public, but the grand jury still votes otherwise. It happens just too often. But when it comes to Nomination Hearings at the Senate, for which there is no judicial verdict of being guilty or not, it becomes pure political drama.

Evidence and witnesses can be ignored, rather, dismissed completely. Council members can make long biased speeches, present 'evidence' as absurd as the novel "The Exorcist", and tailor the proceedings of the hearings to their best interest.

When it happened on live television in 1991, who did you believe? Have a go at the movie. I am very sure you will find a lot of things that did happen but you did not notice, because you were too focussed on "Long Dong Silver" and "High Tech Lynching".

There is no surprise to the ending of this story. It is forever a part of Supreme Court history that Judge Clarence Thomas was confirmed as Associate Justice. But the impact remains. The movie acknowledged how votes for senators swayed towards female senators in the succeeding election, and how the general public was reeducated about sexual harassment not simply being an act but can also be an intention.

There are also the negatives that follow. At his current seat as Associate Justice, Clarence Thomas was accused of multiple incidents in which he should have recused himself, but did not. Thomas was also caught in the delicate matter of disclosure of funds, specifically on the account of his wife. The excuse he gave was embarrassing. He claimed that he did not understand the reporting form.

Allow me to boldly conclude that Clarence Thomas hijacked the term "High Tech Lynching" because he saw the opportunity. He was in an era when race was an uneasy topic, especially in politics. Today, after 25 years, we see much more clearly that it should have been about his integrity, and not his race. But we are disheartened still. Words like "erotomania" flood the table to discredit all accusations, because ultimately, it is not the truth that is important, but the political agenda.

This movie is a clairvoyant reminder, as the US presidential election approaches, that everything we are about to experience might just be a reinvention of the game of politics; we might never know how we reached our conclusions now, until some 25 years later, a movie reenacts it for us to examine.