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interesting....
"The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas’s nomination to the full Senate on a vote of seven-to-seven. In mid-October, on the eve of the Senate’s final vote on Thomas, his confirmation looked like a sure thing.
Meanwhile, as the chances of defeating the Thomas nomination grew smaller, both the press and the groups working against him grew ever more vigorous in their search for material to use against him. Employees at the EEOC reported getting repeated phone calls from journalists and Thomas opponents explicitly asking for “dirt.” On Sunday, October 6, after the Senate Judiciary Committee had voted to send the Thomas nomination to the Senate, Newsday and National Public Radio reported that for a month the committee had had in its possession an affidavit from a woman named Anita Hill making charges of sexual harassment.
Thomas supporters protested the introduction of a new charge against him, after so many other accusations had been leveled and failed, on the very eve of the confirmation vote. Thomas opponents said that because not much was known about the charges, the vote should be postponed and Hill’s story given a more thorough airing.
But the opponents said a great deal more as well. They claimed that the Senate, by its treatment of Hill, had already demonstrated men’s outrageous indifference to the welfare of women and the fundamental incapacity of male elected officials to give proper political representation to their female constituents. If the Senators went ahead with their floor vote on Thomas as scheduled, they would compound the insult.
The anger of Thomas’s critics drove out respect for procedural traditions and niceties. The Judiciary Committee had considered Hill’s charges privately, in agreement with Hill’s expressed wishes; but someone on some Senate committee staff decided that he or she was morally justified in overriding these rules of confidentiality and leaking Hill’s affidavit, either directly to the press or to an intermediary, and subjecting both Hill and Thomas to a public airing of the issue.
After the leak, Thomas’s supporters said that because he was to be effectively put on trial, he should be given the presumption of innocence: Hill should have to come up with some solid corroboration of her claim. Thomas’s opponents dismissed this idea, explaining that since sexual harassment often took place in private, an absence of corroborating evidence was only to be expected. Asking for the conventional presumption of innocence under this circumstance would be nothing other than a fancy version of “blaming the victim.”
The opponents evidently calculated that by bathing the whole affair in the light of publicity, they could undo the Judiciary Committee’s verdict. And indeed, at first they seemed to succeed. But in the end, they succeeded too well. They forced a public event that featured Hill and Thomas facing off against each other directly and individually. They provided Hill with a phalanx of lawyers to match Thomas’s White House handlers. They created, in other words, a forum that strongly resembled a criminal trial."
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