Even two decades later, the facts are familiar. Anita Hill, also a graduate of Yale Law School, worked on Thomas’s staff at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. According to her testimony, Thomas made a series of crude advances to her, which included references to pornographic movies starring Long Dong Silver and utterances like “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Thomas denied her allegations categorically and denounced the hearings as a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.” On October 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 52–48. Neither the Judiciary Committee nor any other government office has seen fit to reexamine the controversy, although a good deal of evidence has since emerged about the protagonists and their testimony. Near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to corroborate Hill’s testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk.
