‘Confirmation:’ HBO’s high-tech lynching
Witness HBO’s TV movie “Confirmation,” which aired Saturday, about Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment 25 years ago that almost derailed Clarence Thomas from becoming a Supreme Court justice.
The drama’s makers claim that they didn’t take sides in depicting Thomas’ Senate confirmation hearings, even as a trailer punctuates close-ups of actress Kerry Washington, who plays Hill, with stentorian capital letters: “It only takes one voice ... to change history.”
A number of former female staffers who worked for Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — J.C. Alvarez, Phyllis Berry, Nancy Fitch and Diane Holt — testified that they did not believe Hill’s charge that Thomas sexually harassed her and discussed pornographic films at work.
Stuart Taylor Jr., who covered the 1991 hearings, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Confirmation” also left out Hill’s hard-to-believe story that she followed Thomas from the Department of Education to EEOC because she feared losing her job.
[...] there was no recognition that when Bill Clinton entered the Oval Office a year later, sexual harassment lost its potency as a political weapon.
Female aides’ willingness to prop up errant male Democrats — that phenomenon did not interest the “Confirmation” team, which stuck to a script that confirmed liberalism’s need to be heroic, especially when liberals are anything but.