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Home • News

Anita Hill Points Out The One Thing We're Missing In Donald Trump’s Sexual Assault Remarks

Anita Hill wrote an op-ed on “what we can still learn from sexual harassment.”
Anita Hill Points Out The One Thing We're Missing In Donald Trump’s Sexual Assault Remarks
Brad DeCecco for ESSENCE
By Toni Akindele · Updated October 26, 2020

In an op-ed written for The Boston Globe, Anita Hill addresses Donald Trump’s sexual assault remarks.

Hill – who twenty five years ago today, testified in front of the Senate that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her while she worked for him at the Department of Education – wants people to start focusing on the victims of sexual violence and not their perpetrators.

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“What I learned in 1991 is no less true today and no less important for people to understand,” Hill wrote. “Responses to sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence must start with a belief that women matter as much as the powerful men they encounter at work or at school, whether those men are bosses or professors, colleagues or fellow students.”

Hill believes one major theme has been absent from the discussion surrounding Trump’s resurfaced audio recordings.

“Missing from the conversation this weekend, which focused almost exclusively on the character of the offender,” she wrote, “was concern about the victims of sexual violence.”

She also makes it clear that the ‘president will be boys’ rhetoric that Trump and his campaign is using to defend his actions and words, just isn’t going to cut it.

“To excuse it as [‘locker room banter’] or as youthful indiscretion or overzealous romantic interest  normalizes male sexual violence,” asserts Hill.

Read Hill’s op-ed in entirety here.