The Weekly Screed (#904)

Mechelle, Anita and Uncle Joe 

By David Benjamin

“I said, ‘I don’t want to go to bed with you’ And he says, ‘Just like I hired you, I’ll fire you. Just like I made you, I’ll break you, and if you don’t do what I say then I’ll have you killed.’ … And that’s how it started.”

                                                               — Mechelle Vinson

MADISON, Wis. — Joe Biden has fumbled his way into a sexual politics controversy that seems inescapable, after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. In this case, as usual, the media’s attention is misdirected.

Yes, Biden actually did touch those women, laying his hands on their shoulders, kissing the backs of their heads, embracing and rubbing them. People who know and like Biden tend to agree that he’s both affectionate and respectful toward women, but also a mite too touchy-feely. No one claims that Uncle Joe’s physical contact ever escalated to sexual harassment or intimidation. However, there’s a growing consensus that his chronic tactility disqualifies him as a presidential candidate in the 21st century.

I agree, but I don’t think the issue should be women like Lucy Flores and Caitlyn Caruso, whose brief encounters with Biden made them “uncomfortable.”

The issue is Anita Hill. In 1991, Joe Biden, as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, led an all-white, all-male inquisition into Prof. Hill’s testimony about a sexually-charged hostile environment created by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who had been her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In that case, Biden was neither affectionate nor respectful toward that woman, or women in general. He allowed the worst of his sexist fellow senators to grill Prof. Hill with insulting and intimate questions about “women’s large breasts,” about her sex fantasies and “Long Dong Silver,” pubic hair and sex with animals, about her deviant psychology as a “scorned woman” and “civil-rights militant” with a “martyr complex.”

Then the Committee endorsed Thomas and he won the narrowest Court vote in history, 52-to-48. Biden voted against him.

Some eight years later, I met Anita Hill and immediately launched into a discussion of an unsung feminist heroine named Mechelle Vinson. It was Ms. Vinson who made Prof. Hill’s charges against Clarence Thomas both feasible and believable. It was Ms. Vinson’s quixotic legal action against her abusive boss that led to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that defined the concept of a hostile work environment based on unwelcome sexual advances. Anita Hill, who teaches law, knew well the case of Vinson v. Meritor Savings Bank. I might’ve known the case a little better.

In the mid-1980s, I wrote a book about ethical dissenters (the popular term is “whistleblowers”) called Fatal Integrity, that my publisher decided was too prickly to print. It included a long chapter on the ordeal of Mechelle Vinson. I interviewed Mechelle at her home in Washington D.C. and flew to California to talk with Patricia Barry, the lawyer who refused to give up the case even after a federal district court ruled that Ms. Vinson had “dressed provocatively” and was, essentially, asking for it.

Mechelle Vinson, a victim of abuse by her father and her ex-husband, was still a teenager when she started working as a teller trainee at Capital City Federal Savings Bank (later renamed Meritor). A few months later, her boss, Sidney Taylor, offered Mechelle a deal she hadn’t oughta refuse: Either spread your legs or you’re fired.

Bewildered, accustomed to being used and abused by men, Mechelle gave in. This led to four years of what her attorney called “sexual slavery,” including a number of rapes that left Mechelle torn, bruised and bloody. Worst of all, she walked into work every day scared to death.

When I talked to Mechelle, a petite woman with a deep hurt in her eyes and a steely determination to get her measure of justice, her case was still in limbo. She had lost in district court and was appealing to the D.C. Court of Appeals.

That court reversed the initial judgment against Mechelle even though two of its soon-to-be-famous members, Antonin Scalia and Robert H. Bork, insisted that Mechelle was an ungrateful slut harassing her boss.

As I discovered with all the ethical dissenters I met while working on my ill-fated book, Mechelle Vinson’s life was shattered. Just getting someone to believe her story was an exhausting ordeal that wiped out her meager resources and stifled her future. Her first lawyer, bought off by the bank, betrayed her. She found herself quietly and implacably shunned by every institution that sides with the rich and powerful against the young, the black, the poor and the female, against the bewildered and defenseless.

I prefer to think the main reason that Mechelle Vinson eventually prevailed, despite her odds, was that she was telling the truth. Of course, the truth, as we all know, has no standing in the law. But her case tilted in her favor because, after eight years, fifty rapes and a thousand insults, nine judges—Warren Burger, Thurgood Marshall, Byron White, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor and William Brennan—could not honorably call Mechelle a liar and deny the evil that had been done to an innocent girl who just needed a job.

Justice Rehnquist, the conservative who wrote the majority opinion in Mechelle Vinson’s favor, quoted an earlier case in the 11th Circuit: “Sexual harassment which creates a hostile or offensive environment for members of one sex is every bit the arbitrary barrier to sexual equality at the workplace that racial harassment is to racial equality. Surely, a requirement that a man or woman run a gauntlet of sexual abuse in return for the privilege of being allowed to work and make a living can be as demeaning and disconcerting as the harshest of racial epithets.”

Nevertheless, five years later, Joe Biden and the Senate Judiciary Committee, after listening to Anita Hill’s brave and painful testimony about the “gauntlet of sexual abuse” imposed on her by Clarence Thomas, dismissed her as a fantasist, a self-styled martyr, a vengeful bitch and liar.

In 1991, fourteen men contrived to give Anita Hill’s persecutor, a mediocre jurist with a filthy mind, a lifetime seat on the highest court in America. In doing so, Uncle Joe and the boys opened the door—a generation later—to the déja vu humiliation of Christine Blasey Ford and the installation of a second sexual predator on United States Supreme Court.

The Anita Hill hearing and its consequences are a stain on Joe Biden’s legacy and a threat to women in America that no apology can expunge.

Biden has often expressed his heartfelt support of women by fatherly hugs and chaste kisses, by rubbing their shoulders and patting them on the back. Fine, but what they really need from Joe, perhaps in honor of Mechelle Vinson, is for him to gracefully give up his presidential dream. 

Then, if he really wants to atone, he can help one of them expel from the White House the sexual predator who  lives there now.