Politics

Anita Hill Says She Could Vote For Biden After Refusing To Forgive Him

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Anita Hill says that she would consider voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden in the general election despite her unwillingness to accept Biden’s apology for how he treated her during her 1991 testimony at Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing.

“Of course I could,” Hill responded on Thursday when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked if she could conceive of voting for the former vice president in the event that he faced President Donald Trump in 2020.

Hill testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 that Thomas sexual harassed her while she worked under him at the Department of Education and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Biden’s participation in the hearing, during which he served as the committee’s chairman, has garnered renewed scrutiny in light of the “Me Too” movement.

Biden defended his decades-old line of questioning in April, noting that he didn’t treat her badly, but rather “took on her opposition.”

“What I couldn’t figure out how to do — and we still haven’t figured it out — how do you stop people from asking inflammatory questions?” he said. “How do you stop these character assassinations?”

Hill contended that Biden is “absolutely not” on par with Trump and there is no moral equivalency between the two. However, when Biden reached out to apologize subsequent to his presidential announcement, Hill publicly responded that she was not “satisfied” with his apology.

“I’m not sure anything I’ve said has actually hurt Joe Biden’s campaign,” Hill told Mitchell. “He still is leaving in the polls against Donald Trump and really all of the other candidates on the Democratic ticket, so I’m not sure that I buy that I have actually hurt him.”

“What I do want to do though is to make the public aware of the urgency of this issue. We’ve had years now to grapple with it, grapple with this as a society,” she continued. “I think we’ve come to a good place and we need to take advantage of this moment and address the problems.”

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