Twenty-five years after her accusations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas spurred a landmark Senate hearing about sexual harassment, Anita Hill has spoken out about Donald Trump’s lewd remarks caught on tape. In an op-ed published Tuesday, Hill warned that shrugging off Trump’s remarks as “locker room” talk would only “normalize male sexual violence.” At the same time, she said more focus should be placed on the victims of sexual harassment. “At virtually every dinner table this weekend, people talked about what should happen to Donald Trump’s political ambitions,” Hill wrote. But “how many of them talked about Arianne Zucker, the young woman in the leaked video who Bush cajoled into hugging the same two men who had just joked about forcibly kissing her? Did she know she was the butt of a sexual gag?” “Trump’s language, which he and others have tried to minimize... is predatory and hostile,” she warned, stressing the importance of not simply letting Trump off the hook. Noting how alarming it is to see “large swaths of Americans believe this to be even vaguely defensible,” Hill stressed that Trump’s comments must be condemned “so this doesn’t happen again to the next generation.”
