Justice Thomas, Undaunted

What if the left threw a high-tech lynching and no one came? It happened this spring, although you probably didn’t notice. On April 16, HBO aired Confirmation, a docudrama version of Justice Clarence Thomas's 1991 Senate confirmation hearings​—​more specifically, of Anita Hill's sexual harassment accusations against her former boss and mentor. It flopped.

At first glance, Confirmation seemed a strange choice to receive the full HBO treatment. The film attempted to turn a 1994 book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's Strange Justice, into a major 2016 television event. As the book's title suggests, Mayer and Abramson set out to construct a compelling anti-Thomas case out of themes that had failed to convince the Senate and the American public in 1991. Even the New York Times's book reviewer, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, noted skeptically upon its release that Strange Justice took "a fragile hypothesis and then buil[t] a monumental case out of it."

Yet, two decades later, HBO​—​and many of Thomas's critics​—​seemed to think they had a hit on their hands. Strange Justice was adapted for the screen by Susannah Grant, who received an Oscar nomination for her Erin Brockovich script. True to Mayer and Abramson's approach, Confirmationpresented Hill as a courageous truth-teller, a task assisted by the choice of actress to play Hill: Kerry Washington, of ABC's Scandal, one of television's trendiest and most attractive stars.

HBO screened the movie at a party on Paramount's lot, where everyone could revel in the moment. "The film is a lot about courage and being up against forces that feel more powerful than you," Washington told Women's Wear Daily. Senator Barbara Boxer agreed wholeheartedly: "I think the overwhelming power of the film is just how much courage it took [Hill] to stick with it," she told Variety. "The taunting, the way she was treated by my colleagues in the Senate."

The real guest of honor on the Paramount lot was Hill herself, who later appeared on NBC's Today to stress the importance of HBO's upcoming broadcast. "It's important for us, I think, to relive the story and continue to learn the lessons from it," she told Savannah Guthrie, who beamed while lobbing softball questions.