Joe Biden's non-apology to Anita Hill casts long shadow over 2020 run

After Joe Biden failed once more on Friday to apologize to Anita Hill for his handling of a 1991 Senate hearing at which she testified about being sexually harassed by supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas, questions surged anew.

Related: Joe Biden: Anita Hill not satisfied with former vice-president's apology

Why can’t Biden just issue a straightforward apology? To what extent might the episode trip up his presidential candidacy? And what, exactly, is Biden said to have done wrong at the time?

As he asks voters to choose him over multiple women candidates to run against Donald Trump, a president accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women, Biden has had to respond to complaints of unwanted touching. He has said “social norms are changing” and promised to ‘be more mindful of personal space in the future”.

But according to experts in gender studies and sexual harassment interviewed by the Guardian, his failure to apologize to Hill, in a recent personal call with her and on the national TV program The View on Friday morning, is particularly frustrating and potentially damning.

Hill told the New York Times this week that Biden called her and expressed “his regret for what she endured”. But, she said, it wasn’t an apology.

“I cannot be satisfied by simply saying, ‘I’m sorry for what happened to you,’” Hill said. “I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.”

On The View, Biden did say he was sorry – but not for anything he had done.

“I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated,” Biden said. “I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to try to stop things.”

But analysts questioned whether Biden had, as chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, done everything in his power to protect Hill.

“He was the chairman of the committee and it was up to him to do something, and there’s a kind of passivity about it, even in retrospect, and that’s really upsetting,” said Helena Michie, director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University in Texas.

“Biden has done things since that time – and it has been a long time – on behalf of women, and on behalf of mitigating violence against women. But I think what Hill was saying was that until he takes full responsibility for his role, until he stops saying he wished he could have done something, or kind of underplaying his agency in the structuring of that event, then she’s going to continue to be deeply suspicious of him.”

The event

While it might be hard to believe, given the hyperpartisanship of today’s Congress, in 1991 the Thomas nomination, put forward by Republican president George HW Bush, appeared to be sailing through the Democrat-controlled judiciary committee. At the head of the committee sat Biden, then 51, already in his fourth term as a senator.

Then Hill’s bombshell allegations emerged. She had told the FBI that Thomas, her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sexually harassed her.

“On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess,” she would testify, describing multiple other specific instances of alleged harassment which Thomas denied.

Biden called Hill to testify in an open hearing. What millions of viewers across the country saw was unforgettable: a young African American law professor – Hill was just 31 – facing a panel of mostly aged white men quizzing her about being harassed.

The moment was a generational touchstone, said Amy Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine who conducted a long-running study of views on sexual harassment that surveyed people in their early 20s at the time of the hearings.

“It’s really interesting how many of them noted, without being prompted by me at all, the Thomas hearings as sort of this turning point for them in their consciousness about workplace sexual harassment,” said Blackstone.

“I don’t think that cohort from our sample is unique in any way, at least in that respect. Certainly it was a turning point for many people in the country in terms of our awareness about harassment as an issue, and about the reality that for many women, they’re not alone in that experience.”

The Thomas hearings were further charged by racial politics. Thomas, an African American circuit court judge, had been nominated by Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall, the high court’s first African American justice. In his climactic testimony, Thomas said, in part, “from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned it’s a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks”.

As committee chairman, Biden was responsible for calling and questioning witnesses, for controlling the pace of testimony and cross-examination and for defining the tenor of the hearing. His critics say he failed in each regard, calling witnesses inimical to Hill while failing to call corroborating witnesses, forcing Hill to describe in graphic detail scenes of harassment she had suffered, and in general failing to defend Hill’s vulnerability and to direct the hearing.

“Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged?” Biden asked Hill at one point.

“He absolutely failed at almost every point to take control of the event and to make it dignified and safe for Anita Hill,” said Michie. “The other thing he did is that he made her repeat in detail every sexual allegation in front of this panel. And she said repeatedly, ‘It’s all in writing, you have it all in writing.’ And he would say, ‘I know it’s uncomfortable, but we have to do it.’

“There was really a kind of repetition of the violation, but this time in public.”

Biden has blamed Republican intransigence for the failed hearing.

“To this day, I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us,” he said last month. On The View, Biden credited Hill with creating support for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, watershed legislation he authored to investigate and prosecute violent crimes against women.

“She’s responsible for significant changes and she deserves credit for it,” Biden said.

Hill has been careful about the spotlight. She did not respond to an interview request. But in her public statements and speeches she repeatedly calls for a better process for handling the testimony of victims of sexual violence.

That was her message after the confirmation hearings last year for supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused by Dr Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault. Hill told a group of Pennsylvania students more witnesses should have been called and more evidence allowed.

“Anita Hill really has been just such an amazing leader in terms of speaking out about harassment and getting us to think more deeply about the impact that it has on people,” said Blackstone. “And certainly I am grateful to her for that, as no doubt are many others.”