Twenty-six years before anyone had heard of sex-harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer or Charlie Rose, there was Anita Hill.

Sitting on her own under the glare of television cameras, facing a Senate judiciary committee comprised of 14 white men and no women, she told a story that's now become a familiar refrain in the media.

Then a professor at the University of Oklahoma law school, Hill described being sexually harassed by a former boss, Clarence Thomas, when they both worked at the U.S. Department of Education.

Thomas, a relatively inexperienced judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, had been nominated by then president George H.W. Bush to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was the highest court's first judge of African ancestry and this was Thomas's confirmation hearing.

Hill told the committee that initially, she had a positive working relationship with Thomas.

"I thought he respected my work and trusted my judgement," she testified.

But she claimed that after he asked her to go out socially and she declined, he kept asking her out and then repeatedly sexually harassed her.

"My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex," Hill testified. "On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports of education issues or projects."

But after a brief discussion of work, she claimed, Thomas "would turn [the] conversation to a discussion of sexual matters".

The chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Joe Biden, asked Hill to recall the most embarrassing incident.

"I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography involving women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals," Hill replied. "That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated."

Next week, Hill will speak at a free event at UBC in an event jointly presented by the urban studies program, Social Justice Institute, Peter A. Allard School of Law, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, and the Sauder School of Business.

Entitled "Gender, Race, and Power in the Academy", it takes place at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday (April 3) at UBC Woodward IRC 2.

Back in 1991, Americans were riveted by Hill's testimony, just as they were by Thomas's subsequent denial of any wrongdoing.

The judge opened his testimony with these remarks to Biden: "Senator, I would like to start by saying unequivocally, uncategorically, that I deny each and every single allegation against me today that suggested in any way that I had conversations of a sexual nature or about pornographic material with Anita Hill—that I ever attempted to date her, that I ever had any personal sexual interest in her or that I, in any way, ever harassed her.

"A second, and I think more important point, I think that this, today, is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee. It was then leaked to the media. And this committee, and this body, validated it and displayed it in prime time over our entire nation."

Thomas went on to describe the hearing as "a circus", "a national disgrace", and most famously, "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who, in any way, deign to think for themselves, do for themselves, to have different ideas".

"It is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you," Thomas declared. "You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree." 

The Senate judiciary committee was split 7-7 on whether to approve Thomas's confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. It passed the Senate by a 52-48 vote, the narrowest in U.S. history, thanks to Thomas receiving support from several Democrats.

And the contradictions between the testimony of Hill and Thomas led to years of debates between liberals and conservatives over which one of them was telling the truth.

The controversy also hurt Biden politically because his handling of this issue did not impress some people.

Before Thomas was about to speak, Biden said in a comforting tone that it had been a "tough day and tough night" for the judge.

Biden's questioning of Hill also struck some as insensitive. This was particularly so when he was interrogating her claim that implicit in Thomas's discussions about sex was, in fact, an offer to have sex with him. 

The New York Times reported in 1991 that Biden "at times appeared to be leaning in favour of the nomination". In the end, Biden opposed it along with six other Democrats on the committee.

In 2015, Biden told Teen Vogue that he feels that he owes Hill an apology over what happened.

Since then, some have openly wondered if Biden's "Anita Hill problem" could derail any attempt to secure the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 2020.

In December, Biden finally got around to apologizing to Hill, fuelling speculation that he's interested in running against Donald Trump.

For her part, Hill told PBS's Gwen Ifill in 2016 that she doesn't regret stepping into the spotlight to draw attention to the issue of sexual harassment.

"I would do it again," Hill, how a professor at Brandeis University, said. "Many people do remember it vaguely but I run into people all the time who remember it vividly."

In December,Variety reported Hill telling an audience at the National Women's Law Center that if she were to deliver the same testimony today, "more people would believe my story."

“I don’t think of 1991 and 2017 as isolated moments in history,” Hill said, according to Variety. “I see them as part of an arc, and an arc that has been been bending towards justice.”