In 1991, Anita Hill introduced testimony and scandal into America’s dwelling rooms in the course of televised Senate affirmation hearings within which she targeted the sexual harassment she had suffered by the hands of Clarence Thomas. The male Senate Judiciary Committee refused to take Hill heavily, and the veracity of Hill’s claims have been sullied within the mainstream media. Hill used to be defamed as “a little bit nutty and a bit of slutty,” and Thomas was once proven. The tainting of Hill and her testimony are a part of a bigger social heritage during which ladies locate themselves stuck up in a process that refuses to think what they are saying. The Anita Hill case exhibits how a tainted witness isn't really who an individual is, yet what a person can become.

Tainted Witness elucidates how power and pernicious styles of doubt connect to girls who deliver ahead money owed of sexual and racial violence. Reactions to Anita Hill’s testimony in addition to Rigoberta Menchú’s account of genocide in Guatemala, modern memoirs that chronicle stories of gendered and racialized violence, and information tales like Nafissatou Diallo’s declare that Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped her, exhibit the reflexive strategies of judgment that discredit women’s advanced debts of injury, either in felony courts and courts of public opinion. The sped up pace of scandal is important to tainting ladies witnesses. the frenzy to judgment encourages framing testimonial conflicts by way of who's telling the reality and who's mendacity, with the presumption that this is often an enough and significant testimonial try. this type of framing, even though, prevents witnesses from offering sufficient context for his or her testimony and particularly elides histories of slavery and colonialism. Leigh Gilmore examines what occurs whilst women’s testimony is discredited, but in addition strains the flow of testimony past the body of scandal and its means to undergo witness anew.