On Thursday, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show invited Brandeis University professor of Women's Studies Anita Hill on his program to promote the new documentary Anita, released March 14th, which chronicles events in 1991 when she nearly halted the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court with accusations of sexual harassment from ten years earlier when the two were employed at the EEOC. The Senate found Thomas innocent of Hill's charges.

The extended interview lasted a total of 13 minutes and Stewart, as speculated previously, asked Anita Hill zero hardball questions that could have raised doubt on her side of the story such as: why she waited ten years after her time at the EEOC to bring the allegations against Thomas forward; why her testimony regarding the alleged offense became more detailed only after she met with her attorneys, not during her initial testimony to the F.B.I; why phone records proved she called Thomas several times once they "no longer had contact;" why several women who worked closely with her and Thomas at the EEOC, including his assistant, testified before the Senate on Thomas' behalf; why no woman has accused Justice Thomas of misconduct during his 23-year tenure on the Supreme Court. Instead, Stewart treated Hill like a victim as if her story were undisputed fact. Here's the transcript:

Stewart: Thank you so much for joining us. It is hard for me to believe the Clarence Thomas hearings were over 20 years ago.

Hill: Right, almost 23 and, as I say, I've lived every day of those 23 years, some of them easier than others. When I started to do this film, it was about four years ago, I realized an entire generation of people had been born since the hearings and they were going to go into the workplace, universities, and military; and they were going into a different place than what I went into. They didn't really know how we got to that place. So this movie really is about looking at our history and learning from it.

Stewart: it was interesting, you know, just the little clip, what struck me, and I remember it so viscerally watching those early hearings was ... just the optics of it. There was this panel of 14 old white dudes, and there they are, and they were vicious to you, many of them, and you sat there, a black woman -- and I think that -- that visual even is what shook some people up and maybe woke them up to what power dynamics may look like.

Hill: What power dynamics may look like and, also, what a failure to have a representative body in the Senate actually results in. It results in processes that are being held that are just completely uninformed by reality of peoples' lives. You had people in the Senate saying, "Sexual harassment- what is this? None of us know anything about this." You had women throughout the country saying, "How could you not know about this very real thing that happens in our lives? In your own wives' lives or daughters' lives?"

Stewart: Even in the Senate, I'm sure some of them would go back and talk to their staffers and say, "What is this stuff?" The staffer might be thinking to themselves, "It's that thing you do to me every morning."

Hill: Even if they acknowledged that it happen, they refused to acknowledged that it mattered, and that it mattered to the very process that they were engaged in -- determining whether or not a person should be on the Supreme Court actually making and passing judgment on the very same laws.

Stewart: Exactly

Hill: So it was really, it did have a surreal feel, and I'm sure that there are people who will look back today, once they watch the film. and they'll say, "Could that be only 22 years ago?"

Stewart: Oh, it feels anachronistic to what you would imagine, you know, 1991 was not that long ago.

Hill: It's not. It doesn't feel that long ago to you and me, but a generation of people who don't even know that it happened are now going into work and experiencing this. They see the signs now that say sexual harassment is prohibited, but they don't know how it got there.

Stewart: And what drew a highlight to it, because the laws were on the books, but I don't think anybody paid attention to them until this case brought it all to light and it was like looking under a rock.

Hill: And it was the people who started talking about it, and sharing their stories, and pushed it even further than perhaps it ever would have gotten had it not been for those hearings, but unfortunately, what we know is that the problems continue. I just think that we're at a point now, with the benefit of 22 years of hindsight and perspective, that we're at a point now where we can move to that next level. So we know sexual harassment is wrong. We know it exists. So do we have the right processes in place to get women coming forward and men coming forward.

Stewart: I think it's a constant struggle and it's one that continues to evolve, but i think it ebbs and flows when there's attention drawn to it. You know, minority shines a light on something, it gets better for a little bit, soon as the light goes off, they all come back.

Hill: Well, the trick has been just to keep the light shining. [smile]

In the second half of the interview, Stewart asked Hill about the personal trauma she suffered after experiencing so much "venom" at the hands of the Senate. Hill simply stated she's proud of what happened, because the hearings, in her mind, rallied women to stand together and say "enough."