Clarence Thomas survived his confirmation hearings and now sits on the Supreme Court, right? Nine top legal jobs in a nation of about 350 million people though less at that time) and he got one of them--after the Hill passed a lie detector test.
Anita Hill had not volunteered to testify. In the course of the government's doing diligence on Thomas, however, one of the women interviewed mentioned that anyone investigating Thomas should speak to Anita Hill, so they did.
Anita Hill had been a very credible witness. Other women corroborated her claims by tales of how Thomas had behaved toward then. Thomas made no attempt to refute a single one of her allegations, instead lashing out at the proceedings. Clarence Thomas was also evaluated as the second least qualified SCOTUS nominee in modern time. (The first was Sandra Day O'Connor, who was graduated from law school when women could only get jobs as legal secretaries--which she did, but before affirmative action. Thomas, on the other hand, had had the benefit of affirmative action throughout.)
Media goaded both Hill and Thomas about taking a lie detector test. Thomas, of course, did not take one. Hill did.
On Sunday, October 14, 1991, Anita Hill's representative announced that she had passed a lie detector test that week, given by a man who had worked with the FBI. The test included the subject matter of her allegations about Thomas. Those facts were immediate and widely reported by media--a media whose message is much less diluted than today's media. On Monday, October 15, 1991, the Senate confirmed.
Granted, the margin was narrow, but the vote was along party lines, so who knows what accounted for that. Bottom line, Thomas got to be one of nine humans in the U.S. with the final say over things like sexual harassment in the workplace.
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