I was 25 years old at the time, the same age as Professor Hill when she worked for Judge Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I was only six months into my job as an on-air reporter for a network affiliate in Philadelphia. Like Professor Hill, I, too, lacked a resume. I, too, loved my job. On the day in question, a station news executive and I traveled by train to New York so that I could receive a George Foster Peabody Award for my work on a documentary on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s visit to China. I delivered an earnest and self-conscious acceptance speech to the media heavyweights gathered in the gold-trimmed room. At one point, I momentarily lost my composure and my newly acquired American accent when I mentioned that only a few years before, I did not even speak English. But through it all I basked in the warm glow of my peers’ approval. It should have been a proud day for a neophyte reporter. It did not turn out that way.

My executive escort, seemingly bristling with pride (it was the first time a local Philadelphia television reporter had won the coveted Peabody), invited me and a childhood friend from Budapest to the Russian Tea Room to toast the event. The hours passed in a happy haze. “Isn’t it time we headed for the Metroliner back to Philadelphia?” I asked the executive around nightfall. Having said goodnight to my friend, we walked to the limousine my colleague had hired for the occasion. But the car did not follow the familiar route to Penn Station. Without a word of prompting, the limo pulled up in front of the Hilton hotel. Too astonished and too intimidated to muster anything like a firm protest, I found myself following the executive into the hotel elevator. “I only want to get to know you better,” he explained. “To talk to you.”

And talk I did, with the feverish urgency of a drowning person clinging to a life raft. I saw talk as my only escape from certain disaster, a compromise between humiliating the man to whom I owed my career and my own revulsion at the situation he had placed me in. So I talked about my childhood, embellishing and dramatizing, in the manner of a stand-up comic auditioning for the big time. By midnight I had run out of steam and stories so I prodded him to talk about his life, his troubles. It was the most exhausting tap dance of my life, but it was the only way I could think of to deflect this man from pursuing what I assumed to be his own objectives. There was no time to even wonder how in God’s name he presumed this was where I wanted to spend the proudest night of my short career. What gave a man with whom I had exchanged one handshake-and that on the day I was hired–this right? He assumed that right, I, loving my job, thinking I got it only by a stroke of luck, became his accomplice by not walking out, by not even voicing outrage. I did not have the nerve.

Belittling comments: At dawn, he finally drifted off to sleep and I made my bleary-eyed way to the train and to Philadelphia. Toward evening, as I faced the bright lights of the studio cameras, I saw him just arriving to work. He looked then all memories of the previous day’s brief moment of glory had been supplanted by other memories. Irrational feelings of guilt regarding my conduct began to nag at me. Had I given the wrong signals? He seemed such a nice, square sort of family man. And why had I not walked out on him? The minute a woman decides to stay and stay silent, in her own mind at least, she loses the moral edge. Like thousands of women in newsrooms, offices and factories, I had swapped the moral edge for job security. I did not think I had the luxury of choice in the matter.

I suppose the executive felt sure I would never talk about his abortive attempt at seduction. He was right. I never have, until now. Nor have I let myself take much pride in that hard-won Peabody Award, fearing that the other memories would rush in beside them. But hearing Professor Hill’s taut recitation, accompanied by the belittling comments of certain members of the gentleman’s club on Capitol Hill, forced me to mentally revisit that room in the Hilton. Professor Hill’s dignity did not mask the lasting humiliation that is the inevitable residue of such moments.

There is more than personal catharsis at stake in owning up to this long-suppressed incident. I am writing this not only because the memory would not let go. I am writing because Professor Hill’s voice moved me to do so. I wanted to say to the Senate panel, “Look, I know why she stayed on with the man who insulted her. So many of us have been there, not liked ourselves for it, but have stayed.” And there is another impulse to my speaking out now. If men and women alike pronounce such degrading episodes unacceptable, perhaps our daughters might be spared similar choices in their professional lives. No one should have to purchase job security at so high a price.