For a world-famous woman who changed the face of modern America, Anita Hill has a surprisingly modest office: a few book-lined shelves, as befits a university professor, a plain desk and a couple of chairs. The only clue to her celebrity status is a prominently displayed photograph in which she stands, in a dazzling turquoise evening gown, alongside a beaming Bill and Hillary Clinton.
"I'm a very private person," she confides softly, hands folded in her lap. "Yet people often approach me and express their feelings about what happened - at the airport, at the Home Depot [a big US retailer], even in the ladies' bathroom."
Anita Hill lost her anonymity for ever in October 1991 when she accused Clarence Thomas, a prominent fellow African-American, of sexual harassment. Thomas was the choice of then president George Bush for a vacancy in the US Supreme Court. Her televised testimony before the Senate at Thomas's confirmation hearings was electrifying. In a clear, steady voice, she told how in the early 1980s, when he was her boss as head of the equal employment opportunities commission, Thomas had subjected her to lurid tales of the pornographic videos he had watched and boasted repeatedly about the size of his penis.
In the most famous incident she recounted, he had waved his drink at her, demanding, "Who has left a pubic hair on my Coke can?" Testifying after Hill, Thomas vehemently denied the allegations. Playing the race card, he claimed that "interest groups" were using Hill to subject him to a "high-tech lynching".
The potent mix of sex, gender and race caught the public imagination around the world. Thirty million viewers heard Anita Hill's testimony, sparking an intense debate about sexual harassment at work. When the virtually all-male, all-white Senate voted by a four-vote margin to confirm Thomas's nomination, women of every age, race and class were furious. In 1992, official complaints of sexual harassment rose by 50% and a record number of women were elected to Congress, many standing in part on an Anita Hill platform.
The toll on the woman at the centre of the storm, however, was unbearable. The hearings quickly degenerated into a trial in all but name: not for Thomas, but for Hill. She was accused by Republican senators of lying and being an erotomaniac, obsessed with fantasies about Thomas. Their henchmen even besieged students at the University of Oklahoma, where she had become the first African-American female professor, with fruitless inquiries about whether she was a lesbian.
In the months and years that followed, she received several death threats, and the vilification by rightwing politicians and commentators continued. In 1995 the New York Times referred to her as "Oklahoma's open wound". A year later, despite the support of fellow staff and students, she felt forced to leave her job, and consequently her home.
Today, in the calm, cloistered environs of Brandeis University, just outside Boston, Hill's turbulent past seems distant. She talks enthusiastically about her family and work - as a professor of law, social policy and women's studies - and happily confesses to being a "yoga bore".
And yet the past won't let go. The confession last month by rightwing journalist David Brock that he had made up much of a hostile 1993 "biography" of Hill made headlines in Britain and America. "I killed Anita Hill and I'm sorry," Brock facetiously declares in a press release for his new book Blinded By the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.
Hill, however, is very much alive and kicking. She looks much younger than her 45 years and is impeccably dressed. Not a line marks her face, despite the fact that she has suffered more slings and arrows than anyone might reasonably expect in one lifetime. How does she explain her resilience? "I think that in many ways women or people of colour are prepared all their lives for very stressful, pressured experiences. I never expected to find myself in such an extreme and intense situation, but my whole life as a female and an African-American has prepared me for the ultimate test. Although I hope," she adds with an infectious laugh, "that it was the ultimate test, that there's nothing else like that in store for me!"
There is considerable steel under the soft exterior, which no doubt stood her in good stead. When we met she had rebuffed the pleadings of dozens of journalists, from The Larry King Show down, to respond to Brock's sensational admission. Of his revelations - how they vindicate her, how they might harm Clarence Thomas's judgeship - she says that she will respond in her own time. "Of course I have a reaction, but I want to discuss how I feel with my family, friends and associates before I decide whether to make it public."
Her life has clearly been changed by the constant media attention generated by the trial. How else has its course been altered? "Well, in some ways things are not so different. I was a professor then, and I'm a professor now, although I would probably have stayed with commercial law rather than teaching gender studies, which I love. But I've also been able to make some good, positive choices about my life which wouldn't have been possible without the hearings." Prominent among these choices is her high- profile role as a public speaker, as part of which she delivers at least two lectures a month on sexual harassment and its impact on society to America's decision-makers.
She is anxious, however, not to give the impression that in hindsight the hearings were "good" for her. Rather, she says, "the odds were just as high or higher that I would not be doing OK today". So I put to her the question that she is most often asked about the "trial" and its aftermath: what got her through?
"First, my family, to whom I'm very close and, second, all the letters of support I received from people who had had similar experiences. Immediately after the hearings, polls were showing that 70% of Americans believed I lied under oath. I was walking into supermarkets and realising that seven out of 10 people at the checkout thought I had perjured myself, and it was a very strange feeling to come to terms with.
"But then I started receiving thousands of letters, from America and across the world. My opponents had made my behaviour seem absurd, but in these letters real people were telling me that my experience was not isolated, it was common. They helped keep me sane." To date she has received 40,000 letters. "Occasionally I run into people who say, 'I wrote to you 10 years ago,' and that's great because I get to say thank you face to face."
Hill's 1997 memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, interweaves her family's turbulent history with her own life story. Her account of how her grandparents fled white hostility in 1914 Arkansas in search of a better life in Oklahoma, found instead the Ku Klux Klan, yet thrived against the odds, is deeply moving. Does she see parallels in her own struggle with the white, male, Republican establishment?
"Dealing with racial hostility has not just been a lifetime of struggle for me [she met prejudice from students in her first teaching posts], it has been a generational struggle for my family. The best thing that came out of the book was to talk to my family about our story and to share it with the public, because I think it's a true American story."
In the winter of 1991, she says, "I felt like my whole world was collapsing around me, but my supportive and wonderful family kept me going." Ten years on, her family - parents in their 90s and 12 siblings - are still her mainstay. She goes home two or three times a year and is in constant phone contact. "If anything, I've become even closer to my siblings. They still get questions about the hearings and that binds us together."
Looking back, would she have done anything differently? "Oh gosh, I try not to live my life that way. Not through hindsight. At the time I did the best I could and, yes, I would do it all again. Some people have said I should have brought a sexual harassment suit against Thomas immediately after I left the EEOC in 1983, but I'm not sure I would have got very far in the climate of the time."
She says she doesn't think about Thomas much these days. But she is clearly dismayed that he is ruling on the key issues, such as last year's contested presidential election, that mould the American social and political landscape. "He got thebenefit of the doubt from African-Americans and I don't believe he deserved it. None of the things he has done on the Supreme Court has convinced me that he'll be a champion of civil rights."
More positively, she is deeply proud of her contribution to bettering the lot of working women. Her testimony, she says, had an "immeasurable" impact on awareness of sexual harassment, forcing the male establishment to stop looking the other way. The figures bear her out: between 1991 and 1996, cases more than doubled, while payouts quadrupled to $27.8m (£19.6m). "Women still have quite a way to go. But it's harder for an employer to get away with things these days."
Does she think the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a case of sexual harassment by a powerful president? "No, because whether she was deluding herself or not, Monica Lewinsky genuinely believed it was an equal, consensual relationship."
Notwithstanding all the good things in her life, Hill still leads an abnormal existence. She never attends public events alone, her phone number isn't listed and her house has top security. Wherever she goes she is treated almost as public property. "I haven't had a hostile encounter in a long time, though I can never rule that out. One guy who wrote to me from prison got out, found out where I lived, and thought we had some kind of relationship going. Recently, someone else came up to campus a couple of times asking for help from me and the campus police got nervous and checked him out."
Somehow, with winning humour, she seems able to see the funny side of her situation. "I was renovating my house and the guy in the salvage yard said, 'You look like Anita Hill - but she'd be a lot older.' I told him who I was and we had a good laugh!"
Ask about the future, however, and her face saddens. "One of the down sides is that, because my world changed so dramatically, it's very hard to look too far into the future. It's something I have to work on."
She lives alone in a small, picturesque New England town, near her office. New Englanders, she says, are less instantly neighbourly than Oklahomans, but she likes the way people in Massachusetts are more politically engaged than southerners.
Her parting words are upbeat. "I am happy and single, although I hope one day I can be married and happy, too." If anyone deserves a happy ending, Anita Hill does.
