Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised the #MeToo movement, and shared her own experience of sexual harassment
- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg extolled the #MeToo movement and shared a personal experience of sexual harassment at Sundance Film Festival on Sunday.
- Ginsburg spoke at a Q&A in advance of the debut of "RBG," a documentary on her life and career.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised the #MeToo movement and shared a personal experience of sexual harassment in a conversation at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday.
"I think it's about time," Ginsburg told moderator Nina Totenberg of the #MeToo movement, which has seen many women come forward with accounts of sexual misconduct in recent months. "For so long, women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could about it. But now the law is on the side of women or men who encounter harassment, and that's big thing."
The 84-year-old justice, a 25-year veteran of the Supreme Court, was at the festival for the debut of "RBG," a biographical documentary of her life and career as a prominent women's rights lawyer, leading toward her Supreme Court appointment in 1993.
"Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is though we didn't have a name for it then," Ginsburg said, before, as CNN notes, sharing a personal incident of sexual harassment as a student at Cornell University in the 1950s.
Ginsburg said she was preparing for a chemistry test when her instructor offered "a practice exam." She said she found out the next day the practice exam was actually the real test. "And I knew exactly what he wanted in return," she said. "And that's just one of many examples."
"The attitude towards sexual harassment was 'get past it, boys will be boys.' This was not considered anything you could do anything about, that the law could do anything about," she continued.
She said that she did not ignore the incident with her college instructor, but instead confronted him at his office later and said, "'How dare you? How dare you?' And that was the end of it."
When Totenberg asked about the justice's health at 84 years old, Ginsburg said it was "very good," to a round of applause.
"As long as I can do the job full steam, I will be here," she said.