Justice Ginsburg supports #MeToo movement and tells of harassment
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking at Stanford University in 2017. Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg supported the #MeToo movement in an interview Sunday and said she has had her own experiences with harassment.
In an interview with NPR journalist Nina Totenberg at the Sundance Film Festival, Ginsburg told of an experience she had while a college student at Cornell, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Washington Post and CNN report. Ginsburg was at the film festival in Park City, Utah, for the premiere of a documentary about her life called RBG.
Ginsburg said she told her college chemistry instructor she was uncomfortable with some of the material. He gave her what he said was a practice exam. But when Ginsburg took the test the next day, she realized the professor gave her the actual test. “And I knew exactly what he wanted in return,” Ginsburg said.
Ginsburg said she deliberately made two mistakes on the exam. Then she confronted the instructor.
“I went to his office and said, ‘How dare you?’” Ginsburg said. “And that was the end of that.”
At the time, Ginsburg said, the attitude toward sexual harassment was, “Get past it. Boys will be boys.”
Ginsburg supported the #MeToo movement in the interview.
“I think it’s about time,” she said. “For so long women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it. But now the law is on the side of women or men who encounter harassment, and that’s a good thing.”
Ginsburg has fought for women’s rights throughout her career. She argued six gender-discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won five of them.
