Justice Ginsburg Details Her Own Harassment: ‘For So Long, Women Were Silent’

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sunday detailed her own experiences with sexual harassment and pay inequality—and shared her thoughts on the growing #MeToo movement—during a talk at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is, although we didn't have a name for it,” Ginsburg said, noting an encounter when she sought assistance from a chemistry teacher at Cornell who gave her an identical copy of a real test in place of a practice exam. “I knew exactly what he wanted in return,” she said, noting that she quickly “went to his office and said, ‘How dare you? How dare you do this?’ And that was the end of that.” On the #MeToo movement, she said: “It’s about time. 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.”