Ruth Bader Ginsburg has her own #MeToo too

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confessed that she, like many other women, had her own brush with sexual harassment and gender inequality.

Of the #MeToo movement the 84-year-old Brooklynite said: "It's about time."

"Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is, although we didn't have a name for it," the elderly SCOTUS liberal told a crowd during a forum to promote her new documentary "RBG" at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday. "The attitude toward sexual harassment was simply, 'Get past it. Boys will be boys.'"

Ginsburg told NPR's legal correspondent and longtime liberal friend Nina Totenberg, about an incident that she said occurred when she was a law student at Cornell University in the early 1950s, before most people were born.

Ginsburg spoke about her concerns with her chemistry teacher over her "abilities" ahead of an important exam. He comforted her and told her he'd give her a practice exam to make her more comfortable with the test.

"The next day--on the test--the test is the practice exam. And I knew exactly what he wanted in return," Ginsburg claimed. "That's just one of many examples," she added, without actually giving an example of what happened.

But Ginsburg refused to slough off the professor's inappropriate unexplained gesture. After the exam, she walked straight up to him and confronted him, she said.

"I went to his office and I said, 'How dare you! How dare you, you--" she said without clarifying what the end of her sentence was. "And that was the end of that."

When Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School in 1964, she quickly saw how she was treated differently than her male colleagues. 

Because Rutgers was a state school in New Jersey, she knew she'd be taking a pay cut, but when the dean told her how big a cut, she was mortified. She asked a male colleague who had graduated from law school about the same time as her what he was being paid and the difference was quite substantial.

"Ruth, he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York," the dean responded.

That was the very year the Equal Pay Act had passed," Ginsburg said. "That was the answer that I got."

So the Women's March on Saturday was never about equal pay and equal rights for women--it's now law, just like protection from harassment in the workplace is law. 

The Women's March was actually an anti-Trump march because that's the main issue women really care about.


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