Whether Joe Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill, nearly three decades ago, will continue to cloud his Presidential campaign likely depends on how contrite he is. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

As the Times reported this week, shortly before Biden announced his candidacy, on Thursday, he called Hill and, according to a statement from his campaign, conveyed “his regret for what she endured.” Biden evidently hoped to neutralize any lingering political damage from his chairing of the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings where Hill accused Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually harassing her. Thomas forcefully denied her account. As Biden presided, the hearings devolved into a shocking showdown in which Thomas and his defenders did all they could to degrade Hill’s character and destroy her credibility, accusing her, with no real evidence, of being a liar, a fantasist, and an erotomaniac.

The hearings uprooted the rest of her life. A cautious law professor who had initially declined to testify when first contacted by the Senate, Hill was transformed into a symbol and catalyst for the #MeToo movement in support of sexual-harassment victims, decades before it had a name.

Biden’s recent, half-hearted condolence call to Hill, and his subsequent statements, however, have reignited rather than quelled the controversy. Hill told the Times that she believed the issue isn’t politically disqualifying for Biden but that he needs to take more responsibility for the damage done not only to her but to other sexual-harassment victims. She drew a connection between her experience and that of Christine Blasey Ford, whose credibility was similarly assailed when, during the Senate confirmation hearings of another Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, Ford was impugned as she testified that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school. In Hill’s view, Biden had “set the stage” for the hearings in which Kavanaugh, like Thomas, was narrowly confirmed after his defenders trashed his accuser’s credibility and dismissed her allegations without a thorough investigation.

Rather than heeding Hill’s call for a fuller mea culpa, Biden instead dug himself in deeper during a visit to ABC’s morning show “The View,” on Friday. Predictably, Biden was asked if he should have given Hill a fuller and more personal apology. Biden again stopped short of blaming himself, saying, “I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules.” He then added, “I don’t think I treated her badly.”

Biden failed to acknowledge that, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, he set many of “the rules” that damaged Hill and determined the over-all fairness of the process. As Jill Abramson and I reported in our 1994 book about the Thomas confirmation fight, “Strange Justice,” several of Biden’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate later acknowledged that, in his eagerness to be impeccably fair to all sides, Biden got outmaneuvered by the Republicans. That left Hill and, ultimately, the truth undefended. As Howard Metzenbaum, a crusty Democrat from Ohio, later admitted, “Joe bent over too far backwards to accommodate the Republicans, who were going to get Thomas on the Court come hell or high water.” An adviser to Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts liberal whose own womanizing eroded his credibility, was more critical still, saying, “Biden agreed to the terms of the people who were out to disembowel Hill.”

Even one of the top lawyers on Biden’s Senate staff at the time, Cynthia Hogan, now faults their handling of the hearings. As she admitted this week to the Washington Post, “What happened is we got really politically outplayed by the Republicans.” Hogan, now the vice-president for public policy for the Americas at Apple, explained that Biden had wanted to be seen as a neutral arbiter, while the Republicans instead wanted to win. “They came with a purpose, and that purpose was to destroy Anita Hill. Democrats did not coordinate and they did not prepare for battle. I think he would say that that’s what should be done differently.”

This meant that from the moment rumors first reached the Senate, in the summer of 1991, that Thomas had sexually harassed Hill when he was her supervisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she was left open to political attack. In contrast, Thomas had the full-throated defense of George H. W. Bush’s White House and Republican members of the Senate, and an array of conservative political groups also rallied to the nominee’s defense.

Thomas’s defenders portrayed Hill as having carefully plotted to bring him down, but, in fact, she twice declined to discuss her allegations with Senate staffers when they contacted her. Eventually, she agreed to do so out of a sense of “duty” to tell the government the truth. She also agreed to share her story only if her name was kept confidential, and with the understanding—which proved false—that her account was one of several such allegations the Senate was investigating.

Biden wasn’t alone in the Senate in underestimating the seriousness of Hill’s charges. When Metzenbaum first heard Hill’s account that Thomas, as her boss, pressured her for dates and subjected her to graphic sexual conversations, he told a reporter that half the Senate also was guilty of sexual harassment.

The staffers working for Metzenbaum and Kennedy, however, took Hill’s allegations more seriously and were the first to reach out to her. They urged Biden’s staff to talk to Hill as well. But the effort languished in Biden’s office, where his staff followed his personal rules, which went beyond those of the Senate. The aide who investigated the claim, for instance, declined to call Hill, requiring that Hill instead initiate contact. Once they spoke, the aide declined to act on Hill’s allegation unless Hill consented to Biden’s office confronting Thomas directly and disclosing Hill’s name to him. Hill, who hadn’t asked for any of this, demurred. Biden’s aide concluded that Hill had merely wanted to “get it off her chest.” The public, meanwhile, heard nothing about it.

Talk of Hill’s allegations spread on the committee, however, and as it reached other Democratic senators, they worried they would be accused of a coverup. Democrats then pressed Biden to take action, which he did, asking the F.B.I. to get statements from Hill and Thomas. The statement from Thomas was a surprise. Biden’s office expected him to say that there had been a misunderstanding between the two. Instead, Thomas categorically denied Hill’s accusations, leaving Biden in the uncomfortable position of having to take sides. Clearly, either Thomas or Hill was lying.

Meanwhile, Hill sent a statement describing Thomas’s sexual harassment of her to Biden’s staff. On September 27, 1991, the Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote on Thomas’s confirmation, sending it to the rest of the Senate for final approval. Unexpectedly, the committee split evenly, showing more opposition to Thomas than expected. The public still knew nothing. But when Biden himself voted against Thomas in committee, he made a cryptic public statement warning against the idea that Thomas’s character should be an issue. “I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all,” Biden said, “and that is his character. This is about what he believes.” Further, Biden admonished, “I know my colleagues will refrain, and I urge everyone else to refrain from personalizing this battle.”