Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Virginia Thomas, Professor Anita Hill
It has been 19 years since Anita Hill testified against her former boss Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capital Hill, claiming that she was the victim of sexual harassment while employed as his attorney-advisor and special assistant.
In a bizarre twist to the decades old controversy, the wife of Justice Thomas opened a can of worms a week ago with a voicemail message to Professor Hill, requesting an explanation and apology for her husband.
Anita Hill received the strange message at her Brandeis University office and did nothing with it for a week, uncertain if it was really from Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist who heads Liberty Central. Hill eventually turned the voicemail over to campus police, requesting that they forward it to the FBI.
The message said: “Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas. I just want to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”
Hill issued a press release: “I certainly thought the call was inappropriate. I have no intention of apologizing because I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony.”
According to Hills sworn testimony in 1991, Thomas engaged in provocative and harassing sexual language beginning in 1981 while she worked for him at the U.S. Department of Education and the behavior continued when she followed him to his next job as Chairman of the EEOC.
Her Senate testimony indicated that Thomas made references to scenes in hard core pornographic films, and other sexually explicit comments. Thomas vehemently denied the allegations and called it a “high-tech lynching” that was intended to prevent him from being seated on the Supreme Court. In his autobiography, he professed to being incapable of doing what Hill said he did.
Lillian McEwen, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who dated Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980’s, is working on her own memoir and plans to detail her relationship with Clarence Thomas. She alludes that her experience with him was more consistent with Hill’s account than with Virginia Thomas’s perceptions of her husband.
She said: “The Clarence I know was certainly capable not only of doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then.”
Virginia Thomas released this statement: “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we would ultimately get past what happened so long ago. That offer still stands, I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same.”
More photos and video below: