AMERICA:An interview about events in the 1980s is a big headache for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his loyal wife, writes LARA MARLOWE
A LOYAL wife should think twice before attempting to defend her husband’s impugned honour, Ginni Thomas, a fundraiser for the right-wing Tea Party and the spouse of the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, learned this week.
Thomas's telephone message to her husband's accuser has revived a two-decades-old, racially charged controversy about sexual harassment and ethical standards, bringing one of Clarence Thomas's former mistresses out of the woods in a damaging interview published yesterday by the Washington Post.
In 1991, Anita Hill, who like Clarence Thomas is African-American, testified against her former boss in Senate confirmation hearings. Hill said Thomas repeatedly asked her on dates, and described pornographic films to her. His wife Ginni, who is white, sat in the hearing room in tears.
Fast forward to 7.30am on Saturday, October 9th, 2010. Ginni Thomas, now 53, called the office telephone at Brandeis University of Prof Hill, now 54, and left the following message: “Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology some time and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. Okay, have a good day.”
Commentators have noted the incongruousness of “have a good day” at the end of such a blast from the past, and suggested it was Thomas who should have apologised to Hill.
Hill waited a week before asking the Brandeis campus police to convey the message to the FBI. On October 19th, a public relations firm hired by Ginni Thomas issued a statement confirming that she placed the call “extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get passed (sic) what happened so long ago”.
Yesterday, the Thomases were hit with a bombshell in the form of an interview by Lillian McEwen (65), a former US attorney and Senate judiciary committee counsel, who dated Thomas from 1981 until 1986. Clarence Thomas, now 63, had cited his steady relationship with McEwen to counteract Hill’s accusations.
McEwen never spoke out before, in part because she was afraid of damaging her own legal career. She has now retired, and is looking for a publisher for her memoirs. Clarence Thomas “was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners. It was a hobby of his,” she told the Washington Post. “He was obsessed with porn. He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films.” Thomas was particularly interested in large-breasted women in his office, and told McEwen he asked one employee her bra size.
McEwen’s interview corroborated testimony by Angela Wright, who worked under Thomas as public affairs director at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Wright said that Thomas asked her “What size are your breasts?” as they walked into an EEOC meeting.
Thomas was appointed by Ronald Reagan to chair the EEOC in 1982. He was both gamekeeper and poacher; the EEOC is supposed to prosecute sexual harassment cases. He remained at the EEOC until George H W Bush appointed him as a judge in 1990.
In other evidence of Thomas’s sexual predations, Sukari Hardnett, Thomas’s special assistant in the mid-1980s, wrote a letter to the judiciary committee saying, “If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned” by Thomas.
Hill and at least four other sources have said Thomas tried to seduce women with a joke about a pubic hair on his Coke can.
At the time, Thomas described himself as the victim of “a high-tech lynching” and claimed Anita Hill acted “as a result of the complexion of the woman I dated and the woman I chose as my chief of staff”. McEwen, his mistress at the time, is a light-skinned African American.
US media have speculated that Ginni Thomas’s strange early morning telephone call was prompted by a front-page New York Times article suggesting that her role as founder of Liberty Central, a new non-profit group dedicated to fighting the “tyranny” of the Obama administration and to supporting the Tea Party movement, posed ethical problems for her husband.
Clarence Thomas has not excelled as a Supreme Court justice. USA Today reported this month that he has not asked a question in oral arguments in more than four years.
Last January, Thomas voted for the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which has allowed groups – including his wife’s organisation – to make campaign contributions without disclosing the identity of donors. The ruling was criticised by President Obama in his state of the union address. Obama has continued to condemn the secret funding of right-wing candidates in the mid-term election campaign.