Virginia Thomas, Clarence Thomas’s tea partier wife, apparently left a voice mail message last week for Brandeis law professor Anita Hill. “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” she apparently said. (Hill testified against Clarence, a former co-worker, during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings and said that he had sexually harassed her, talked about porn, and left a pubic hair in her Coke made a strange joke about pubic hair in his Coke. The justice later called the hearings a “high-tech lynching.”)
Hill originally thought the voice mail was a joke, and referred it to campus security. But nope, it’s real! Virginia issued a statement today, explaining that she “did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get passed [sic] what happened so long ago.”
It’s probably not going to change the situation. “Even if it wasn’t a prank, it was in no way conciliatory for her to begin with the presumption that I did something wrong in 1991,” Hill told ABC News. “I don’t apologize. I have no intention of apologizing, and I stand by my testimony in 1991.”
What could have possibly provoked Mrs. Thomas into calling, out of the blue, at 7:31 on a Saturday morning to rehash the events of 20 years ago? Surely it can’t have anything to do with the fact that the New York Times ran a scathing front-page story that very morning about how her Tea Party activism could, as the paper puts it, “raise judicial issues.”
Random fun fact: Secretary of Homeland Security and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano was one of Hill’s lawyers during the hearings.
Virginia Thomas’s Message For Anita Hill [News Desk/TNY]
Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology—Hill Says No [Political Punch/ABC News]
