Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says No

QueEx · Oct 20, 2010

<center>
Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail
Asking for An Apology --
Hill Says No</center>

ABC News
Jake Tapper, Ariane
de Vogue and KGO’s
Mark Matthews report
October 19, 2010 6:50 PM

A few days ago, Brandeis University professor Anita Hill received a message on her voice mail at work.

“Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas,” said the voice. “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 sometime 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 come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”

Hill didn’t think the call was real.

“I initially thought it was a prank,” Hill told ABC News. “And if it was, I thought the authorities should know about it.”

She reported the call to campus police.

Mark Matthews of our affiliate KGO learned about this and reached out to Virginia Thomas.

Thomas e-mailed him, saying: “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 could ultimately get passed 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. Certainly no offense was ever intended.”

Hill told ABC News: “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. I simply testified to the truth of my experience. For her to say otherwise is not extending an olive branch, it’s accusatory.”

She continued: “I don’t apologize. I have no intention of apologizing, and I stand by my testimony in 1991.”

Hill remembered that when Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography was released in 2007, Ariane and Jan Crawford interviewed the Thomases.

ABC: “When you thing about Anita Hill … was she a pawn, was she a liar?”

Justice Thomas: “I really don’t care enough — let me be honest with you. I went through that during the hearing. I thought about it. I really don’t care. What I care about is that the responsible people didn’t put an end to this nonsense.”

Virginia Thomas: “I think there’s a lot of theories, but I hope she once day calls up and apologizes and I look forward to forgiving her. … I’m sure she got swept up into something bigger than she may have understood at the beginning of whatever she was doing, but I think she owes us an apology and I look forward to receiving that phone call or that visit one day. “

“So this isn’t new territory,” Hill told ABC News.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalp...email-asking-for-an-apology-hill-says-no.html

QueEx · Oct 20, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

One can only imagine what went through Hill's mind when she checked her messages at Brandeis University, where she teaches, and heard this:

Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny 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 sometime 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 come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day.

Hill says that she assumed the message was a prank — so she called campus security. And after learning that the message was seemingly genuine, Hill tells ABC News that "it was in no way conciliatory for her to begin with the presumption that I did something wrong in 1991. I simply testified to the truth of my experience. For her to say otherwise is not extending an olive branch, it's accusatory."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...e-reportedly-requests-apology-from-anita-hill

thoughtone · Oct 20, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

What a couple!

QueEx · Oct 20, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

<center>

For Those Who Don't Know

Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas: The Backstory

</center>

<IFRAME SRC="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/20/national/main6975679.shtml" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/20/national/main6975679.shtml">link</A>

</IFRAME>

QueEx · Oct 21, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says


I keep thinking . . .

Why is the woman (Virginia Thomas) still so angry after 19 years ?

Why ?

Maybe thre is a clue in her voicemail:

"Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny 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 sometime 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 come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day."

If she is angry about what Anita said at her husband's Confirmation Hearing, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought Anita slandered her husband, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought Anita was trying to destroy her husband's reputation, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought Anita was somehow seeking revenge for being shunned by her husband, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought Anita was just being spiteful, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought Anita Hill was jealous and just wanted to keep her husband off of the Supreme Court, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

If she thought that Anita Hill was just doing the business of the Democrats to disparage her husband, she would have said: "what you did TO my husband."

But, Virginia Thomas said: what you did with my husband.

 with my husband

`

QueEx · Oct 21, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

`

Whether Ginni Thomas expected her call to Hill to become public is not known. But it had at least one consequence that she probably did not anticipate:

It prompted a former girlfriend of her husband's, who had kept her silence since the 1991 controversy, to say publicly that she found Hill's testimony credible.

Lillian McEwen, a retired administrative law judge who said she dated Clarence Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980s, told The Washington Post: "The Clarence I know was certainly capable of not only doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then."

QueEx · Oct 25, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

<center>
Clarence Thomas's credibility at issue again
</center>

p o l i t i c o
By JOSH GERSTEIN
October 22, 2010

The phone call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife placed to Anita Hill earlier this month seeking an apology for Hill’s allegation 19 years ago that Thomas sexually harassed her may go down as a textbook lesson in unintended consequences.

With a single voice-mail message, Virginia Thomas managed to rekindle interest in a story many Americans no longer remember or never heard about — and set in motion a series of events that could seriously undermine her husband’s credibility and damage his long effort to distance himself from his controversial confirmation to the court.

Conjuring-Up The Old Girlfriend

After years of refusing interviews, Lillian McEwen, a former girlfriend of Thomas’s, agreed to talk to The Washington Post and appeared to corroborate Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Thomas's nomination that he had a keen interest in pornography and sometimes made sexually suggestive comments to women in the workplace — allegations that Justice Thomas has always denied.

She reiterated that point in an interview with Rebecca Cooper, reporter for Washington's ABC affiliate, WJLA-TV.

“He was obsessed with pornography,” McEwen told ABC 7/WJLA-TV. “It was something he talked about quite frequently.”

McEwen also confirmed reports that Thomas asked a colleague about her bra size and that he was a regular at a Dupont Circle shop that offered pornographic films.

“The owner of the store stocked Clarence’s preferences behind the counter,” McEwen said.

Former Girlfriend: Virgina May Hot have Had All The Facts

McEwen said that Virginia Thomas may not have had all the facts about her husband when she approached Hill last week seeking an apology.

“Clarence should know that [Hill] doesn’t owe him an apology, but it’s not something he would have necessarily communicated to his wife,” McEwen said. “I would tell her to have a conversation with her husband and get the truth out of him, but the chances of that happening are not great.”

A Supreme Court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas had no comment on McEwen’s account.

McEwen, who has worked as a prosecutor, a defense attorney and an administrative law judge for the Securities and Exchange Commission, maintains she had a romantic relationship with Thomas from 1981 to 1986.

<center>She said she did not speak out in 1991 in part because she
was still friendly with Thomas, but also because she
suspected neither Hill nor Thomas was being entirely honest. </center>

“I felt that neither was telling the truth because I had always assumed that Clarence had had a sexual relationship with her,” McEwen said. She conceded, however, that she had no proof of such a relationship.

McEwen said she was persuaded to break her silence this week in part because she has written a book about her life and is looking for a publisher. She insisted she harbored no ill will toward Thomas but simply sees no reason to keep quiet at this point.

“The reason I am talking now is because I have retired, I have reflected on my life since I have retired, I have written a book about my life which happens to include him in it. The book may never have been published,” she said. “Why would I let other people write about me?”

A spokesman for Brandeis University, where Hill currently serves as a professor, said she is declining all interviews.

“If all the women who were kept from testifying were allowed to testify, it would have made a difference. If everyone had heard all the accounts, it would have begun to ring very differently,” Ross said. “But Biden made the decision to limit it to people who knew Thomas in the employment sphere.”

McEwen, who once worked for Biden on Capitol Hill, said the senator was well aware that she had been romantically involved with Thomas. She also said Biden was not as tough on Thomas as he could have been.

“I made sure that the senator knew about the relationship that I had with Clarence and that he also knew that Clarence was a frequent visitor to our office in the Russell Building,” McEwen told ABC 7/WJLA-TV. “Clarence is a very charming person. I always thought that Sen. Biden was charmed by Clarence and, as a result of that, did not pursue matters that could have been pursued.”

A spokeswoman for Biden said he had no comment on McEwen’s story.

Radio host Armstrong Williams, a longtime defender of Thomas, said McEwen and Thomas were “very good friends.” Williams said he likes McEwen and would not attempt to dispute her story, even though he’d seen no indication that Thomas had a penchant for pornography or making odd sexual comments. “There was nothing in his behavior that would ever make me believe that,” the radio host said.

“It saddens me to see these things resurrected again, but it was resurrected by [Thomas’s] wife,” Williams noted. “Obviously, sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.”

Thomas’s televised confirmation hearings, at which he complained of being a victim of “a high-tech lynching,” riveted the country in the fall of 1991. In response to Hill’s testimony, he told the committee:

“If I used that kind of grotesque language with one person, it would seem to me that there would be traces of it throughout the employees who worked closely with me, or the other individuals who heard bits and pieces of it on various levels.”

In the phone message that Virginia Thomas left Hill on Oct. 9, she asked Hill “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.”

Ross said she was baffled by Virginia Thomas’s decision to reignite the long-dormant fight. “I can’t understand why she would do such a thing. It can only hurt her husband,” Ross said.

Williams also seemed surprised at what has happened in the past two weeks. “Nineteen years later, [McEwen] felt the need to tell this story, just as his wife felt the need ... to call Anita Hill,” said Williams. “These are some strange events.”

He said the renewed debate would be painful for Justice Thomas, but that ultimately the recent disclosures won’t have much impact.

“Some people who have supported him in the past may have questions, but people will get to pick their sides and stake out their positions, and nothing’s going to get him to leave. He’s staying on the Supreme Court, and he’ll be there, I think, until they drag him off for old age,” Williams said.

(ABC 7/WJLA-TV is owned by POLITICO parent company Allbritton Communications)

http://www.bgol.us/board/newreply.php?do=postreply&t=535514

QueEx · Oct 25, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

QueEx said:


But, Virginia Thomas said: what you did with my husband.

 with my husband

`

Lillian McEwen, Thomas’s former girlfriend said:

“I felt that neither was telling the truth because I had always assumed that Clarence had had a sexual relationship with her,” McEwen said. She conceded, however, that she had no proof of such a relationship

Is that, as Virginia Thomas complains, "what you did with my husband ???.



`

QueEx · Oct 25, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

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thoughtone · Oct 25, 2010

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

I saw the Lillian McEwen article. I refrained from posting it because at this point it is conjecture. His word against heir's. He said, she said.

However, Clearance is obviously not over Ms. Hill. You know what they say: "Once you go Black...!" :lol:

QueEx · Oct 6, 2011

Re: Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says

Hill's story hits newsstands Friday

That was an event in my life, not who I am. I’m a friend, daughter,
sister, teacher. I’m in a relationship (with a Waltham, Mass. Busi-
nessman) that’s been wonderful for 10 years – longer… I’m happy,
and I still have a voice.”

— Anita Hill opening up to People magazine about testifying against
Clarence Thomas 20 years ago. The interview hits newsstands
Friday.

Virginia Thomas Leaves Anita Hill a Voicemail Asking for An Apology -- Hill Says No

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