Clarence Thomas News

Lillian McEwen, Others, Back Up Anita Hill On Clarence Thomas

9:10 am EST October 22nd, 2010 | Conservative, History | 45 Comments

Clarence Thomas

At the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings, Lillian McEwen’s relationship with Clarence Thomas was cited by defenders as a rebuttal to Anita Hill’s testimony against him:

To McEwen, Hill’s allegations that Thomas had pressed her for dates and made lurid sexual references rang familiar.

‘He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,’ McEwen said matter-of-factly. ‘It was a hobby of his.’”

…

“He was obsessed with porn,” she said of Thomas, who is now 63. “He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.”

McEwen added that she had no problem with Thomas’s interests, although she found pornography to be “boring.”

According to McEwen, Thomas would also tell her about women he encountered at work. He was partial to women with large breasts, she said. In an instance at work, Thomas was so impressed that he asked one woman her bra size, McEwen recalled him telling her.

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However bizarre they may seem, McEwen’s recollections resemble accounts shared by other women that swirled around the Thomas confirmation.

Angela Wright, who in 1984 worked as public affairs director at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — which polices sexual harassment claims — during Thomas’s long tenure as chairman, shared similar accounts with Senate investigators.

Once, when walking into an EEOC seminar with Thomas, he asked her, “What size are your breasts?” according to the transcript of her Senate interview.

Her story was corroborated by a former EEOC speechwriter, who told investigators that Wright had become increasingly uneasy around Thomas because of his comments about her appearance.

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Another woman, Sukari Hardnett, who worked as a special assistant to Thomas in 1985 and 1986, wrote in a letter to the Judiciary Committee that “If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female” by Thomas.