TIME HEALS all wounds--but not for Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Nearly 20 years ago, Thomas' Supreme Court nomination hearings made headlines when his former colleague Anita Hill testified about multiple occasions of his alleged sexual harassment.
Putting the issue of sexual harassment in the national spotlight, Hill was treated particularly badly by those in the Senate who cross-examined her--and was accused of everything from being mentally unbalanced to being a scorned woman. Columnist David Brock, for example, referred to Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty"--and later admitted that he and other conservatives were part of a campaign to smear Hill in order to ensure Thomas a place on the Supreme Court.
And it wasn't just Republicans attacking Hill. Vice President Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, prevented witnesses who could have corroborated Hill's allegations that she was sexually harassed by Thomas from testifying. Biden later lamely explained, "There was in fact a concern about whether or not to make the guy look stupid--what would happen if you embarrassed him."
Recently, however, Clarence Thomas' wife Virginia "reached out" to Hill--incredibly, to demand an apology from Hill.
On October 9, Virginia Thomas, now a leading Tea Party activist, apparently left a message on Hill's answering machine at her home in Waltham, Mass.
In what the New Yorker's Jane Mayer calls "a singsong voice," Virginia Thomas said:
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 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, now a law professor at Brandeis University, turned the phone message over to campus police. Meanwhile, Virginia Thomas explained to the New York Times that, "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 past what happened so long ago," she said.
Sure, because being sexually harassed and then raked over the coals in front of Congress about it is really something a person should "get past."
