Ginni Thomas: Why did she call Anita Hill?

“What was she thinking?” That’s what everybody was asking last week, said Jenice Armstrong in the Philadelphia Daily News, after it was revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni, had picked up the phone at 7:30 a.m. one recent Saturday and left a voice mail for Anita Hill. “Good morning, Anita Hill,” said Thomas, a longtime conservative activist. “I would love you sometime to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” She was referring, of course, to her husband’s confirmation hearings 19 years ago, whic.h were dominated by Hill’s lurid allegations that he had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a federal agency. The subsequent testimony—including claims that Thomas regaled Hill with the exploits of a porn star named Long Dong Silver—was so humiliating that Thomas indignantly called it “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” We’ve all fantasized about demanding an apology “for some perceived, long unresolved wrong,” said Karen Heller in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “But we don’t act on these impulses.” And for good reason. Hill thought the phone call was a prank and turned it over to the police and the FBI—and Ginni Thomas’ impulse “backfired spectacularly.”

If anyone’s guilty of strange behavior, it’s Anita Hill, said Tevi Troy in National Review Online. Why did the Brandeis law professor call the cops because someone nicely asked her for an apology? That’s just “not a normal reaction” to a simple phone call, whether it was real or a prank. Ginni Thomas later confirmed making the call, said Joe Carter in FirstThings.com, and “good for her.” Hill’s testimony against her husband lacked all credibility: This Yale Law School graduate filed no complaints against Thomas when she worked for him, and she followed him, in fact, to another job. She emerged with her complaint many years later—when Democrats wanted someone to destroy the nomination of a conservative African-American to the Supreme Court.

Actually, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, “the overwhelming weight of the evidence” shows that Hill told the truth. Since 1991, a host of witnesses have confirmed that Thomas was indeed very fond of pornography and took pleasure in discussing his hobby with female staffers. Damning new evidence emerged just this week, said Michael A. Fletcher, also in the Post. Lillian McEwen, a former prosecutor and retired law professor who was Clarence Thomas’ girlfriend for five years in the 1980s, has broken her silence to corroborate Hill’s story. McEwen said that “the real Clarence” was, in her words, “obsessed with porn,” would ask female co-workers their bra sizes, and “was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners.”

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If you were Ginni Thomas, would you want to hear these kinds of attacks on your husband? said Armstrong Williams in The Washington Times. Of course not, and “instead of scorning her, we should be looking to her example.” Thomas, like her husband, is an extremely devout Christian, and is required by the “mandates of her faith” to forgive those she feels have wronged her. She asked Hill to apologize “because she wanted to forgive” and put this incident behind her. Either that, said Susan Milligan in USNews.com, or deep down Ginni Thomas suspects that Hill wasn’t lying. She finds that knowledge so painful that, against her better judgment, she sought “the reassurance of a confession—even a false one—from Hill.”

Don’t bother psychoanalyzing Ginni Thomas, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. As his autobiography made plain three years ago, her husband still seethes with rage over his confirmation hearings, and he and Ginni live in a very narrow world, defined by their grievances and their contempt for the media. In their world, “there are no facts. There are just ‘our’ beliefs and ‘their’ beliefs,” and people like Hill are part of their narrative of liberal persecution. Why did Ginni Thomas leave that voice mail for Anita Hill? It’s foolish to ask. “We are not in the Thomases’ bubble, and never will be.” What’s done is done, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Clarence Thomas may have “lied his way onto the bench,” but as a Supreme Court justice he serves a life term, and we’re stuck with him now. And so is Ginni Thomas, who with one ill-advised phone call provided a “wacky coda to one of the most searing chapters in American history.”