Hill With Family; Legal Team Maps Strategy : Accuser: A large clan of relatives provides emotional support. A dozen lawyers and professors prepare her defense.

Anita Faye Hill went into seclusion with her family Saturday as her legal team sought to defend her against Republican attacks on her credibility and her motives for accusing Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

Friends and lawyers refused to disclose her whereabouts, but a law professor who spoke to her said Hill did what millions of other Americans did Saturday--she watched the televised hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Thomas was questioned about the allegations Hill vividly recounted in riveting testimony the day before.

“She has her family by her side and, unlike Thomas, she is watching the proceedings and is in touch with us by telephone,” said Wendy Sherman, a Democratic political consultant.

“They (the family) are taking comfort in prayer. . . . The hearings have been very rough on her. But they have been even tougher on her parents,” another member of Hill’s defense team said.

Hill’s father, Albert, and her mother, Erma, both 79, flew to Washington with other relatives from their home in rural Oklahoma to be with their daughter as an obviously anguished and embarrassed panel of senators examined in detail her allegations that Thomas sexually harassed her.

Albert Hill, a retired farmer, had “never been on an airplane in his life until he came to Washington to be with his daughter,” and the stress of the journey, combined with the ordeal of the hearings, has been emotionally draining for both parents, said Louise Hilson, a Washington public relations executive.

“This is a time of great trial for her parents and it has taken a visible toll on them,” Hilson said.

The elder Hills and other relatives are being housed at several undisclosed locations. Some are staying with Hill at a downtown hotel near the Capitol, while others are staying at the homes of supporters.

“Everybody’s trying to make sure that Prof. Hill gets the support she needs,” Sherman said. “Yesterday, when we had lunch with the family, we reached into our pockets and paid for it. If there are other problems (with money), we’ll get them solved,” she said of the members of the legal team that has been assembled to help Hill.

The team, brought together by a network of law professors angered by the committee’s initial dismissal of Hill’s allegations, includes more than a dozen lawyers, law professors and political consultants who have volunteered their services.

“The notion put out by her detractors that there is an elaborate coterie of people around Anita Hill who are orchestrating all of this is completely fictitious,” said Judith Resnick, a law professor at USC. “This began with a group of women law professors, horrified that this woman’s allegations were being so quickly dismissed, deciding that we had to do something . . . “It was a classic example of a sexual harassment case in which the woman who complains is thin on economic resources and the person she complains about is more powerful professionally and has more resources,” Resnick said.

Resnick and other law professors used their contacts to assemble a team of legal experts with specialties ranging from sexual discrimination cases to Supreme Court nominations who volunteered to serve as Hill’s lawyers. They met with her in Washington for the first time Thursday.

“Anita now has so many people calling to volunteer their services that we haven’t been able to use them,” said one member of the team, Georgetown University law professor Emma Coleman Jordan. “It’s been a spontaneous effort by women law professors from across the country. . . . People are calling in from Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco--from all the campus towns around the country--offering to help.”

The volunteers are operating out of a small suite of Senate offices near the hearing room, where they spent the day Saturday plotting their legal strategy for the remainder of the hearings.

None of Hill’s lawyers would comment on the strategy, but one member of the team, Harvard University law professor Charles Ogletree, gave some indication of the tack the lawyers plan to take.

Stressing that Hill has offered and is still willing to take a lie detector test to affirm her credibility, Ogletree indicated that her defense plans to call a series of witnesses who will testify that she complained to them long ago that Thomas was sexually harassing her. He also indicated that the legal team will defend Hill’s credibility by trying to show that, unlike Thomas, she has no reason to lie about the allegations.

An expert on criminal law, Olgetree is one of several lawyers leading Hill’s defense. Others include Susan Deller Ross, a Georgetown University expert on sex discrimination, and John Frank, a Phoenix lawyer who has written extensively about the Supreme Court and the congressional confirmation process.

But Hilson, vice president of the Washington-based public relations firm Devillier Communications, said no one has been put in charge of the defense team. “It’s very much a collaborative effort,” she said. “All the decisions are joint decisions. It is ad hoc in the truest sense.”