Thomas Denies Harassment Charges : Hearings: Law professor Anita F. Hill testifies that the Supreme Court nominee repeatedly boasted of his sexual prowess. The judge forcefully rejects all charges.

University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill offered explosive new testimony Friday to support her allegations that she was sexually harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, drawing a vehement--and angry--denial from the man she accused.

In an extraordinary hearing that left many spectators fidgeting uneasily, Hill told the panel that Thomas had repeatedly boasted to her of his sexual prowess during their service together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s and had several times graphically described to her scenes from pornographic movies.

She also charged that Thomas, who had served with her at the Department of Education as well, often engaged her in private conversations during which he “referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal” and “spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex.”

Thomas, who appeared on the witness stand at the hearing’s opening and later after Hill spoke, categorically denied all charges that Hill made in her testimony and in earlier statements, contending that he had never had any conversation with her that contained sexual innuendoes.

“Senator,” he told Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.), “I know that what she is saying is untrue.” He called her allegations “uncorroborated” and “scurrilous.”

He also, for the first time in memory, publicly implied that some of the all-white committee’s toughness in airing the charges publicly might be racially motivated--a turnabout for Thomas, who traditionally has expressed pride that he has been able to overcome racial handicaps.

At one point, he said of the hearing: “It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to the old order, this is what will happen to you. You’ll be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

The televised hearing was called by the Senate Judiciary Committee after a public firestorm erupted over the committee’s failure to fully investigate Hill’s charges, which surfaced last Sunday, just two days before the Senate was to have voted on Thomas’ confirmation. At the time, most analysts had expected that Thomas would win confirmation by a comfortable margin.

But it wasn’t immediately clear late Friday just how the day’s events would affect the Thomas nomination. Although the disclosures appeared to have damaged Thomas’ prospects severely, the nominee appeared to impress committee members with his aggressive responses during late-evening testimony after Hill’s appearance.

Panel members indicated that they still were undecided over which witness to believe after the more than 10 hours of testimony. “Here we are in a perplexed situation and trying to get to the bottom of it,” Heflin said as the panel prepared to shut down for the night. “We’re still faced with the fact that if she’s lying, why?”

Judiciary panel chairman Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.) also was cautious. “Because we are hearing this allegation,” he told Thomas, “does not mean that we assume the allegation is correct. This has not been decided. Tell us what you know. We’re trying to determine what happened.”

Barring new action by the Judiciary Committee--or a possible withdrawal of the nomination by the White House or Thomas himself--the full Senate is scheduled to vote on the nomination Tuesday. The Judiciary hearings were expected to continue over the weekend and Monday, possibly spilling over until Tuesday.

Thomas repeatedly criticized the confirmation process that had left him answering such charges in public. “This is a circus,” he said angrily in late-evening testimony that followed Hill’s appearance. “This is a national disgrace.”

Shortly before Thomas was due back, Danforth said Thomas would not consider withdrawing his nomination. “The fight is on,” said Danforth. “Clarence Thomas is ready to go.”

Earlier, Thomas had struck a note of defiance, warning that he would not answer questions concerning his own private life or sexual affairs. “I will not allow this committee or anyone to probe into my private life,” he said. “I am not going to allow myself to be further humiliated in order to be confirmed.”

Thomas said that if he is not confirmed, he will “go on . . . I’ll live, I’ll have my life back. . . . There is no pity for me. I think the country has been hurt by this process.”

“We have gone far beyond McCarthyism,” he said, referring to the hard-line tactics used by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) in trying to prosecute suspected American Communists during the 1950s. “This is more dangerous than McCarthyism.”

“Enough is enough,” he said. “No job is worth what I have been through. . . . It has got to stop.” Later, he admonished the panel: “You are ruining the country.”

But he stunned some panel members by telling the committee that he had not watched Hill’s testimony, which had been carried on national television for the bulk of the day. “I’ve heard enough lies,” he said, dismissing her appearance.

Thomas also told the panel that he never asked Hill out socially during the three years she worked for him at the Department of Education and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, ending in 1983, and never discussed sexual matters with her.

And he denied, under late-evening questioning by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), each of the charges Hill had made--including some in which she quoted him as having talked about his sexual prowess and asking about a “pubic hair” on a soft-drink can that was in his office.

“I cannot imagine anything that I said or did to Anita Hill that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment,” the embattled nominee declared, as his wife, Virginia, and his chief Senate sponsor, Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), sat stiffly behind him.

“If you really want an idea (of how I work), ask the majority of women who have worked for me,” he later told the panel. “I have worked with hundreds of women. . . . If you really want to be fair, you parade all of them up here . . . and ask them.”

He described Hill in testimony as a competent aide whose “somewhat aloof” demeanor occasionally created “problems” among other staffers. But he said their relationship was cordial and he sometimes drove her home, occasionally stopping to talk politics over a Coke.

While it came as no surprise that Hill and Thomas contradicted one another, the graphic details of some of Hill’s allegations clearly struck many senators as astonishing, forcing them to proceed gingerly as they pressed her for more details.

Seated behind the long green-felt-covered table, her slight frame barely rising above it, Hill answered questions in a neutral, almost clinical, tone.

In what she called “one of the oddest episodes,” Hill recalled being in Thomas’ office when he picked up a soft-drink can that was on his desk. She said he held up the can and asked: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”

Hill said Thomas had begun asking her out “approximately three months” after she became his special counsel at the Department of Education in 1981. She said she rebuffed him, but he was not easily put off.

Later, Hill said, Thomas began talking to her about pornographic movies he had seen involving women with large breasts having group sex, having sex with animals and being raped. Such talk, she said, left her “embarrassed and humiliated” and “extremely uncomfortable.”

Hill said all these conversations occurred either in Thomas’ office or her own or in a restaurant or government cafeteria, and thus could not have been overheard.

“Implicit in this discussion of sex was the offer to have sex with him,” Hill added. “Given his other conversations, I took that to mean we ought to have sex or we ought to look at these pornographic movies together.”

While Hill was still testifying, President Bush left the White House for a weekend at Camp David, Md., declining to discuss whether Thomas might withdraw his nomination. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater later issued a statement saying: “Judge Clarence Thomas’ message tonight was a powerful testament to his integrity and character.”

“He should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. His testimony speaks for itself,” the statement said.

In his statement, which he read Friday morning, Thomas said that when he learned of Hill’s allegations from FBI agents on Sept. 25, he was “shocked, surprised, hurt and enormously saddened. I have not been the same since that day.”

At another point, he said: “I have never in all my life felt such hurt, such pain, such agony. My family and I have been done a grave and irreparable injustice.”

When Thomas entered the hearing room that morning, his eyes were bloodshot--apparently from having stayed up late into the night to prepare for the hearing. As he began, he said: “No one other than my wife and Sen. Danforth, to whom I read this statement at 6:30 a.m., has seen or heard this statement. No handlers, no advisers.”

Thomas’ entry into the heavily policed hearing room Friday morning was telegraphed well in advance by the loud applause and cheers from many supporters lining the broad, marbled corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building.

As the session got under way, Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden insisted that the hearing would be merely “fact-finding” in nature. But the session quickly took on the air of a criminal trial as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a former Pennsylvania prosecutor, began questioning Hill aggressively, challenging both her allegations and her own behavior.

Although Hill’s voice quavered occasionally as she began to describe the ordeal she said she had gone through, she was calm and unfaltering through most of the questioning.

Under repeated questioning by senators, some of whom sought openly to impugn her credibility, Hill, who is 35, said she had no ulterior motive for making the allegations. “I can only tell you what happened,” she said. “I felt that he was using his power and authority over me.”

Under Specter’s questioning, Hill disputed several statements given to authorities by Thomas supporters that sought to challenge her credibility. She also insisted that she bore no ill feelings toward the man who she says harassed her repeatedly.

In an Oct. 7 sworn statement, Carlton R. Stewart, who also worked as a special assistant to Thomas at the EEOC, said he ran into Hill two months earlier in Atlanta during the annual meeting of the American Bar Assn., and quoted her as having said: “How great Clarence’s nomination was and how much he deserved it.”

Hill recalled the encounter, but said it was Stewart who was “very excited” and had expressed elation at Thomas’ nomination to the high court. “I only said it was a great opportunity for Clarence Thomas,” Hill said. “I did not say it was a good thing. . . . I did not say that he deserved it.”

On another point of contention, Hill conceded that she called Thomas at his EEOC office 11 times between Jan. 30, 1984, and Nov. 1, 1990--as suggested by a telephone log kept by Thomas’ then-secretary, Diane Holt, and released to the press on Tuesday by Danforth.

But she asserted that each call was “made in a professional context,” including three that were on behalf of a group that had asked for her help in persuading Thomas to make an appearance in Oklahoma to deliver a speech.

When Specter noted that much of the details that Hill recounted Friday had not been included in a report by FBI agents who interviewed her in late September, Hill said that she initially had been “uncomfortable” with being unreservedly explicit with the agents, one of whom was a man.

“He (the agent) asked me to describe the kinds of incidents that had occurred as graphically as I could without being embarrassed,” Hill recalled. “I described them to my level of comfort.”

She also said she had told the FBI agents that she would be willing to undergo a polygraph, or lie-detector, test.

Hill also addressed the question of why, despite Thomas’ alleged harassment at the Department of Education, she joined him when he left to take over the EEOC.

She said that since Thomas had been a political appointee, she was fearful that his successor would hire his own special assistant to replace her. She said she accepted another post working for Thomas partly because the job market was tight at the time, and then-President Ronald Reagan had expressed a desire to eliminate the Education Department.