Hill Related Harassment in ‘81, Panel Told; Co-Workers Vouch for Thomas : Hearings: Professor’s attorneys say she has passed a lie detector test. Bush calls the Senate sessions ‘ridiculous’ and ‘outrageous.’

As the seesaw battle for credibility entered its third day, three friends and a professional colleague of Anita Faye Hill on Sunday told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Hill had told them years ago that she was being sexually harassed by now Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Later in the day a panel of women who had worked with Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission criticized Hill as overambitious and calculating, telling the committee that in their experience, Thomas had never acted improperly toward any woman.

And in a significant development outside the hearings, attorneys representing Hill announced that she had voluntarily submitted to and passed a lie detector test.

“There was no indication of deception to any relevant question,” according to a report from the American International Security Corp. in Fairfax, Va., which administered the test.

But it was unclear what impact the announcement will have on the hearings, now due to end today. Senators did not call on Thomas to take a lie detector test himself, and President Bush on Sunday flatly rejected the suggestion.

Bush predicted that Thomas will win confirmation to the Supreme Court despite the charges, and denounced the Thomas hearings as “ridiculous” and “outrageous.”

“I notice the country appears to be strongly supporting him,” Bush added. “The American people know fairness when they see it and they know that this process is ridiculous.”

Bush said that he had been “glued to the television,” watching the Judiciary Committee. While he continued to express confidence in Thomas’ chances, he cautioned he did not know yet if Thomas has the votes in the Senate to be confirmed.

In hours-long testimony that was alternately intimate, emotional, prim and matter-of-fact, witnesses for Hill recounted conversations that took place between 1981 and 1987 in which, they said, she told them that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

In one account told to the Judiciary Committee by Susan Hoerchner, a California judge who was Hill’s close friend, Hill confided that Thomas had told Hill she would have “a perfect case” against him if she had had witnesses.

Those statements are expected to be the subject of a final round of testimony before the Judiciary Committee, at which Hill and Thomas have been invited to appear again. The full Senate vote on the nomination is scheduled for 3 p.m. PDT Tuesday.

Although some players and politicians in the unfolding drama have at times expanded the proceedings into a debate over racism and sexism, Sunday’s testimony abruptly refocused attention on the central questions of the inquiry: whether Thomas indeed engaged in the behavior of which he is accused, and whether his “categorical” denial of the charges is truthful.

But as secondhand accounts that continue to depend on Hill’s telling, Sunday’s testimony, like all else in the unfolding “he said/she said” drama of Thomas’ confirmation fight, offered no definitive answer to the investigation’s central question.

For Thomas’ defenders, the testimony of Hill’s friends and associates, along with the results of the lie detector test, were a damaging, if inconclusive, setback. The witnesses--in addition to Hoerchner, a law professor and two private attorneys--knew Hill at several different stages in her life, and said they heard her accounts of Thomas’ alleged harassment at different times and under different circumstances.

But Thomas’ defenders fought back, calling four women who had worked with Thomas to testify. J. C. Alvarez, who worked for four years with Thomas at the EEOC, called Hill’s testimony “schizophrenia,” adding that she “did not remember her being particularly shy or innocent.”

“The Anita Hill I knew was nobody’s victim,” said Alvarez in a spirited critique of Hill’s testimony.

Hill’s friends on Sunday sought to portray the Oklahoma law professor as a “level-headed” woman with no personal, professional or political motive to block Thomas’ nomination.

According to two witnesses, Hill was an ardent backer of Judge Robert H. Bork, the controversial and conservative Yale law professor whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in 1987. Indeed, Hoerchner said that Hill had been “appalled” at the treatment of Bork during his confirmation fight, a fact that led Hoerchner to believe Hill did not intend to come forward with her charges.

Hoerchner added that Hill had told her, in a telephone call the day after Thomas’ nomination, that the nomination “turned her stomach,” but that like Bork, Thomas should “stand or fall” on the basis of his ideas.

“She is one of the most level-headed people I have ever known,” said Hoerchner, a Workman’s Compensation Judge in Norwalk, Calif., who was a civil service appointee. “Her feet are firmly on the ground. She had never conveyed any fantasy to me whatsoever.”

The female judge’s responses, delivered in prim and judicious language, contrasted sharply with the impassioned testimony of Ellen Wells, a black attorney who met Hill at a Washington social gathering in 1981 and painfully recounted her own reactions to having been sexually “touched” in her workplace.

In addition, Joel Paul, a law professor at American University, and attorney John Carr, who had a social relationship with Hill, spoke of the Oklahoma law professor with respect and admiration.

“I hope,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said, “that after this panel, we’re not going to hear any more comments--unworthy, unsubstantiated comments--unjustified comments about Prof. Hill and perjury, as we heard in this room yesterday. I hope we’re not going to hear any more comments about Prof. Hill being a tool of the various advocacy groups.”

“And, quite frankly, I hope we’re not going to hear a lot more about racism as we consider this nominee. . . . The issue isn’t discrimination and racism, it’s about sexual harassment.”

While the testimony of Hill’s associates failed to corroborate the seamy details of Hill’s allegations, they appeared to offer general support for her credibility.

According to Hoerchner, Hill, appearing depressed during an informal telephone conversation sometime in 1981, revealed that Thomas repeatedly asked her out.

“She told me that she had, of course, refused, but that he did not seem to take no for an answer,” Hoerchner said. Hill reported that Thomas had pressed her repeatedly, telling her “I’m your type and you know I’m your kind of man, but you refuse to admit it.”

The panel of Hill’s defenders were asked why they thought Hill moved from one job to another with Thomas and stayed in touch with him after her departure from his staff. The continued contact, which followed the first instances of Thomas’ harassment, have been widely cited by Thomas’ supporters as casting doubt on her allegations.

Repeating her mother’s advice, and noting that “I’m sure Anita’s mother told her,” Wells said: “When you leave, make sure you leave friends behind, because you don’t know who you may need later on. . . . Being a black woman, you know you have to put up with a lot, and so you grit your teeth and you do it.”

Hoerchner and Carr added that Hill’s professional ambitions, and the fact that her professional reputation appeared to be tied to Thomas, might help explain her unwillingness to break off all relations with Thomas.

“I do know that in looking forward as a young professional at my career, I am concerned that I will be on good terms with people who have a say or impact or are in a position to judge my career. And I would be extremely--extremely--hesitant to say or do anything to offend or cut them off for fear that in the future they might adversely impact my career,” Carr said.

“A good portion of Anita Hill’s, so to speak, professional claim to fame, was due to her experiences with Clarence Thomas. And it may well be that to categorically cut off that relationship would have been detrimental to her career going forward.”

But in testimony presented later, a former employee of Thomas suggested that frustrated romantic interest, not professional concern, appeared to have prompted Hill’s continued contact with Hill and her recent allegations.

“My impression was that Anita wished to have a greater relationship with (Thomas) than just a professional one,” said Phyllis Berry, who worked for Thomas for several years at the EEOC. “Her feelings were hurt” because Thomas did not appear to reciprocate her desires,” added Berry, who at one point stated bluntly that Hill “had a crush” on Thomas.

Berry’s testimony also suggested that Hill became resentful when she began to fall behind at the EEOC in one of Washington’s most prevalent contests: the inter-office struggle for access to the boss.

“It was competitive,” Berry said. “We were a tough, strong group of women around Clarence Thomas.”

Hill’s defenders were unyielding in their certainty of Hill’s truthfulness.

“Yesterday, Judge Thomas spoke here very eloquently about the pain that he has experienced,” Hoerchner said. “There is only one person to blame for that pain. I know no one who takes any joy in his suffering. His suffering is very apparent. There is, however, only one person to blame. . . . It is not Anita Hill.

“He is suffering as a result of his own actions,” Hoerchner said. “And there’s another person who has been suffering much, much longer. She’s suffering now, she was suffering 10 years ago, and she is not suffering as a result of her actions, and that person is Anita Hill.”