Witnesses Praise, Assail Both Sides; Thomas Accused by Fired Employee : Hearings: Angela Wright, in transcripts released by the panel, contends the judge made advances toward her. Hill’s attorneys say she has passed a lie detector test.

As the seesaw battle for credibility entered its third, exhausting day, witnesses for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill paraded before an increasing testy Senate Judiciary Committee on Sunday, alternately pummeling or praising the judge and his accuser.

Perhaps the most dramatic development in the more than 14 hours of the grueling, sometimes tedious hearing came just after midnight, when the committee released transcripts of testimony from Angela Wright--a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission employee fired by Thomas--who said he also pressed her for dates and once asked her the size of her breasts.

The release of the transcripts capped a day that had grown increasingly bizarre with the appearance of attorney John N. Doggett III, who testified near midnight that Hill suffered from “delusions” that he was interested in her, and with the announcement by Hill’s attorneys earlier in the afternoon that she voluntarily had taken and passed a lie detector test.

Sunday’s testimony may have been the last in the proceedings. When he gaveled the hearing to a close early today, committee chairman Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said both Hill and Thomas had been invited back to testify today, but said they had indicated they would not appear. The full Senate is expected to vote on Thomas’s confirmation at 3 p.m. PDT Tuesday.

The committee decided to place in the record transcripts of Wright’s private testimony to them rather than require her to testify publicly.

The statement was significant because it tended to support Hill’s allegations that Thomas exhibited sexually offensive behavior. But its impact also could be diminished because Wright was not called personally to testify and thereby be subjected to questioning by Thomas’ Republican supporters.

Interviewed under oath on Oct. 10, Wright told staff members of the Senate panel that Thomas “did consistently pressure me to date him . . . (and) made comments about women’s anatomy quite often.”

Wright said it was typical for Thomas to make such remarks as “you look good and you are going to be dating me.”

At an EEOC seminar, Wright said, Thomas commented on the dress she was wearing and asked her: “What size are your breasts?”

Wright said she was annoyed at Thomas’ advances but added she never felt “intimidated” or sexually harassed by them.

Wright is now an editor at the Charlotte (N. C.) Observer. Thomas has testified that he fired her after she referred to another EEOC staffer as “a faggot.”

The long and arduous interrogation of witnesses began at noon Sunday when a panel made up of three friends and a professional colleague of Hill’s told the Judiciary Committee that she had recounted to them years ago that she was being sexually harassed by Thomas.

Later in the day, a panel of women who had worked with Thomas at the EEOC went on the counterattack, criticizing Hill as overambitious and calculating, telling the committee that in their experience, Thomas had never acted improperly toward any woman.

It was in the midst of the panel’s testimony that the announcement of the lie detector test came, temporarily diverting public attention from the proceedings in the ornate Senate Caucus Room.

“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.

It was unclear, however, what impact the announcement would have on the hearings. 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 said. “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 that he did not know yet if Thomas has the votes in the Senate to be confirmed.

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 questions.

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.

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.

As lawyers and administrators came before the committee to testify in Thomas’ behalf, they offered complex psychiatric diagnoses, ranging from “transference” to rejection complex to help explain Hill’s motives.

Biden and Doggett, who said Hill appeared to have “fantasized” about starting a relationship, lectured each other on the difficulties and ambiguities of dating behavior in Washington.

Doggett, an international management consultant in Austin, Tex., said Hill demonstrated an “ability to fabricate the idea that someone was interested in her when in fact no such interest existed.”

He and Hill encountered each other from time to time over two years while they both lived in the same neighborhood, talked about meeting “some time for a drink or dinner” but did not date, he said.

At a going-away party, he said, Hill approached him and said: “I am very disappointed in you. You really shouldn’t lead on women and then let them down.”

Doggett said he asked her what she meant and “she stated that she had assumed that I was interested in her.”

Saying her comments “stunned” him, Doggett said he “told her that I felt that her comments were totally uncalled for and completely unfounded.”

Earlier, the panel of Thomas’ female employees threatened to turn their testimony into an examination of the sensitive subject of who has access to the boss.

Phyllis Berry, who served under Thomas at the EEOC, added that she believed that ideological differences between Thomas and Hill may have added to Hill’s mounting frustration with Thomas.

“At the commission, I would not have characterized Anita as a conservative,” Berry said. “I would have characterized her more as a moderate person or a liberal. And there were times when it was necessary that the conservative view prevail, in my opinion, on some positions that the chairman took that she adamantly disagreed with.”

Berry, who called Hill “aloof” to co-workers, told senators “a woman’s scorn can mean not just in the romantic context, but if your ideas are no longer the ones that are considered the ones that the chairman adopts, if your point of view is not given more weight than someone else’s.”

Alvarez, who charged “schizophrenia” in Hill’s behavior, went on to tell lawmakers that Hill appeared either to fantasize or to exaggerate her closeness and her access to Thomas.

“She used to like to sort of tout the fact that she had worked with him before. You know, when we would get into debates on how we were going to handle an issue, she would say: ‘Well, you know, I know how he thinks. I know how he likes his papers written.’

But 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 Berry. “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.”