PERSPECTIVE ON THE THOMAS CONTROVERSY : The Judge’s Trial by Fury : The feminists’ verdict and their attack on women who defended him violated the law’s principles of fairness.

In their outrage over sexual harassment and in their instinctive sympathy for Anita Hill, many feminists have transformed this appealing young law professor into a hero, the innocent victim who suffered for years and then courageously came forward to strike a blow for women everywhere.

That’s fine public theater: It dramatized women’s right to be free of harassment in the workplace and how pervasive the threat to that freedom is. But it’s not so fine when we look at the deeper issues of guilt or innocence in this particular case, and to the alarming things some feminists seem to be saying about other, even more important freedoms guaranteed by the legal process.

Much of the feminists’ furor over the treatment of Anita Hill rests on a leap of logic: Because they themselves may have been victims of the outrage of sexual harassment, it must be true that Anita Hill was sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas.

That is not a fact. It is an accusation, and one that Thomas has denied. The facts are in dispute, and that’s why we have trials, to determine facts to the best of an impartial judge or jury’s ability so that no American shall be deprived of his rights without due process of law.

The whole country found itself sitting in the jury box last weekend, without the benefit of due process for either the accused or the accuser. Statutes of limitation, rules of evidence, the opportunity to investigate witnesses and to prepare a prosecution and a defense, all went out the window. We were left with some primitive kind of public inquisition that raised more questions than it answered.

To me, the crucial testimony came from the women who had worked with Judge Thomas. Intelligent and committed, most of them had made equality in the workplace their own life’s work, and some of them had themselves been victims of sexual harassment. By their accounts, an office run by Clarence Thomas was a place of absolute respect for women, without a hint of profanity or sexuality--in other words, nothing like any office I have ever been in.

Some of these women were trained in policing sexual harassment and were alert to its menace of humiliation and abuse of power. They had worked with Hill, and none of them had noticed anything amiss. They insisted, by virtue of personal experience or professional observation, that women who have been sexually harassed seldom, if ever, continue contact with the harasser. Hill did. Every one of them who had been harassed said that she had confided in a co-worker about her ordeal. Hill had talked to none of them.

Some of the women offered theories for Hill’s accusation, among them that she had expected to keep her close working relationship with Thomas when they both moved to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and was deeply hurt when other women had his ear.

Many feminists attacked this testimony as humiliating and irrelevant, and all but accused these women, who work on the front lines of the fight against discrimination, of betraying their sex.

This is dangerous ground. No woman, they seem to be saying, should speak ill of another woman. That principle is little different from the old Southern taboo that no white man should speak ill of another white man, and we know what that principle did for blacks seeking justice in the South.

It’s possible that all these strong, independent women who worked for the EEOC spoke of Hill unflatteringly for a reason: That’s how she was. And her behavior was critical to judging the quality of her testimony and, therefore, to Thomas’ defense. Perhaps, just perhaps, that behavior introduced an element of doubt.

A personal example: For years, I followed the practice of hiring as my assistants people with little journalistic experience, and then, if they showed promise, promoting them. I helped one such assistant get an even better job at another magazine after several years of excellent work with me. But after she left she began spreading stories about the two of us that were utterly untrue. I was powerless to refute them. My denials were greeted with skepticism. I wondered how such an intelligent, successful woman could do such a thing. But, as I have since seen a greater and greater variety of human behavior, I realize that when men and women work together, no behavior is unimaginable.

If I had been on trial, I have no doubt that this woman would have been every bit as impressive as Anita Hill was. Witnesses would have come forward to testify to what she told them years ago. Faced with that, I hope my attorney would have done everything possible to determine if my accuser had a pattern of imagining relationships, or whether anything had occurred in the workplace that might have given her reason to harbor a grudge against me. I would have wanted her (my attorney most certainly would be a woman) to counter with exactly the sort of testimony that her former co-workers gave about Anita Hill.

But my personal experience is no more valid than the personal experience of all the women who have been sexually harassed. Because a woman made up a story about me does not mean Anita Hill made up her story about Clarence Thomas. She may be speaking the truth, or the truth may lie in some murky area that went unexplored.

I hold no brief for Thomas, or for anyone who might be guilty of sexual harassment. But he was not tried by the rules, and no jury found him guilty, so we must presume that he is not.

Determining guilt or innocence is one of the most fundamental processes of a free society. It is a tough, uncompromising, embarrassing and at times humiliating ordeal. Its flame burns away nicety and politeness. I have great sympathy for any woman who has to go through it to obtain justice. But it would not be justice if the accused were not allowed every opportunity to prove his innocence.

We are not yet, thank God, to the point that an accuser can hide behind a screen, point a finger and have the miscreant thrown in chains.