credit: NY Times The absolute arrogance of it all: Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas’s wife has called Ms. Hill, seeking an apology. In a
October 20, 2010

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credit: NY Times

The absolute arrogance of it all:

Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Justice Thomas’s wife has called Ms. Hill, seeking an apology.

In a voice mail message left at 7:31 a.m. on Oct. 9, a Saturday, Virginia Thomas asked her husband’s former aide-turned-adversary to make amends. Ms. Hill played the recording, from her voice mail at Brandeis University, for The New York Times.

“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”

Ms. Thomas went on: “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. O.K., have a good day.”

When I first saw this headline, I misunderstood it to be Ginni Thomas reaching out to Anita Hill to apologize herself for the disgusting circus that surrounded Hill's testimony, but I should have known that a tea party queen like Ginni Thomas would no more apologize to Anita Hill any more than she would apologize to the whole of America for her husband's proclivity for napping during SCOTUS hearings. No, instead, she had the unmitigated gall to call up Professor Hill to ask Hill to apologize?

To her credit, Hill has simply refused to give Thomas the apology she's seeking, rather than throwing it back in her face or perhaps laughing herself silly, which would have been my first inclination. And this is not the first time Thomas has sought an apology:

“I initially thought it was a prank,” Hill told ABC News. “And if it was, I thought the authorities should know about it.”

She reported the call to campus police.

Mark Matthews of our affiliate KGO learned about this and reached out to Virginia Thomas.

Thomas e-mailed him, saying: “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get passed what happened so long ago. That offer still stands, I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.”

Hill told ABC News: “Even if it wasn’t a prank, it was in no way conciliatory for her to begin with the presumption that I did something wrong in 1991. I simply testified to the truth of my experience. For her to say otherwise is not extending an olive branch, it’s accusatory.”

She continued: “I don’t apologize. I have no intention of apologizing, and I stand by my testimony in 1991.”

So that's what Thomas considers an olive branch? Okay then. Anita Hill proves both then and now what a class act she is compared to both Thomases.

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