Clarence Thomas denounced and denied the sexual harassment accusations against him Friday night and said the reopened hearing in his Supreme Court confirmation was "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks . . . "
After a day of testimony in which Anita F. Hill leveled lurid, graphic charges against him, Thomas returned to the witness chair to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that its proceedings were "disgusting.""This is a circus," Thomas said. "It's a national disgrace, and from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.
"It is a message that unless you kowtow to the old order, this is what will happen to you," said Thomas. "You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the United States Senate rather than hung from a tree."
Hill, a black woman, testified for nearly seven hours, insisting that her accusations of sexual harassment, of pressures to date Thomas, of his boasts of his own sexual prowess and repeated remarks about X-rated movies all were the truth.
"I'm not given to fantasy," she said in the face of Republican efforts to shake her story.
Hill, 35, did not budge in her insistence that Thomas harassed her with demands and explicit talk when she worked for him at two government agencies between 1981 and 1983. When she was done, committee members - particularly Democrats - said they admired her courage in going public, 10 years after the episodes she described.
Thomas said he had not listened or watched Hill's testimony.
"I've heard enough lies," he said. "This is a travesty. You've spent the entire day destroying what it has taken me 43 years to build and providing a forum for that."
Hill's appearance had generated speculation that Thomas might withdraw as the Supreme Court nominee, particularly after one Republican said that it might kill the nomination.
But Thomas flatly denied all of Hill's charges.
"Senator, I am incapable of proving the negative," he said under questioning. "It did not occur."
He said his integrity had been stolen by the Senate committee. "You have robbed me of something that can never be restored," he said.
"What I have said to you is categorical, that any allegations that I engaged in any conduct involving sexual activity, pornographic movies, attempted to date her, any allegations, I deny," Thomas said. "It is not true."
Thomas was called back for questioning on Hill's allegations as the unprecedented hearing stretched late into the evening.
Hill said she was neither a militant nor a martyr and had made her complaint now only because investigators had come to her and the story had then become public.
As her testimony neared an end Friday night, Simpson, the GOP whip, summed up the potential impact on the nomination:
"Maybe, it seems to me that you really didn't intend to kill him, but you might have."
Thomas went first, denying it all. He told the reopened inquiry that not even a seat on the Supreme Court was worth the prying he's faced. He insisted he would answer questions only on harassment in the workplace, not on any other private matter, because "I will not provide the rope for my own lynching."
But before there were any questions at all, he yielded the chair behind the green-draped witness table to the woman whose accusations put his confirmation in jeopardy.
President Bush, like millions of other Americans, watched the hearing on television. Leaving the White House for Camp David at the end of the day, he declined to answer questions about possible withdrawal of the nomination.
Presidential press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, asked if Thomas might withdraw, said, "There's never been any hint of that."
Thomas testified under oath that "I cannot imagine anything that I said or did to Anita Hill that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment." Nor, Thomas said, did he ever ask her for a date.
She insisted he had, "I would say 10 times, maybe, I don't know, five to 10 times."
More embarrassing and threatening, she said, Thomas repeatedly talked about sex, even though she objected and, when she could, walked away from him.
Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, said she told three friends about it at the time, in 1981.
"I was really upset," she testified.
She said the pressure to date him was embarrassing, and the sex talk more so, and humiliating as well.
"The two combined really made me feel sort of helpless in a job situation," she said.
Questioning her credibility, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., brought up a sworn affidavit from John Doggett, who had been a Yale classmate of Thomas and then an Washington acquaintance of Hill.
Doggett said Hill's comments to him at a party suggested she had fantasized about a relationship with him and appeared "somewhat unstable." She testified she made no such comments, barely remembered Doggett and "did not at any time have any fantasy about a romance with him."
As for her allegations against Thomas, she recounted a series of episodes in which she said Thomas asked her for dates, bragged of his sexual prowess and told her - in the face of her obvious discomfort and objections - of X-rated movies of women engaging in sex acts with animals.
"I felt that implicit in the discussion about sex acts was the offer to have sex with him," she testified.
"I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of pornography involving these women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people or animals," she said. "That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated."
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Hatch threatens
For Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the hearings got off to a rocking start.
Early in the hearings, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., the chairman, said senators could not use the statement Anita Hill had made to FBI agents during a two-day inquiry last month because "Professor Hill says that she wants to tell her story."
That brought a quick objection from Hatch, R-Utah, his voice throbbing with anger. He said Thomas "has a right to face the accuser and everything that accuser says. And if he doesn't then I'm going to resign from this committee today. I'm telling you, I don't want to be on it."
Biden then recessed the hearing, and when the senators returned he announced that Hill would then testify and Thomas return later.