Hill’s New Harassment Allegations Draw Angry Denials From Thomas : Hearings: The law professor testifies that the court nominee repeatedly boasted of his sexual prowess. The judge calls session ‘high-tech lynching for an uppity black.’

WASHINGTON —  University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Faye Hill offered explosive new testimony Friday to support her allegations that she had been sexually harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, drawing a vehement--and angry--denial from the man she accused.

In an extraordinary hearing that left many spectators fidgeting uneasily, Hill told the panel that Thomas had repeatedly boasted to her of his sexual prowess during their service together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s and had several times graphically described to her scenes from pornographic movies.

She also charged that Thomas, who had served with her at the Department of Education as well, often engaged her in private conversations during which he “referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal” and “spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex.”

The televised hearing was called by the Senate Judiciary Committee after a public firestorm erupted over the committee’s failure to fully investigate Hill’s charges, which surfaced on Sunday, just two days before the Senate was to have voted on Thomas’ confirmation. At the time, most analysts had expected that Thomas would win confirmation by a comfortable margin.

But it was not immediately clear Friday evening just how the day’s events would affect the Thomas nomination. Although the disclosures appeared to have damaged Thomas’ prospects severely, Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), the candidate’s chief advocate in the Senate, pledged that her testimony would be “very strongly refuted” later in the evening.

Thomas, who appeared on the witness stand at the hearing’s opening, and later before Hill spoke, issued a blanket denial of “all” the charges that Hill had made in earlier statements. The committee recalled him late Friday night to address specifically the charges Hill made Friday morning.

Shortly before Thomas was due back, Danforth said Thomas would not consider withdrawing his nomination. “The fight is on,” Danforth said. “Clarence Thomas is ready to go.” Danforth said Hill’s statements had inconsistencies and would be “very strongly refuted” by Thomas.

Thomas denied that he had ever had any conversation with Hill that contained any sexual innuendoes.

He also repeatedly criticized the confirmation process that had left him answering such charges in public. “This is a circus,” he said angrily in late-evening testimony that followed Hill’s appearance. “This is a national disgrace.” He called the session “a high-tech lynching for an uppity black.”

Earlier, Thomas had struck a note of defiance, warning that he would not answer questions concerning his own private life or sexual affairs. “I will not allow this committee or anyone to probe into my private life,” he said. “I am not going to allow myself to be further humiliated in order to be confirmed.

“Enough is enough,” he said. “No job is worth what I have been through. . . . It has got to stop.”

But he stunned some panel members by telling the committee that he had not watched Hill’s testimony, which had been carried on national television for the bulk of the day. “I’ve heard enough lies,” he said, dismissing her appearance.

Thomas also told the panel that he never asked Hill out socially during the three years she worked for him at the Department of Education and then the EEOC, ending in 1983.

And he denied, under late-evening questioning by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), each of the charges Hill had made--including some in which she quoted him as having talked about his sexual prowess and joking about a “pubic hair” on a soft-drink can that was in his office.

“I cannot imagine anything that I said or did to Anita Hill that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment,” the embattled nominee declared, as his wife, Virginia, and Danforth sat stiffly behind him.

“If you really want an idea (of how I work), ask the majority of women who have worked for me,” he later told the panel. “I have worked with hundreds of women. . . . If you really want to be fair, you parade all of them up here . . . and ask them.”

While it came as no surprise that Hill and Thomas contradicted one another, the graphic details of some of Hill’s allegations clearly struck many senators as astonishing, forcing them to proceed gingerly as they pressed her for more details.

Seated behind the long green-felt-covered table, her slight frame barely rising above it, Hill answered questions in a neutral, almost clinical tone.

In what she called “one of the oddest episodes,” Hill recalled being in Thomas’ office when he picked up a can of soft drink that was on his desk. She said he held up the can and asked: “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”

Hill said Thomas had begun asking her out “approximately three months” after she became his special counsel at the Department of Education in 1981. She said she rebuffed him, but he was not easily put off.

Later, Hill said, Thomas began talking to her about pornographic movies he had seen involving women with large breasts having group sex, having sex with animals and being raped. Such talk, she said, left her “embarrassed and humiliated” and “extremely uncomfortable.”

Hill said all these conversations occurred either in Thomas’ office or her own or in a restaurant or government cafeteria, and thus could not have been overheard.

“Implicit in this discussion of sex was the offer to have sex with him,” Hill added. “Given his other conversations, I took that to mean we ought to have sex or we ought to look at these pornographic movies together.”

While Hill was still testifying, President Bush left the White House for a weekend at Camp David, Md., declining to discuss whether Thomas might withdraw his nomination. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said later: “There’s never been any hint of that.”

Earlier, Bush hailed Thomas’ opening monologue as a “very, very powerful and moving statement.”

“The American people are fair,” Bush said, repeating his confidence that Thomas would win confirmation. “They are basically fair and they know character when they see it. And today they saw a decent, honest man speaking from the heart.”

In his statement, Thomas said that when he learned of Hill’s allegations from FBI agents on Sept. 25, he was “shocked, surprised, hurt and enormously saddened. I have not been the same since that day,” he declared.

At another point, he said: “I have never in all my life felt such hurt, such pain, such agony. My family and I have been done a grave and irreparable injustice.”

When Thomas entered the hearing room, his eyes were bloodshot--apparently from having stayed up late into the night to prepare for the hearing. Indeed as he noted when he began: “No one other than my wife and Sen. Danforth, to whom I read this statement at 6:30 a.m., has seen or heard this statement. No handlers, no advisers.”

Thomas’ entry into the heavily policed hearing room Friday morning was telegraphed well in advance by the loud applause and cheers from many supporters lining the broad, marbled corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building.

As the session got under way, Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) insisted that the hearing would be merely “fact-finding” in nature. But the session quickly took on the air of a criminal trial as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a formal Pennsylvania prosecutor, began questioning Hill aggressively, challenging both her allegations and her own behavior.

Although Hill’s voice quivered occasionally as she began to describe the ordeal she said she had gone through, she was calm and unfaltering through most of the questioning.

As she testified, her 79-year-old parents, flanked by some of their other children and a battery of attorneys, sat behind her, listening intently.

Under repeated questioning by senators, some of whom sought openly to impugn her credibility, Hill, who is 35, said she had no ulterior motive for making the allegations. “I can only tell you what happened,” she said. “I felt that he was using his power and authority over me.”

Among the spectators jammed into the large, ornate Senate Caucus Room were five female House members who, as part of a larger delegation on Tuesday, had boldly lobbied Senate leaders on Tuesday to delay a confirmation vote scheduled for later that day.

Under questioning by Specter, Hill disputed several statements given to authorities by Thomas supporters that sought to challenge her credibility. She also insisted that she bore no ill feelings toward the man who she says harassed her repeatedly.

In an Oct. 7 sworn statement, Carlton R. Stewart, who also worked as a special assistant to Thomas at the EEOC, said he ran into Hill two months earlier in Atlanta during the annual meeting of the American Bar Assn., and quoted her as having said: “How great Clarence’s nomination was and how much he deserved it.”

Hill recalled the encounter, but said it was Stewart who was “very excited” and had expressed elation at Thomas’ nomination to the high court. “I only said it was a great opportunity for Clarence Thomas,” Hill said. “I did not say it was a good thing . . . I did not say that he deserved it.”

On another point of contention, Hill conceded that she called Thomas at his EEOC office 11 times between Jan. 30, 1984 and Nov. 1, 1990--as suggested by a telephone log kept by Thomas’ then-secretary, Diane Holt, and released to the press on Tuesday by Danforth.

But she asserted that each call was “made in a professional context,” including three that were on behalf of a group that had asked her help in persuading Thomas to make an appearance in Oklahoma to deliver a speech.

When Specter noted that much of the details that Hill recounted Friday had not been included in a report by FBI agents who interviewed her in late September, Hill said that she initially had been “uncomfortable” with being unreservedly explicit with the agents, one of whom was a man.

“He (the agent) asked asked me to describe the kinds of incidents that had occurred as graphically as I could without being embarrassed,” Hill recalled. “I described them to my level of comfort.”

She also said she had told the FBI agents that she would be willing to undergo a polygraph, or lie-detector, test.

Hill also addressed the question of why, despite Thomas’ alleged harassment at the Department of Education, she joined him when he left to become chairman of the EEOC.

She said that since Thomas had been a political appointee, she was fearful that his successor would hire his own special assistant to replace her. She said she accepted another post working for Thomas partly because the job market was tight at the time, and then-President Ronald Reagan had expressed a desire to eliminate the Education Department.

Much of the questioning during Hill’s appearance centered on how she came to make the allegations about Thomas to the committee--whether she had offered them voluntarily or in response to a request by the panel for information, as she earlier contended.

Hill said Friday she was first contacted last Sept. 4 by Gail Lasiter, a counsel on a Senate Labor subcommittee headed by Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio). She was one of three women who had worked with Thomas at the EEOC and who were questioned by Metzenbaum’s staff.

Metzenbaum said the three were asked about “a range of women’s issues, including rumors of sexual harassment at the agency.” He said that Hill did not make any allegations against Thomas at that time.

On Sept. 5, Ricki Seidman, a staff lawyer on the Labor Committee who works for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee chairman, contacted Hill in the course of interviewing former EEOC employees regarding Judge Thomas’ record at the EEOC, a Kennedy spokesman said.

Hill testified that the Seidman call, which she returned, was on Sept. 6.

Before joining Kennedy’s Labor Committee staff, Seidman had worked for the People for the American Way, a liberal lobbying organization that has opposed several Reagan and Bush Administration judicial nominees.

During her conversation with Hill, Seidman asked about reports of sexual harassment at the EEOC and about the agency’s handling of the sex harassment complaints, Kennedy’s spokesman said. He said Hill indicated she needed time to decide whether to respond.

Hill testified Friday that she told Seidman she would “neither confirm nor deny any knowledge” of Thomas’ tolerance of sexual harassment or about his actually engaging in sexual harassment.

Over the weekend of Sept. 7-8, Hill said she spoke with Seidman again and asked her where she could go to speak with “someone who was knowledgeable about the issue” if she were to decide to respond. Seidman suggested James Brudney, Metzenbaum’s chief counsel.

Hill then told Brudney of her allegations and he discussed them with Metzenbaum, who told him to report them to the Judiciary Committee, on which both Metzenbaum and Kennedy also sit and which is conducting the current round of hearings.

The Kennedy spokesman’s version is that Hill related her allegations first to Seidman, and at that point Seidman referred her to Brudney. The spokesman said Seidman thought Hill would be more comfortable talking with Brudney because they had gone to Yale Law School together.