Maureen Dowd's Op ed piece on the Brock story: (bolds mine)
June 27, 2001
LIBERTIES
Truth, Sex, Lies and Videotape
By MAUREEN DOWD
ASHINGTON — When I covered
the brutal psychodrama of Clarence
Thomas and Anita Hill that ferocious week in
October '91, I used to wake up in the middle
of the night haunted by the mystery of who
was telling the Big Lie. How could we put
someone on the Supreme Court for life
without knowing? But everyone was playing to win, so the truth never really entered
into it.
Now, a decade later, David Brock, a right-wing hit man who was in league back
then with the Bush White House, steps forward to talk about truth and lies.
The journalist now says he lied then when he painted Anita Hill as a liar, a woman
who was "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," both in an American Spectator piece
and a best seller embraced by conservatives called "The Real Anita Hill." And he
says he lied then when he helped the Bushies and conservatives portray Clarence
Thomas as truthful, calling himself "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine."
His former conservative allies say that Mr. Brock is lying now in his apologia,
contained in a book called "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an
Ex-Conservative," to be published in September and excerpted in August's Talk
magazine.
"I had stumbled onto something big," Mr. Brock writes, "a symbiotic relationship
that would help create a highly profitable right-wing Big Lie Machine that flourished
in book publishing, on talk radio, and on the Internet throughout the 90's."
The '91 hearings turned on the Republican effort to smear Anita Hill as an
erotomaniac while suppressing reports popping up from Judge Thomas's friends and
supporters that he was often a patron of X- rated movie houses while a student at
Yale Law School in the early 1970's, and that he would sometimes humorously
describe the pornographic movies to his friends and colleagues, just as Ms. Hill had
testified he did with her.
To that end, Senator Orrin Hatch said it was unthinkable that Judge Thomas could
ever have discussed Long Dong Silver and other porn with her, because anyone
who would do that would be "a psychopathic sex fiend or a pervert."
Judge Thomas agreed that he would never "approach anyone I was attempting to
date as a person with this kind of grotesque language."
After he ascended to the Supreme Court, two friends of mine, Jill Abramson and
Jane Mayer, wrote a book called "Strange Justice" that reported that, when he
worked with Ms. Hill, he regularly rented adult movies at Graffiti, a local video shop
stocked with Long Dong Silver movies. In the book, Kaye Savage, a former career
civil servant in the Reagan White House and social friend of both Clarence and
Anita, said she visited Mr. Thomas's bachelor apartment in the summer of 1982 and
saw "explicit photos of nude women."
Mr. Brock writes in Talk that he tried to discredit "Strange Justice" in a Spectator
review with the help of Justice Thomas and the White House. According to Mr.
Brock, he used as an intermediary a Bush White House lawyer named Mark
Paoletta to ask Justice Thomas if he had owned video equipment in the early
1980's. "Paoletta," Mr. Brock writes, "came back with a straightforward answer:
Not only had Thomas had such equipment in his apartment, he had also often rented
pornographic movies from Graffiti during the years that Hill worked for him."
Mr. Brock writes that "Thomas passed along, through Paoletta, unverified
embarrassing personal information about his friend" Kaye Savage "that Thomas
claimed had been raised against her in a divorce proceeding. . . . Thomas was
playing dirty, and so was I."
Justice Thomas had no comment. Mr. Paoletta told The Times that he had not
confirmed to Mr. Brock that Mr. Thomas rented or watched pornography, and said
that Justice Thomas "did not ask me to pass along any derogatory information about
Kaye Savage." And Ms. Savage told The Times that Mr. Brock had "either got it
from Clarence or he got it from Anita, and Anita's my friend."
A column last week said that Representative Gary Condit was one of the few
Democrats to vote for the impeachment of Bill Clinton; Mr. Condit voted in favor of
opening the impeachment inquiry, but in the end voted against impeachment. |
