Hi Karen,
Oh I love the phrase "reflection restorative! That's exactly what it is for me too. So how was your time off SI? Not so bad, I hope. I'm telling you, there seem to be five more hours in each day when you turn off the computer.
I bought another cat earlier this week (cover your eyes, X). He's a Himalayan and is incredibly calm. Nothing ruffles him. When my daughters have been carrying him around like a baby for days, but eventually I'll get to know him.
Here's an interesting piece from today's NYT:
June 27, 2001
Thomas Book Author Says He Lied in His
Attacks on Anita Hill
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI and WILLIAM GLABERSON
he author of a best-selling book that
attacked the credibility of Anita F. Hill
has disavowed its premise, and now says that
he lied in print to protect the reputation of
Justice Clarence Thomas.
David Brock, the author of the book, "The Real Anita Hill" (Free Press, 1993), has
also suggested, in a magazine article to be published this week, that Justice Thomas
used an intermediary to provide Mr. Brock with damaging information about a
woman who had come forward to provide support for Ms. Hill's accusations of
harassment by Justice Thomas. Ms. Hill's accusations became the focus of Senate
hearings into Justice Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991.
Mr. Brock reported that he then used the information to force the woman to retract
her statements about Justice Thomas. The article, in the August issue of Talk
magazine, is excerpted from Mr. Brock's new book, "Blinded by the Right: The
Conscience of an Ex Conservative" (Crown Publishers), which is scheduled to be
published in September.
Describing an article he wrote for The American Spectator, a conservative
magazine, in 1992, which became the basis for his book on Ms. Hill, he said he did
everything he could to "ruin Hill's credibility," using "virtually every derogatory and
often contradictory allegation I had collected on Hill into the vituperative mix."
"I demonized Democratic senators, their staffs, and Hill's feminist supporters without
ever interviewing any of them," he continued.
In the last few years, Mr. Brock has disavowed his conservative activism, and
criticized his own and his former colleagues' attacks on their main targets, Bill and
Hillary Clinton.
In the Talk article, Mr. Brock said the incident involving the intermediary occurred in
1994 as he was preparing a review of a book, "Strange Justice: The Selling of
Clarence Thomas," by two Wall Street Journal reporters, Jill Abramson and Jane
Mayer, for The American Spectator. Ms. Abramson is now the Washington bureau
chief of The New York Times; Ms. Mayer is a Washington correspondent for The
New Yorker.
He said Mark Paoletta, a Washington lawyer whom Mr. Brock identifies as a close
friend of Justice Thomas's, gave Mr. Brock damaging information about Kaye
Savage, another friend of Mr. Thomas's, who had told the "Strange Justice" authors
that Justice Thomas had an obsessive interest in pornography. The information,
which according to Mr. Brock's account, Mr. Paoletta said came from Justice
Thomas, involved personal details about Ms. Savage's divorce.
Mr. Brock wrote that he used the information to intimidate her into recanting her
account, threatening that he would "blacken her name, just as I had done to every
other woman who had impugned Thomas's reputation."
In an interview, Mr. Paoletta, now senior Republican counsel to the House
Committee on Energy and Commerce, denied Mr. Brock's account.
"It's not true," he said. "Justice Thomas did not ask me to pass along any derogatory
information about Kaye Savage."
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, Kathy Arberg, said yesterday that the
justice had no comment.
Reached at home in Washington last night, Ms. Savage said that Mr. Brock had
tried to intimidate her but that he had not told her the source of the negative
information.
"I didn't think to ask," she said.
But she said that she had shared the information about her divorce with few people
and that Justice Thomas and Ms. Hill were "primarily" those to whom she had
confided.
"He either got it from Clarence or he got it from Anita," Ms. Savage said, "and
Anita's my friend."
Mr. Brock also said in the magazine excerpt that Mr. Paoletta told him that Justice
Thomas rented pornographic videos from a store called Graffiti Video.
Mr. Brock wrote that in an effort to protect the conservative political agenda, he
"consciously lied" in the review of "Strange Justice" in The American Spectator.
In the review, Mr. Brock wrote that there was no evidence that Justice Thomas had
"ever rented one pornographic video, let alone was a habitual consumer of
pornography."
In the excerpt, Mr. Brock writes: "When I wrote those words I knew they were
false. It was the first and last time that I consciously put a lie in print."
Mr. Paoletta denied Mr. Brock's statement that Mr. Paoletta had told Mr. Brock
that Justice Thomas had often rented pornographic movies from a store named
Graffiti Video when Anita Hill worked for him.
In the interview yesterday, Mr. Paoletta said, "I do not know whether Justice
Thomas ever rented pornographic videos at any time."
When he was a writer for The American Spectator, Mr. Brock also wrote an article
titled "Troopergate," in which he reported accusations from Arkansas state troopers
about Bill Clinton's private life when he was governor of Arkansas. Later, when Mr.
Brock was working on a biography of Hillary Clinton, he had a change of heart
about the attacks on the Clintons and has since defended them.
Earlier this year, during the confirmation hearings for Theodore B. Olson, President
Bush's nominee for solicitor general, Mr. Brock accused Mr. Olson of being an
active part of a campaign to air damaging information about the Clintons, an
accusation that Mr. Olson, who is now solicitor general, denied. |
