Author admits smear of Anita Hill, casting shadow over appointment Clarence Thomas to supreme court
Admission casts shadow over selection of US supreme court judge

Michael Ellison in New York      Thursday June 28, 2001      The Guardian

A rightwing author who made his name undermining the reputation of a woman who accused
a supreme court judge of sexual harassment says now that he was lying all along.

David Brock, whose best-selling book represented Anita Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty",
says that he did so to defend Justice Clarence Thomas, the conservative black judge whose Senate
confirmation hearings were among the most rancorous in history.

"I demonised Democratic senators, their staffs and Hill's feminist supporters without ever interviewing
any of them," Mr Brock says of his 1993 book, The Real Anita Hill.

"I was so blinded by my partisan tunnel vision and my tortured desire to
make it in the movement that I believed my own propaganda."

Ms Hill had told the hearings two years earlier that the judge had instigated graphic discussions of
pornographic films with her when she worked for him, and Mr Thomas was said to be a regular patron
of the "adult" film shelves at a Washington video shop.

Mr Brock had become "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine", he
writes in the August issue of Talk magazine.

"I had stumbled on to something big, a symbiotic relationship that would help create a highly profitable,
rightwing Big Lie Machine that flourished in book publishing, on talk radio and on the internet throughout the 90s."

Apart from confessing to having lied, Mr Brock claimed that Justice Thomas used a go-between to
smear another woman, Kaye Savage, who backed up Ms Hill's allegations about the pornography.

Mr Brock says that the go-between, a friend of the judge, gave him information about Ms Savage's
divorce which he then used to intimidate her into withdrawing her support for Ms Hill's case.

The piece in the magazine is an extract from his next book,
Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

It says that in an article he wrote in 1992 for a rightwing magazine, and which became the basis for
The Real Anita Hill, he did all he could to destroy her credibility with "virtually every derogatory
and often contradictory allegation I had collected on Hill into the vituperative mix".

Mr Brock names Mark Paoletta, a Washington lawyer who is now a Republican counsel to the
House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, as the go-between.

He says that Mr Paoletta gave him the damaging personal details about Ms Savage to limit the damage
that another book, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, might do to the judge.

Mr Brock was reviewing the book and Ms Savage had told its authors of
Justice Thomas's interest in pornography.

"Confirmation that Thomas frequently rented porno tapes made Hill's
 entire story much more plausible," Mr Brock writes in Talk.

Still, his review of the book described it as an outrageous hoax and said that there was no evidence
that the judge had ever rented an "adult" movie.

"When I wrote those words I knew they were false," he says.
"Thomas was playing dirty and so was I."
Mr Brock says he lied to protect the conservative political agenda.

He visited Ms Savage, put to her the personal information he had received through Mr Paoletta, and demanded
a retraction of the Strange Justice statements "or I would blacken her name,  just as I had done to every other
woman who had impugned Thomas's reputation." Ms Savage complied later with a fax.

Justice Thomas and Ms Hill both declined to comment.

Mr. Paoletta, however, said: "It's not true. Justice Thomas did not ask
me to pass along any derogatory information to David Brock about Kaye Savage."

**************

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,513572,00.html