Thomas began to ask her out socially three to five months after she began working for him in July 1981, according to Hill. His approach was unusual. Rather than asking her to join him for a specific date or event, like a movie or dinner, he expressed his interest as a casual command, saying, "You ought to go out with me sometime." She turned him down firmly, she recalled, explaining that she enjoyed her work and believed it "ill advised to date a supervisor." But he would not take no for an answer. Instead, she testified, "In the following weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying 'no' to him."
According to notes taken by a former Senate aide, James Brudney, of a private conversation he had with Hill weeks before she accused Thomas publicly, Hill acknowledged that from the beginning, and throughout Thomas's alleged harassment of her, she never took the obvious but impolitic step of telling him directly that she was not romantically interested in him. Instead of risking the chance of insulting her boss, she avoided confrontation by erecting a professional barrier; impersonal and inoffensive, her response was likely to do little damage to her career. As Brudney's notes show, Hill acknowledged that when turning Thomas down, she, "cited work, didn't cite not liking him." She blamed herself belatedly for not being more forceful: the notes also show that Hill described herself as having been "pretty naive, stupid," at the age of twenty-five.
In using the workplace as a shield, Hill was displaying her preference for privacy and polite relations. But her social niceties may have been misinterpreted by Thomas at first. He offered a very different view of events. He testified both to the Senate and in his interview with the FBI that he never once asked Hill out. Rather, he said that he thought of Hill and his other staff members as just like "my kids" - and he added emphatically, "I do not commingle my personal life with my work life."
However, according to Hill, Thomas's behavior soon became almost insufferable. She told Brudney that Thomas "never said, 'Date or I'll fire you.' " But the pressure was such that before long, in her words, "I found it impossible." "Thomas," she testified, "began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that because of time pressures we go to lunch at a government cafeteria." But after a brief discussion of work, "he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke of acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On various occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess" - mentioning at one point that he had "measured his penis, which he said was larger than most."
These private conversations, from Hill's standpoint, were "offensive and disgusting, and degrading." Hill recalled that as they became increasingly upsetting to her in the winter of 1981 and early spring of 1982, she became slightly more aggressive toward Thomas. Although she continued to refrain from telling him that she had no interest in him, she expressly told him that she did not want to talk about what she discreetly called "these kinds of things." According to Brudney's notes, Hill tried lamely to change the subject. She also described trying to dismiss such disturbing gambits as Thomas's boast about how "all my friends say they don't do oral sex - I do - I'm into oral sex" by blandly suggesting in her best Sunday school manner that "everyone is interested in different things."
Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)
