posted on June 27, 2001 05:26:54 AM new
Calling himself "A witting cog in the Republican sleaze Machine", the author of several articles and a book which were instrumental in destroying the credibility of Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment against (now) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas now has admitted that he lied.
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. 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.
posted on June 27, 2001 07:02:08 AM new
David Brock has made a career of being an unscrupulous liar. To have even a smidgen of credibility now, he will have to come up with a lot of irrefutable evidence.
