America Has No Respect

Clarence Thomas' wife may have opened up a can of worms with her bizarre apology request to Anita Hill last week.

A former colleague and one-time girlfriend now tells the Washington Post that the Supreme Court justice was "obsessed with porn" as well as the bodies of his female coworkers.

"He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners," Lillian McEwen, a former assistant U.S. attorney and one-time girlfriend of Thomas' told the newspaper. "It was a hobby of his."

McEwen, now 65, remained silent for the past 20 years on Thomas' behavior to protect her career and image, she said.

The phone call Thomas's wife, Virginia, made to Hill Saturday, however, loosened McEwen's lips.


"I have nothing to be afraid of," McEwen, who is currently shopping her memoir, said.

In addition to being a prosecutor, McEwen was a law professor and judge

"I have no hostility toward him," she said. "It is just that he has manufactured a different reality over time. That's the problem that he has."

During the circus-like 1991 confirmation hearings for Thomas, Hill, his staffer at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, accused the soon-to-be justice of sexual harassment.

Thomas, who was nominated to replace the nation's first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, called Hill's testimony a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

She told the Senators that Thomas frequently recounted scenes from porno flicks at work and bragged about his abilities in the bedroom.

Though several women came to Thomas' defense during the hearings, McEwen backed up Hill's accusations.

"He was obsessed with porn," she said. "He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting."

She said Thomas once told her he liked women with big breasts and asked one woman he was smitten with about the size of her bra.

McEwen was never asked to testify by then-Senator Joe Biden, in part because she had been fired by Thomas, the Post reported.

She said she had an intimate relationship with Thomas from 1981 to 1985 and remained cordial since, but admitted the judge "would not be happy with me" now.

In 2007, Thomas, now 62, penned a scathing memoir detailing his outrage over Hill's accusations.

A law professor at Brandeis University, Hill was contacted by Virginia Thomas asking for an apology, which was rejected.

"I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband," she told Hill in a voicemail.

"So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day."

salfano@nydailynews.com