Anita Hill Won't Back Down: 'I Testified Truthfully'

(Oct. 20) -- This is not the first time that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has asked for an apology from Anita Hill.

And to that blast from the past, her answer remains the same: No. Not then. Not now. "I testified truthfully," she said after The New York Times reported that Virginia "Ginni" Thomas left a voice mail earlier this month on Hill's Brandeis University phone asking for an apology and an explanation "of why you did what you did with my husband."

What Hill did was ignite a fury nearly 20 years ago when she testified at Thomas' confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying her former employer had sexually harassed her with constant requests that she date him.

In nationally televised proceedings watched by millions, Hill calmly testified that her previous supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission repeatedly told her "about 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. ... On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess."

An angry and steely voiced Thomas denounced Hill and the judiciary panel at his confirmation hearing, which was reconvened after news leaked that Hill had spoken to investigators. "This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," he told the all-white, male committee. Hill is African-American.

On Tuesday night, Hill issued a statement from her Massachusetts office at Brandeis, where she lectures on race, social issues and gender equality. "I have no intention of apologizing because I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony," she said, The Associated Press reported.

Virginia Thomas is a longtime conservative activist and founder of the nonprofit Liberty Central, which opposes what she has called the "tyranny" of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. She was a keynote speaker earlier this month in Virginia at a state convention billed as the largest tea party event ever.

Virginia Thomas left a voice message at 7:31 a.m. Oct. 9, a Saturday, the Times reported.

"Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas," it said. "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."

Hill told ABC News she kept the message for a week, thinking it might be a crank caller. She gave it to Brandeis campus police, who passed it to the FBI.

Through a statement released by a publicist, Virginia Thomas admitted leaving the message, saying she was extending "an olive branch to [Hill] after all these years" and that "certainly no offense was ever intended."

But Hill -- who was castigated by Republican senators during the 1991 hearings as delusional, suffering from a martyr's complex and a scorned woman who committed "flat-out perjury" -- said she was offended.

"I appreciate that no offense was intended, but she can't ask for an apology without suggesting that I did something wrong, and that is offensive," Hill said, according to the Times.

After the Senate narrowly approved Thomas, President George H.W. Bush's nominee to replace legendary civil rights activist Thurgood Marshall, Hill returned to her native Oklahoma. She taught at the conservative, evangelical Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. She has said she tried to live a quiet life, despite unrelenting media attention.

She later taught at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and the University of California at Berkeley, then joined the faculty of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis. Along the way, she co-edited a study on race and gender and published several papers on international commercial law, bankruptcy and civil rights.

She has also written opinion articles for media publications and done television interviews, and has rebutted remarks from Thomas, the only black Supreme Court justice.

In his 2007 autobiography, "My Grandfather's Son," Thomas wrote that he was still angry and considered Hill "my most traitorous adversary." During a "60 Minutes" interview that year, Virginia Thomas said she expected an apology from Hill.

That won't happen and there is nothing to apologize for, Hill said then. "I was there in 1981, for two years, and I know what happened. Virginia does not," she told "Good Morning America."

Hill did not return a telephone message left today by AOL News on her Brandeis office phone.