Clarence Thomas’ wife raises eyebrows with phone call to Anita Hill

Almost 20 years ago, the Senate's Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas became one of the more heated moments in American politics. At the center of the controversy was Anita Hill, a former Thomas employee at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who claimed that he made lewd comments and sexual advances toward her numerous times when he directed the agency.

So it was something of a heady '90s flashback when the news broke Tuesday night that Thomas' wife, Virginia, recently called Hill's office to solicit an apology from Hill. The startling move by Ginni Thomas is the latest in a string of forays the justice's wife has made into the spotlight--bold moves that longtime observers of the Supreme Court say is highly uncharacteristic of judges' spouses. Justices sitting on the high court generally take great pains to at least seem above the partisan political fray.

According to ABC News' Jake Tapper, Hill, now a law professor, discovered a voicemail when she arrived at her Brandeis University office one morning last week.

"Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas," she 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. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day."

Hill told Tapper that she "initially thought it was a prank" and alerted the campus police about the call. But it turned out not be a hoax.

"I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get passed [sic] what happened so long ago," Thomas confirmed in an email to several media outlets. "That offer still stands, I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended."

Click image to see a slideshow of the Thomases and Hill

AP

In response to Thomas' admission, Hill told Tapper that the voicemail left for her "was in no way conciliatory" because it was rooted in "the presumption that I did something wrong in 1991." She added, "I simply testified to the truth of my experience. For her to say otherwise is not extending an olive branch, it's accusatory."

As the wife of one of the high court's right-leaning stalwarts, Ginni Thomas has worked behind the scenes for years for Republican groups and causes with little fanfare or controversy. But earlier this year when she founded Liberty Central, a nonprofit tea-party-affiliated group for "citizen activists," she acquired a new public profile. And she has been nothing if not forceful in explaining her motivation to be a leader in the tea party movement.

"We've got to get the Constitution back to a place where it means something ... or we're headed for tyranny," she told blogger Ed Morrissey when asked about the group.

But some think that Ginni Thomas -- who has adopted what the New York Times' Jackie Calmes termed "the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation's highest court" -- could create some serious conflicts of interest for her jurist spouse down the road.

Liberty Central -- which started with two anonymous gifts of $500,000 and $50,000 -- is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means she does not have to disclose the names of donors. However, a federal law requires justices to recuse themselves from cases whenever potential conflicts of interest could arise -- including cases where a justice's spouse might possess a financial interest in the court's decision.

"It's shocking that you would have a Supreme Court justice sitting on a case that might implicate in a very fundamental way the interests of someone who might have contributed to his wife's organization," Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode told the Times earlier this month. "The fact that we can't find that out is the first problem. And how can the public form a judgment about propriety if it doesn't have the basic underlying facts?"

(Photo of the Thomases in 2007: AP/Charles Dharapak)