It’s been said that women are all links on a chain, and at no other time have I had more reason to agree with this, perhaps, than now.

In 1991, Anita Hill, an aide to Clarence Thomas, President George Bush’s nomination for Supreme Court Justice, caused a scandal of epic proportions when she accused him of sexual harassment in the middle of his confirmation hearings. It was, I think, the seminal Washington sex scandal, precursor to what has become hackneyed today: you know, standard he said-she said fare, young woman accuses Washington powerbroker of sexual misconduct. But back then, Anita Hill’s bombshell accusation reverberated all over the world. We hadn’t seen anything like it before. Not in Washington. Not since Nixon had left the White House in disgrace had we gawked in horrified fascination at a lurid Capitol Hill story. Besides the political intrigue, there was the bonus fact that the main players were, gulp, black. This was Washington, for God’s sake. Black people were usually bit players, never above-marquee talent.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hill claimed that Thomas had repeatedly made inappropriate sexual comments to her in the workplace, including descriptions of pornographic films. For his part, Thomas denied the allegations and called them “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks”.

Needless to say, the Hill-Thomas case, as it came to be known, got polarising with the public weighing in not simply along gender lines. Black people began thinking that there was a race component. Conspiracy theories emerged. Thomas was an innocent black man enduring a high-tech lynching and being prevented from sitting on the highest US court as the second black Justice. I know I saw it that way. And, much like what would transpire with the OJ Simpson case later, opinions on guilt or innocence came down to race. To white people, Thomas was guilty as sin; he was the embodiment of every stereotype they’d ever heard. Long Dong Silver and all. To black people, however, especially black Americans, there was a sense that Anita Hill was a trouble-making pawn of The Man, being used to keep a black man in his place. Even those who couldn’t reconcile themselves with the fact that the politics of Thomas, a black conservative, didn’t mirror theirs. As a black woman I looked at her sullen face as she endured the intense scrutiny and, yes, embarrassment of testifying and despised her.

(As women, how can we justify relating to other women simply on the basis of how we perceive that they relate to men?)

In the end it was all moot, though. Thomas was confirmed by the Senate and Hill slunk away, her reputation more battered than his. Not that she fared badly. She is today a 54-year-old professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University. But I imagine a cloud still hangs over her.

That is, until now.

Almost 20 years later, a Thomas ex-girlfriend, Lillian McEwen, is spilling the beans. On the heels of a much-publicised voice mail recently left for Anita Hill by Thomas’s wife, Ginni, beseeching that she apologise to the Justice for the pain she caused him by the allegations, McEwen is blabbing that Thomas was in fact the kind of man Hill accused him of being. In an interview with The Washington Post, McEwen seemingly corroborated Hill’s characterisation of Thomas as a power-abusing predator obsessed with porn – more than most men, I gather – who had an unfortunate penchant for querying the bra sizes of the bosomy women he worked with.

Oh my.

So why the silence until now, when she’s shopping around the memoir she’s just completed? Simple, according to her. She wasn’t called to testify, in 1991. Joe Biden, the senator running the hearings back then, knowing about their relationship, blocked testimony from her (and other women who had personal relationships with Thomas), opting instead to hear accounts only from female co-workers.

To be fair, only 25 pages of the book are dedicated to her time with Thomas. Lillian McEwen isn’t some wannabe in need of a fast buck from a tell-all. She’s a retired prosecutor, law professor and administrative law judge who has a comfortable townhouse in Washington. Among the reasons she gives for clamming up, she says is simply out of courtesy to Thomas, with whom she’s remained friendly over the years, and who asked her to not speak publicly about their past.

Guilt or innocence is always difficult to prove in these cases, and one woman’s harasser is another one’s knight in shining armour. What you believe to be the truth is really just about the party you believe. In 1991, I remember watching Anita Hill testifying and feeling caged fury. That was because she didn’t emit warmth. Thinking about it now, how could she have been expected to? She didn’t seem vulnerable, like a bird with a broken wing. But why did her cold defiance rub me the wrong way? I suppose back then I had a different concept of what a sexually harassed woman looked like. Truthfully, Thomas didn’t provoke warm, gooey feelings in me, either. I suspected he was merely acting the wounded victim, betrayed by his “most traitorous adversary”. But I didn’t want to add to the marginalisation of another black man. I was in about as much denial then as Ginni Thomas is now about her husband.

Frankly, I believe Lillian McEwen. Her tone is devoid of rancour about Thomas, who is merely a closed chapter in her life but mostly, her account about Thomas’s sexual proclivities seem to correspond with Hill’s and the other women’s accounts of him, accounts that got brushed aside by the media during the confirmation hearings. Most porn lovers know how to separate fantasy from reality, but other women corroborated what Hill steadfastly charged about Thomas. Why was it so easy to discredit her and give him the benefit of the doubt?

Nearly twenty years later, I believe Anita Hill; I guess I believed her all along. So why did I get caught up in the public excoriation of Hill, back then? For the same reason I would blindly defend OJ, a few years later, even when something deep within me felt he was guilty: the notion that our black men need defending at all costs. I’m older now and wise enough to know that they don’t – not when they’re wrong, and certainly not at the expense of black women.