{"id":6062,"date":"2016-10-28T08:03:51","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T15:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/alaska-lawyer-says-justice-thomas-groped-her-in-1999\/"},"modified":"2016-10-28T08:03:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T15:03:51","slug":"alaska-lawyer-says-justice-thomas-groped-her-in-1999","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/alaska-lawyer-says-justice-thomas-groped-her-in-1999\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaska lawyer says Justice Thomas groped her in 1999"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 An energy company lawyer said Thursday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas touched her inappropriately at a 1999 dinner in suburban Washington. Thomas denied the allegation.<\/p>\n

Lawyer Moira Smith said in a statement that she was 23 when \u201cJustice Thomas touched me inappropriately and without my consent.\u201d Smith, now vice president and general counsel of Enstar Natural Gas in Anchorage, was then a recent graduate of Georgetown University who was spending the year as a Truman Foundation scholar in Washington.<\/p>\n

Two of Smith\u2019s roommates back then confirmed to The Associated Press that Smith told them what happened just after the dinner. Smith didn\u2019t go public until this month.<\/p>\n

Thomas said the claim is \u201cpreposterous\u201d and \u201cit never happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s story and Thomas\u2019 denial were first published by Law.com.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019 high court confirmation in 1991 was nearly derailed by Anita Hill\u2019s claims that Thomas sexually harassed her.<\/p>\n

Smith first described the incident publicly on her Facebook page, saying \u201che groped me while I was setting the table\u201d at a dinner hosted by her boss. Smith said she has since deactivated her Facebook page, but Law.com reprinted the posting with its story.<\/p>\n

Smith said she was moved to share her experience after hearing that Donald Trump had been caught on tape making crude comments about women and then seeing an internet meme that made light of the situation. Smith said on Facebook that she also had been the victim of date rape and was later groped by an acquaintance in a bar.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the mother of a young daughter and son, I am coming forward to show that it is important to stand up for yourself and tell the truth. When powerful men commit sexual assault, they count on their victims keeping it a secret,\u201d she said in the statement.<\/p>\n

When Smith returned home from the dinner in June 1999, she recounted what happened to her three roommates, said one of the women, Carrie Farmer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t recall if it was that night or the next morning, but she told us that she went to this dinner and then this awful thing happened,\u201d said Farmer, a health policy expert with the Rand Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. \u201cI don\u2019t recall our reaction to it, except I guess we were young and we didn\u2019t know what to do with that kind of information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another roommate, Laura Fink of San Diego, would only say that the account published in Law.com was accurate. Fink is a Democratic consultant who made similar claims against former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, for whom she worked when he was running for Congress. In 2013, Filner resigned as mayor amid sexual harassment allegations and eventually was sentenced to 90 days of home confinement on charges related to the claims.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s account became public just as Thomas and his supporters were marking his 25th anniversary on the court. The commemorations included an event at the Heritage Foundation Wednesday night, where Thomas was asked whether there is hope for the Supreme Court confirmation process.<\/p>\n

Carrie Severino, a former Thomas clerk, said the justice treated his clerks with \u201cthe utmost respect\u201d and allowed her to defer her clerkship for a year because she was pregnant.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe alleged conduct bears no resemblance to the man I worked closely with, whom I still count a friend after nearly ten years,\u201d Severino wrote in a blog post on National Review.com that the justice\u2019s defenders circulated Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 An energy company lawyer said Thursday that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas touched her inappropriately at a 1999 dinner in suburban Washington. Thomas denied the allegation. Lawyer Moira Smith said in a statement that she was 23 when \u201cJustice Thomas touched me inappropriately and without my consent.\u201d Smith, now vice president and general […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":6063,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6062"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}