THE Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has broken a 16-year silence to reveal the bitterness he feels towards the woman who tried to derail his confirmation by accusing him of sexual harassment.

Thomas, a prominent conservative jurist, said those who tried to block his appointment chose the “age-old blunt instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct”.

In his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, published tomorrow, he writes: “The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers . . . But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose – to keep the black man in his place – was unchanged.”

Thomas was accused during his confirmation hearings in 1991 of harassing Anita Hill, a black employee, a decade previously. During the hearings, one senator asked whether he had ever said, “Is there pubic hair in my Coke?” or referred to “Long Dong Silver” in Hill’s presence. Thomas denied that he had.

In his book, Thomas describes Hill as a “mediocre” worker who was touchy about his refusal to promote her. He claims she became the tool of activist groups that feared he would roll back abortion rights, and were angry he did not conform to their view of how a black man should think.

“If I. . . had done the slightest thing to offend [Hill], she would have complained loudly and instantly . . . not waited for a decade,” he said.

Thomas, 59, received a $1.5m (£740,000) advance for his memoir, which opens with an account of his strict upbringing by his grandfather in rural Georgia, and ends with his appointment to the Supreme Court. He claims in the book that at one point in the early 1980s, his life felt so desolate that he contemplated suicide.

He reserves particular scorn for the Democratic senators who tried to prevent his confirmation. One made him think of a “slave owner”, while he says his worst fears about white people came to pass “not in Georgia, but in Washington, DC, where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony”.

Thomas writes about his Catholic upbringing, but also criticises the church for being less adamant in the past about ending racism than it is “about ending abortion now”.

The hearings were so degrading that he did not watch the final vote. When his wife told him he was now a Supreme Court justice, he said, “Whoop-dee-damn-do.”

Explore World News

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• The Afghan grave that began decades of war
• Berlin hails Hitler 'assassin'
• Science thinks big for better IVF