This at least is one of the theories stated as fact by David Brock in his controversial book, The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. Its publication has sparked a flurry of charges and countercharges. The Real Anita Hill sprung from an extended article which was first published in the conservative periodical The American Spectator.

Brock's central thesis is that Anita Hill misrepresented herself as a quiet woman, impelled by a sense of duty to keep an unworthy designate off the nation's highest court. She was instead, he claims, a rabid ideologue and the pawn of influential left-wing groups who felt that Clarence Thomas' conservatism rendered him unworthy of Thurgood Marshall's mantle.

The ideological gulf which separated Hill and Thomas and her perception that he did not respond to her subtle advances combined to feed her resentment and sow the seeds of her revenge scheme.

Brock is successful in marshalling a number of discrepancies in the case which Hill brought against Thomas. He does, however, make a number of inferential leaps.

He builds his entire case on the memory lapse of one of Hill's key supporters, Judge Susan Hoerchner. Hoerchner was able to provide pivotal evidence for Hill, since she testified that Hill had confided that she was being sexually harassed ten years before. Her charges, therefore, could not have been trumped up solely to discredit Thomas.

Brock notes that Hoerchner had initially testified that Hill had confided in her before moving to work with Thomas as his assistant at the Department of Education. The sexual harassment to which she referred must have taken place at Hill's previous employer. Only by mistaking the dates was Hoerchner able to provide the evidence to support Hill's claims.

The author is relatively successful in arguing that Hill was professionally incompetent and unable to adjust to a high-powered life in Washington. He lays this failing at the door of affirmative action, perhaps forgetting that mediocrity respects no racial boundaries. Brock suggests that Hill was fired from her first job at the now-defunct law firm, Wald, Harkrader and Ross, because of incompetence and sought to camouflage this incompetence by leveling charges of sexual harassment.

Brock's book is not to be automatically dismissed. Although many of his sources are anonymous, the sheer volume of interviews and intensive examination of the minutiae of the case make for a persuasive argument.

Yet, in spite of the arsenal which Brock has stockpiled, there is no single piece of ammunition sufficient to land a mortal blow. The Real Anita Hill is, however, a salvo in an ongoing cultural war. It lends a new aspect to the case, compelling the reader to take another look at the proceedings which, almost two years ago, rent American society along class, racial and gender lines.