Retired federal prosecutor Lillian McEwen, 70, dated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for seven years before he married attorney Virginia ‘Ginni” Lamp, the founder of Liberty Consulting.
She told “Inside Edition” recently, “We had a relationship that included threesomes … He recruited women that he worked with for participation in those threesomes” before he joined the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here’s what we know about McEwen, who broke her silence about her relationship with Thomas 19 years after his confirmation:
- McEwen is a retired Washington, D.C. Federal Judge, who was also born, raised and educated in Washington, D.C. She’s had a long legal career that included working as a prosecutor, counsel on Capitol Hill, a criminal defense attorney, a law professor, and finally as a United States Federal Administrative Law Judge.
- In 2010, McEwen appeared on “Larry King Live” and made accusations that Thomas was a binge drinker who obsessed over pornography back in the 1980s, but changed radically when he stopped drinking alcohol. “Clarence became not the person I knew when I first met him,” she said, adding that he “drank to excess” when they first met and might have been a “raving alcoholic” at that time. When he gave up alcohol, she said, he became “angry, short-tempered, asexual” and obsessive with ambition and what she called “weird things,” such as long runs in the dark before dawn.
- She wrote a memoir titled D.C. Unmasked & Undressed: A Memoir where she exposed the obsessions and vulnerabilities of the Washington, D.C. establishment – the policy makers.
- It’s reported that McEwen only went public about her relationship with Thomas after his wife, Virginia, called Anita Hill and left her a voice mail asking her to apologize for her 1991 testimony at the confirmation hearing.
- She has been twice married and twice divorced, and has an adult daughter.
Thomas is one of the more conservative justices who sits on the nine-member Supreme Court bench. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, five days after the first Black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement. Thomas was confirmed with 52 consenting and 48 dissenting, the narrowest margin in history.
HBO’s dramatic reenactment of an all-white, all-male Senate judiciary committee questioning Anita Hill about sexual harassment accusations against Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation is appropriately titled Confirmation and will air tonight at 8 p.m.
