What is the historical verdict on Clarence Thomas vs Anita Hill? Who was telling the truth?

Current event(s) notwithstanding, there's a lot of layers here.

The Historical Trends/Context

The confirmation hearing of the Justice Clarence Thomas happened at an interesting cross-section of different strands of American culture.

First, the status of women in American society, in general, and the workforce, in particular, was changing and this change prompted negative reaction(s) from men, up to and including sexual harassment. The experience(s) of Anita Hill--and particularly her stated fear for her job security--were far from isolated incidents.

During the 1970S, following a period of relative stability in occupational sex segregation, women began to break into a variety of traditionally male jobs.^105 Different factors account for these changes, among· them long~term shifts in women's labor force participation ^106 as well as the federal government's growing commitment to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.^107 In fact, these changes in the degree of occupational sex segregation were relatively small, and restricted to certain occupational categories. (For example, from 1970 to 1980, the percentage of women in administrative positions increased by 11.9 percent, while the percentage of women in construction work increased by only 1.3 percent to about 1 percent of the jobs in the industry.)^1°8 But however small these changes, they were fraught with symbolic import. An active second-wave women's movement was energetically asserting women's right to partake in traditionally male practices, preserves, and prerogatives, especially in matters of work. Against this backdrop even marginal shifts in workplace integration resonated with larger social import. At stake was the gendered character of work itself. There was a quite varied repertoire of tactics that men in different occupational positions used to frustrate women's efforts to participate in forms of work that were traditionally gendered male. Sexualized attention emerged as a weapon in this turf war, a means of making women feel so unwelcome that they would eventually leave. In short, the practice of sexual harassment which we have thus far defined as unwanted sexual relations imposed by superiors on subordinates at work- began to play a new role in political economy of heterosexuality... Lin Farley: "The function of sexual harassment in nontraditional jobs is to keep women out: its function in the traditional female job sector is to keep women down." ^109 [Source: Introduction to A Short History of Sexual Harassment by Reva B. Siegel]

Let's look at one example of a workplace sexual harassment claim from the era. From the Supreme Court--oh the irony--in the 1986 Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson case, "a bank teller complained that shortly after she was hired (and while she was still on probation), her supervisor invited her out to dinner, and then "suggested that they go to a motel to have sexual relations";^113 after resisting, she capitulated. According to her complaint, she then had sex with her supervisor some forty or fifty times in the next several years, and on several occasions was raped by him. [Source: Introduction to A Short History of Sexual Harassment by Reva B. Siegel]

Second, America was one generation removed from the Civil Rights Movement and Black American “unity” always shaky was particularly vulnerable at this time. After the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the systematic squashing of the Black Power Movement, Black American political "unity" and "leadership" evaporated--although the (vast?) majority of Black Americans remained liberal to extremely liberal in their political positioning, especially on racial matters. This positioning--then and now--"bubbled up" local Black political leaders who were/are liberal. Hidden from the mainstream narrative at this time, is a dedicated strain of Black conservative thought. These Black conservatives wanted to put forth "a new vision based on individual responsibility, the notion of diversity within the ethnic community and the absence of ethnic frontiers in the perception of the self, which they called transethnicity. The actors of this new political scene were Clarence Thomas, then aide to Republican Senator John Danforth (R-MO) at the time; Thomas Sowell, an economist member of the Hoover Institution; Walter Williams, another economist following the steps of Sowell; Clarence Pendleton, president of the San Diego Urban League and Tony Brown, radio show host (Brown stands apart as he considers himself more a moderate nationalist than a Black conservative)" [Source: Black conservatism in the 1980s: will the future be conservative … for African Americans?]

Looking for potential ways to expand the Republican party electorate and make a play for the heretofore reliably Democratic Black Americans, the Reagan administration embraced the Black conservatives. Clarence Thomas was appointed Under-Secretary of Education for Civil Rights and then appointed head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "Clarence Pendleton became the chairman of the United States Civil Rights Commission; Gloria Toote was appointed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and became influent in urban affairs; Henry Lucas became the first African American to serve in the executive committee of the RNC; as for Thomas Sowell, he was offered a position in the Department of housing and urban development." [Source: Black Conservatism]. While these Black conservatives continually attempted to minimize the importance of their racial identity, they remained acutely aware of it because of their relative isolation from the wider Black community and their racially specific goal of bringing more black Americans closer to conservative thought.

So in 1991, when Thurgood Marshall's health was too poor to wait out George H.W. Bush's presidency, he retired and explicitly stated that race should not be a factor in choosing his successor--and it wouldn't have been if he wasn't the only non-white person on the Supreme Court, but alas he was. Clarence Thomas had been nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989. Oddly enough, Bush had considered nominating Thomas to the Supreme Court earlier in 1990 when Justice William Brennan retired, but he felt that only a few months of experience was insufficient for the highest court in the land. Source Thomas, with now 18 months of experience, a conservative record, and black skin, was a shoe-in for the nomination of Marshall's seat.

[Note: Wow! This is the first time, I maxed out reddit's character count, so continued below this Comment.]

Edit: Words/formatting