This should go well.
This should go well. Rob Crandall / Shutterstock.com

Did you catch Confirmation on HBO last night? Or are you waiting for the Game of Thrones premiere before subscribing to HBO Go for a few weeks?

Confirmation, ICYMI, was a dramatic retelling of the Clarence Thomas hearings. You might be old enough to recall that back in 1991, when Daddy President Bush nominated Thomas, some pretty graphic accusations of sexual harassment came to light.

After that, Thomas seemed a significantly less attractive replacement for outgoing Justice Thurgood Marshall, and not just because he once said "I can't see myself spending the rest of my life as a judge" and also seemed like kind of a jerk (required staffers to watch The Fountainhead).

Back in 1991, former Thomas girlfriend Lillian McEwen was not a part of the confirmation hearings, which is a shame, because she sure does have some saucy stories to tell about him now. But are they true? Well, gee, uhhhhhh...

Here's what McEwen, who dated Thomas for seven years, says: โ€œHe mostly always smelled like soap and just naturally had a wonderful odor to his body." Also: "Acting like he was bending over and picking up a handkerchief off the ground was his signature dance move."

She says he was also really into baths, liked drinking anything with alcohol in it, and watched a lot of porn. He also liked group sex, she says. "He recruited women that he worked with for participation in those threesomes," she said.

Sounds like a fun guy, and also a pretty toxic boss. If what McEwen is saying is true. And this isn't the first time she's saying it โ€” these claims go back to 2010, when she talked openly about him, and then a year later, she released a book about DC's steamy underbelly (sometimes literally). But now, for the first time, we're getting a story about Clarence Thomas' sex life on HBO.

So what are we supposed to believe? She's not the first woman to accuse Clarence Thomas of sexually overstepping in the workplace. Aside from Anita Hill, there's also Angela Wright, who says that he pressured her for a date and made untoward comments about women's bodies. "Clarence Thomas would say to me, 'You know you need to be dating me,'" she said. "'You're one of the finest women I have on my staff.'"

And his former assistant, Sukari Hardnett, said that "If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female."

Of course, Clarence Thomas says that none of this is true, and that the attacks on him were racially motivated (his accusers are women of color, but their claims were eagerly elevated by white men). It certainly wouldn't be the first time that racists spun a pernicious narrative about black men having dangerous sexual appetites.

But on the other hand, when a person claims to be the victim of sexual harassment โ€” and then other people come forward with similar claims โ€” you certainly can't ignore them, or demand proof of something that happened literally decades ago and certainly wouldn't have been documented.

So now what's the proper course of action? What do we do? Murmur about rumors that may all be a bunch of lies? Ignore accusations of a pattern of abuse that might still be happening to this day? What side are we supposed to be on, here?

If only we had a model for sussing out the truth and making a decision; some institution that could inspire us to impartially weigh conflicting opinions and evidence; a kind of national mechanism for gathering evidence relating to a controversy, weighing it, and rendering a judgement based on all available facts.

Oh well.