Clarence Thomas calls Anita Hill "my most traitorous adversary"

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' memoir goes on sale today.

"I felt myself crushed beneath the accumulated trials of a lifetime," he writes of his misery when former employee Anita Hill accused him of talking to her about X-rated movies and making pornographic references.

More than a quarter of the book - for which he reportedly received a $1.5 million advance from HarperCollins - is about his Supreme Court nomination and confirmation fight. In 1991, he called the hearings "a high-tech lynching," a theme he continues here. Recounting the Hill episode, Thomas compares himself to the black defendant wrongly accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird - a story about a young black man doomed by race.

Thomas accuses the Senate Judiciary Committee for taking Hill's claims seriously instead of dismissing them "out of hand."

He calls Hill "my most traitorous adversary," writing that she was wrongly portrayed in the media as a "conservative, devoutly religious Reagan-administration employee," when she was "a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments." He calls her work "mediocre."