Washington, October 28 (RHC)-- A female lawyer has accused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexually assaulting her in 1999.  According to a report, Moira Smith, who works as a corporate lawyer with an Alaska energy company, said the judge made unwanted sexual advances on her during a dinner party when she was 23-years-old. 

In a report issued by the National Law Journal, Ms. Smith said Thomas grabbed and squeezed her buttocks several times during the party in Falls Church, Virginia, saying: “Justice Thomas touched me inappropriately and without my consent.” 

Moira Smith said: “He groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting I should sit ‘right next to him.’”  He was 5 or 6 inches down and he got a good handful and he kept squeezing me and pulling me close to him,” she stated, according to the Journal. 

In a statement to the National Law Journal, Thomas, now 68 years old, dismissed the allegation as “preposterous”, saying that the incident “never happened." 

Smith, currently vice president and general counsel at Enstar Natural Gas Co in Alaska, said she decided to speak out after hearing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's lewd comments about women.  

A 2005 video was released earlier this month by The Washington Post, in which Trump can be heard making lewd comments about women and bragging about groping them.  A number of women have since come forward claiming that the business mogul has sexually assaulted them. 

Trump has called the allegations “slander and libel” and part of a “concerted, coordinated and vicious attack” by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the news media to undercut his campaign. 

Moira Smith said: "That willingness by men in power to take advantage of vulnerable women relies on an unspoken pact that the women will not speak up about it," Smith, now 41, told the Journal. 

"Why?  Because they are vulnerable.  Because they are star-struck.  Because they don't want to be whiners.  Because they worry about their career if they do speak out.  But silence no longer feels defensible," she said.  "It feels complicit.” 

Clarence Thomas was nominated to the top court in 1991 by Republican President George H.W. Bush.