MARCIA COYLE:

Well, the evening of the day that all of us were reading about Donald Trump's audiotape in which he talked about how he treated women, Moira Smith, who is a lawyer and executive at a natural gas company in Alaska, put a post on her Facebook page in which she recounted three instances of inappropriate touching, even sexual assault, in her life.

And one of the incidents that she mentioned involved Justice Clarence Thomas. Back in 1999, when she was just shy of her 24th birthday, she was a Truman Foundation scholar here in Washington, D.C., and she was at a dinner party hosted by her boss at the time at the foundation, and Justice Thomas was there with some other guests.

She claimed that he groped her at that dinner. A friend of hers sent a copy of the Facebook post to me in a private Twitter message. And after discussing it with my editors, we felt we should open the line of communication with her.

I called her, with no commitment to publish anything, to see if she wanted to talk. She didn't seek us out, and we didn't go hunting for her.