The rape of Juanita Broaddrick: 'Their Lives' tells of woman's horrifying encounter with Clinton
Started by Robert M
Editor’s note: Candice Jackson’s explosive book, “Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine,”tells,
like never before, the stories of Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick
and others who have suffered from the actions of William Jefferson
Clinton.
In
this excerpt from the book, Jackson comprehensively covers Broaddrick’s
story of being raped by Clinton, tells of her own experience being
sexually assaulted and explains how she believes American liberalism
encourages the forcing of the will on others.
To
this point, I have carefully avoided using the word “victim” to
describe any of Clinton’s women. I made that conscious effort in tribute
to the maxim that overuse of a word dilutes its meaning. As comedian
Ellen DeGeneres once put it, when everything is “the worst thing” then
people run around saying “Oh, paper cuts – they’re the worst thing,” as
if a paper cut is a “worst thing” in the same way as the death of a
loved one is the “worst thing.”
While
Gracen, Perdue, Flowers, Jones, Willey and Lewinsky suffered undeserved
mistreatment at Clinton’s hands, none of those women found themselves
victimized by Clinton in the most extreme, brutal sense of the word.
Four of those women engaged in consensual affairs; the other two
suffered the humiliation of unwanted sexual advances, including unwanted
touching, but neither suffered forced sexual intercourse – rape.
In
this final profile, the “V” word appears at last, and I hope that by
reserving it for Juanita Broaddrick, its meaning will remain robust, for
there is no more appropriate place for it than in her story.
In
March 1976, Bill Clinton took a leave of absence from his professorship
at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville law school to run for
Arkansas state attorney general. Calling the post “the principal
protector of the people,” Clinton faced off in the Democratic primary
against the secretary of state and the deputy attorney general.
Rebounding
from his November 1974 loss in his first political race (popular
Republican incumbent Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt narrowly beat
him), Clinton poured more energy and networking zeal into his attorney
general campaign than the other two primary candidates combined. It paid
off. He garnered more than 50 percent of the primary vote, thereby
avoiding a run-off, and faced no Republican challenge in the general
election, leaving him free to campaign around Arkansas for Jimmy Carter
until he began his career as a public servant in November 1976, at age
30.
Already,
supporters knew that Clinton was their “governor-in-waiting,” and sure
enough, by 1977 he began contemplating his bid for the chief executive
spot. His only question was whether he should skip this step and go
directly to the U.S. Senate. His first campaign call was to Dick Morris,
to help him decide whether to run for governor or senator. Once he’d
decided on the governorship, he spent the spring of 1978 running two
campaigns. Publicly, he had his own primary election to deal with,
though he was far and away the strongest Democratic candidate.
Privately, he spent hours plotting with Dick Morris to improve the
then-governor’s chances of beating his Democratic rival in the U.S.
Senate race – in hopes of neutralizing that rival’s status as Clinton’s
main competition as rising Democratic star in Arkansas politics. In the
general election that fall, Clinton won with 63 percent of the vote to
become governor at age 32.
In
1978, 35-year-old Juanita Hickey worked as a registered nurse. She was
married to her first husband, Gary Hickey, but having an affair with her
future second husband, David Broaddrick. She had started her own
nursing home in Van Buren, Arkansas, a successful endeavor that
eventually grew into two residential facilities – one for the elderly
and one for severely handicapped children. The young, charismatic
Clinton was in the midst of his gubernatorial race and had made a
campaign stop at her nursing home that spring.
While
glad-handing there, Clinton told her to be sure to stop by campaign
headquarters if she was ever in Little Rock. She was so impressed with
him that for the first time in her life she volunteered to help a
political campaign, agreeing to hand out bumper stickers and signs. She
thought he had “bright ideas” for the state and felt eager to pay a
visit to his Little Rock headquarters, excited about picking up T-shirts
and buttons to hand out.
Not
long after that, she attended a seminar of the American College of
Nursing Home Administrators at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock. She
stayed in a hotel room with her friend, Norma Kelsey. After they checked
in to their room, Broaddrick called Clinton campaign headquarters and
was told to call Clinton at his apartment. She did, and asked Clinton if
he was going to be at his headquarters that day. He said no, but
suggested they meet for coffee in the hotel coffee shop. A bit later the
same morning, Clinton called her and asked if they could meet in her
hotel room because there were reporters crawling around the coffee shop.
She agreed.
She
felt “a little bit uneasy” meeting him in her hotel room, but felt a
“real friendship toward this man” and didn’t feel any “danger” in him
coming to her room. When Clinton arrived she had coffee ready on a
little table under a window overlooking a river. Then “he came around me
and sort of put his arm over my shoulder to point to this little
building and he said he was real interested if he became governor to
restore that little building and then all of a sudden, he turned me
around and started kissing me. And that was a real shock.” Broaddrick
pushed him away and said, “No, please don’t do that” and told Clinton
she was married. But he tried to kiss her again. This time he bit her
upper lip. She tried to pull away from him but he forced her onto the
bed. “And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him
and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen, but he wouldn’t
listen to me.” But he “was such a different person at that moment, he
was just a vicious awful person.” At some point she stopped resisting.
She explained, “It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to
the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please
stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would
bite my lip.”
Clinton
didn’t linger long afterward. “When everything was over with, he got up
and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks
to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out
the door he says, ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and
went out the door.” The whole encounter lasted less than 30 minutes, but
it changed Juanita Broaddrick’s life forever.
When
questioned by an interviewer, “Is there any way at all that Bill
Clinton could have thought that this was consensual?” Juanita Broaddrick
answered, “No. Not with what I told him, and with how I tried to push
him away. It was not consensual.” The interviewer, NBC’s Lisa Myers,
pressed for specificity. “You’re saying that Bill Clinton sexually
assaulted you, that he raped you?” Broaddrick answered, “Yes.”
Broaddrick’s
friend Norma said that when she left their shared hotel room that
morning, Broaddrick had told her that she planned to meet with Clinton.
When Norma called around lunchtime, however, Broaddrick sounded so upset
that Norma returned to the room to find Broaddrick’s lip and mouth
badly swollen and her pantyhose ripped off. Broaddrick told Norma that
Clinton had sexually assaulted her.
Broaddrick
was too upset to stay for the nursing home meeting, so she and Norma
drove the two hours back to Van Buren immediately, stopping for more ice
to apply to Broaddrick’s swollen mouth. On the drive back, Norma says,
Broaddrick was in shock, and very upset, blaming herself for letting
Clinton into her room. “But who, for heaven’s sake, would have imagined
anything like this?” Broaddrick said years later. “This was the attorney
general – and it just never entered my mind.” In her NBC interview,
Broaddrick said she didn’t tell her then-husband, Gary Hickey, who says
now that he doesn’t remember her lip being swollen (she says she
explained that to him as an accident). Broaddrick did tell her
now-husband, David Broaddrick, soon after she returned home, that she
had been assaulted by Clinton. David Broaddrick recalls that her lip was
“black” and “mentally she was in bad shape.” Broaddrick told three
other friends soon after the attack, all of whom vouch for her story.
About
three weeks after the rape, Broaddrick told Lisa Myers, she and her
first husband attended a Clinton fund-raiser together. She still “felt
in denial” and “very guilty” and at that time still felt like she should
“just shut up and accept [her] punishment” for letting Clinton into her
room, since that must have given him “the wrong idea” about what she
had wanted to happen. After that, Clinton called her half a dozen times
at her nursing home. Once he got through to her and asked when she was
coming to Little Rock again. She just said, “I’m not,” and left it at
that.
In
1979, Broaddrick accepted a non-paying position on a state advisory
board relating to nursing homes – a position to which Gov. Clinton
appointed her. For over a decade she dealt with the governor’s office on
occasion but not Clinton personally, except for a 1984 letter Clinton
sent her after her nursing home was named one of the best in the state.
At the bottom is a handwritten note, “I admire you very much.” She
interpreted it as a “thank you” for her silence.
In
1991 she attended another nursing-home meeting in Little Rock, with two
friends. In person, Bill Clinton called her out of the meeting; one
friend confirms seeing the pair talking. Immediately, Broaddrick says,
Clinton “began this profuse apology,” saying to her, “Juanita, I’m so
sorry for what I did. I’m not the man that I used to be, can you ever
forgive me? What can I do to make this up to you?”
Feeling
“absolute shock,” she told him to go to hell and walked away. “In that
moment,” Broaddrick tells me, “I let go of my guilt and put it where it
should have been all those years: on him.” She continues, “It was a
relief not to blame myself anymore.” When she went to lunch with two of
her friends who were also nurses just after the freak encounter with
Clinton, the three women “actually began to discuss the possibilities
that Bill Clinton might be remorseful.” However, “that faded as soon as
he announced his candidacy for president about three weeks later.”
Broaddrick and her friends were all at work when the news broke, “and we
just looked at each other and shook our heads in disgust.”
As
early as the 1992 presidential race, Juanita Broaddrick’s story entered
the realm of rumors that swirled around Bill Clinton. Though her own
account didn’t appear in the news until one week after the Senate
acquitted President Clinton in February 1999, her name had been
circulating among the media, Clinton’s political opponents, and later,
Paula Jones’s legal team. Broaddrick’s “phone rang incessantly with
requests for interviews, all of them refused” until January 1999.
In
November 1997, investigators for Paula Jones confronted Juanita
Broaddrick – and tape recorded the encounter – but she slammed the door
in their faces saying she didn’t want to relive the “horrible thing”
that had happened. When Jones’ attorneys subpoenaed Broaddrick, she
signed an affidavit saying she’d never experienced unwanted sexual
advances from Bill Clinton. Paula Jones’ lawyers used Broaddrick’s
story, disguised as “Jane Doe No. 5″ in a court filing based largely on a
1992 letter to Broaddrick from a friend of hers, Philip Yoak**. In that
letter, Mr. Yoak** wrote that he was “particularly distraught when you
told me of your brutal rape by Bill Clinton, how he bit your lip until
you gave into his forcing sex upon you.” When this letter and the Jones
court filing hit the news in March 1998, Mr. Yoak** told reporters he’d
tried to get Broaddrick to go public during the 1992 campaign, but she’d
said to him, “Who would believe me, little old Juanita from Van Buren?”
Some
people would. Reporting in March 1998 on the Yoak** letter, NBC’s Lisa
Myers called Broaddrick’s story “potentially the most explosive
allegation out there.” Myers pointed out that “Juanita Broaddrick has
never tried to sell any story. She has never gone after the president.
She is a nurse who built a nursing-home business. She is a respected
member of her community in a little town in Arkansas.” Through lawyers,
the White House called Broaddrick’s story (as represented in the Paula
Jones court papers) “outrageous” and smugly pointed journalists toward
Broaddrick’s affidavit denying it.
Ken
Starr provided the impetus forcing Juanita Broaddrick’s story into
public view when he subpoenaed Paula Jones’ lawyers for records relating
to Broaddrick and three other specific women (in addition to Kathleen
Willey and Monica Lewinsky) in March 1998. In April 1998 Broaddrick
admitted to the OIC that she’d lied in her affidavit, but Starr didn’t
pursue her story because she insisted she’d never been threatened or
bribed into silence – hence there was no obstruction of justice angle
for Starr to use in his investigation. To the public eye, Juanita
Broaddrick’s story remained a mere footnote to the Paula Jones lawsuit
and the Monica Lewinsky scandal engulfing the Clinton administration
throughout 1998. She spoke with The Washington Post in April 1998 but
insisted on staying off the record.
Even
though she’d signed the affidavit and had consistently refused to
discuss her story on the record, “Jane Doe No. 5″ appeared in materials
turned over to Congress during impeachment hearings and reportedly
influenced several wavering Republicans to vote in favor of impeachment,
although House of Representatives prosecutors declined to include her
story in their case against Clinton at the Senate trial.
Rumors
about her story wouldn’t disappear. Some of them offended Broaddrick,
and one in particular pushed her over the edge into public disclosure:
on New Year’s Eve 1998 a friend handed her a tabloid story stating that
Clinton had bribed David Broaddrick to suppress his wife’s account. By
January 1999, NBC correspondent Lisa Myers had been trying to persuade
Broaddrick to tell her story publicly for months. Kathleen Willey tells
me, “Lisa Myers called me and asked me if I would talk with Juanita.”
Willey talked with Broaddrick “many times ... I told her what I went
through” going public with her story. “Juanita would tell me, ‘I’m just
so afraid that I’m finally getting this off my chest and then people
won’t believe me,’” Willey tells me sadly. “She kept saying, ‘I don’t
want it to be for naught.’” After everything Willey had been through
herself, she didn’t feel like she could offer Broaddrick much comfort.
“I had to tell her there are no guarantees; look who you’re dealing
with,” Willey says, before adding quietly, “All of us involved in this
Clinton thing, we really have not fared well.” Willey stopped short of
giving Broaddrick any specific advice. “I wouldn’t tell her what to do,”
she says.
Broaddrick
was in her mid-50s in January 1999 when she finally relented and taped
an interview with NBC. NBC had the scoop, but held off airing the
interview for a month, citing the need for further investigation into
the details of Broaddrick’s account. The delay frustrated Broaddrick,
who said NBC had been investigating for nearly a year already, even
combing through “old papers about the case we settled with two employees
fired for theft 20 years ago.” During the delay, NBC interviewer Lisa
Myers told Broaddrick, “The good news is you’re credible. The bad news
is that you’re very credible.” The story looked explosive, and NBC
wanted to make sure it was “rock solid” before airing it.
Broaddrick
wound up giving The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz a
heart-to-heart chat, which the WSJ published on Feb. 19, 1999, a week
after the Senate acquitted President Clinton. NBC aired its interview
with Broaddrick on “Dateline” on Feb. 24, 1999. WSJ editorial writer
Dorothy Rabinowitz described Broaddrick as “a woman of accomplishment,
prosperous, successful in her field, serious; a woman seeking no profit,
no book, no lawsuit.” Ms. Rabinowitz continued: “[She is a] woman of a
kind people like and warm to. To meet Juanita Broaddrick at her house in
Van Buren is to encounter a woman of sunny disposition. ... She sits
talking in the peaceful house on a hilltop overlooking the Broaddricks’
40 acres, where 30 cows, five horses and a mule roam. .... It’s a good
life all right.”
By
the time it finally aired its interview with Juanita Broaddrick, NBC
had done the thing properly. Lisa Myers reported that NBC had talked to
four friends who corroborated Broaddrick’s story, and had even tracked
down a detail that would be often used to challenge it: Broaddrick could
not remember the month or date of the rape. Springtime of 1978 was as
close as she could recall, though she recalls with clarity many other
details, like what she was wearing, the hotel room furnishings, the view
from the window.
NBC
checked all of Juanita Broaddrick’s personal and business records,
public records, nursing-home records and convention schedules, and
learned that there was a nursing-home meeting at the Camelot Hotel in
Little Rock on April 25, 1978. State records even show that Broaddrick
received credit for a seminar that day. The White House refused to
answer NBC’s requests for information, and NBC could find no evidence
about Clinton’s whereabouts that day, which contradicted Willey’s
claims; he had no “public appearances on the morning in question,” and
newspaper articles “suggest he was in Little Rock that day.”
Other
details checked out, too. The “little building” visible from the hotel
room window that Broaddrick says Clinton pointed to was the Pulaski
County jail. Though it was torn down later, in April 1978 it was visible
from river-facing rooms in the Camelot Hotel. Local law enforcement
officials told NBC that Broaddrick was a solid citizen with no criminal
record and that they took her allegations very seriously; of course,
there was nothing that law enforcement could do, since the statute of
limitations for the crime of rape had run out more than a decade
earlier.
Why
did she refuse to report it when it occurred, or come forward when
Clinton ran for president? “[Given the] mentality of the ’70s,” she
said, “There I was, I was married, I was also in a relationship with
another man, and ... I was there alone in a hotel room with the attorney
general and I didn’t think anyone would possibly believe me.” As for
coming forward during the 1992 campaign, she and her second husband,
David Broaddrick, talked about it in 1992, but “[it] brought up a lot of
hurt, and a lot of things that I’d buried years ago. And then we just
decided it wouldn’t be in our interest to do it. So we decided not to.”
Lisa Myers asked, “Did you receive any payoff to stay silent,” to which
Broaddrick responded, “Oh goodness, no. I mean how could anyone be
bribed or paid-off for, for something that, to not say anything about
something that horrible?” No one ever threatened her, either; staying
silent for so many years was strictly her choice. Why did she sign a
false affidavit? “I didn’t want to be forced to testify about one of the
most horrific events in my life,” she told Lisa Myers. “I didn’t want
to go through it again.” But signing the affidavit hadn’t called off the
hounds and there she was, reliving it all over again on national TV.
When
Kathleen Willey finally came forward with her story of unwanted sexual
advances in March 1998, Broaddrick told Myers that she struggled again
over whether to tell her side of things. “I would get up in the morning
and I would think: it’s the thing to do. Then by nighttime I would think
that could bring no good whatsoever to my life. And I’m sorry for these
women. I’m sorry for what they went through, but I just wasn’t brave
enough to do it. There’s nothing else to say.” She talked to Ken Starr
in April 1998 only because he granted her immunity and she was afraid of
lying to federal prosecutors. By the time she bared her soul in public
in January 1999, she “just couldn’t hold it in any longer.” Although she
had “buried this a long time ago,” she now felt compelled to “clear up
all these stories” floating around about her. Time had not healed all
her wounds, however. When asked how she felt about Bill Clinton, she
replied, “I couldn’t say it on the air. My hatred for him is
overwhelming.”
As
difficult as it was for Broaddrick to come forward, she expresses
sympathy for the trouble her “Dateline” interview caused Lisa Myers. “I
feel that Lisa suffered during this time,” Broaddrick confides to me.
While NBC postponed the airing of the “Dateline” interview, some people
created buttons that read “Free Lisa Myers” that were worn by Brit Hume
and others on Fox News Network. Despite Myers’s painstaking research and
reporting, airing Broaddrick’s story still carried a professional and
political price. “Lisa and I remain good friends,” Broaddrick tells me.
Clearly, Lisa Myers remains one of the few journalists with the courage
to stand by Broaddrick through this ordeal, and Broaddrick must deeply
appreciate her professional integrity and personal support.
Broaddrick
is also tremendously proud of her son, attorney Kevin Hickey, who
appeared on “Larry King Live” in March 1999 defending his mother against
guests Dee Dee Myers and David Gergen, former Clinton advisers. Kevin
was only 9 years old when the rape happened, and his mother didn’t
burden him with her ordeal until rumors began surfacing during the 1992
campaign. Then, she sat down with Kevin and told him what Bill Clinton
had done to her. He was shocked and angry at then-candidate Clinton.
“I
couldn’t believe what was happening,” Kevin told Larry King. “But I
could tell, just by the look in her face, that this was just a terrible,
terrible experience.” When Larry King asked Kevin what his feelings
were toward Clinton, Kevin replied, “Disgust. The guy has got into a
high office – a lot of people think he’s a very good politician and that
may be true, but I think he leaves a lot to be desired as a person and
that’s pretty much my feelings of him.” Dee Dee Myers and David Gergen
were left fumbling for words, admitting that they found Kevin and his
mother quite believable. Gergen said that Kevin’s interview gave him
pause because “what mother would tell her son that she had been raped if
it hadn’t happened?” Broaddrick says of her son’s interview, “He was
awesome. ... Dee Dee Myers and David Gergen were speechless after
Kevin’s interview.” After Broaddrick’s interview with the WSJ, the White
House issued its first direct statement mentioning Juanita Broaddrick
by name.
“Any
allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20
years ago is absolutely false,” read a statement from the president’s
personal attorney, David E. Kendall. That was it. No attempt to argue
that Clinton wasn’t even in Little Rock on the day in question, or that
he had never been alone with her, or even that they hadn’t had sexual
relations. The denial was immediately parsed by some in the press and
public wary of Clinton’s overly technical, legalistic use of the English
language. Broaddrick wasn’t known as “Ms. Broaddrick” in 1978, some
noted – at that time she was “Mrs. Hickey.” She alleged rape, not
“assault.” The denial even seemed to leave intact a possible loophole –
Clinton could retort that consensual sex had occurred, just not rape.
Clinton never addressed the charges; when questioned he answered, “Well,
my counsel has made a statement about the ... issue and I have nothing
to add to it.”
An
initial smattering of coverage followed the February 20 Wall Street
Journal interview, but the story faded quickly. On Feb. 23, 1999,
journalist Richard Cohen wrote of the Clintons: None of the rules of
political gravity apply to them. They just float above everything.
A
second wave of commentary and coverage washed up after NBC aired its
interview on Feb. 24, 1999. Much of it focused on the perceived
weaknesses in Juanita Broaddrick’s account – particularly, that she
could not recall the month or date of the rape, and that she attended a
Clinton fund-raiser just weeks after it happened. Coverage focused on
her story’s import to the media industry more than on the impact of her
story as such. The Chicago Tribune wrapped up its article with a tone
weary with scandal fatigue: “The Broaddrick allegation – a devastatingly
serious but old and unproven charge against the president of the United
States – presented every newsroom in the country with a difficult
decision.” Columnist Mary McGrory wrote that Broaddrick’s allegations
were treated more as a “press mystery” than as a bombshell. Michael
Kelly spotted the problem: no one cares. Clinton’s lawyer, Kelly
observed, declared the allegation “absolutely false.” But the lawyer
couldn’t know for certain the charge was false. “At best, he can know
that Clinton says the accusation is false,” Kelly wrote. “And what is
that worth?” Kelly concluded, “But [Clinton's lawyer] of course doesn’t
really care whether Broaddrick’s story is true or not. He doesn’t really
care whether the president is a rapist or not. He doesn’t really care,
because he figures you don’t really care either – at least, not enough
to do anything about it.”
Richard
Cohen, a columnist for The Washington Post since 1976 who is no friend
of conservatives (in a column after President Reagan’s death Cohen
refused to give Reagan credit for ending the Cold War, saying flippantly
that the Soviet empire “would have collapsed sooner or later”) remained
troubled by Juanita Broaddrick’s story. “Is it possible the president’s
a rapist? Am I supposed not to care?” Cohen wondered. “Who is this
guy?” Cohen wrote, and answered himself: “At one time, I thought I knew.
He was a somewhat left of center southern governor – progressive, a
policy wonk, a product of the anti-war movement, and, of course, a
womanizer. This much I knew, and none of it, including the last,
bothered me much.” But Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Monica
Lewinsky were not what Cohen expected from Clinton. Now, with Juanita
Broaddrick, “A woman has cried rape. She sounds credible. ... The White
House denies the charge, but so what? I would expect nothing less.
Anyway, we’re not talking George Washington here. With Clinton, if
there’s a cherry tree down, we know who did it.” You can almost see him
shaking his head in dismay as he closed by repeating, “Who is this guy?”
But
Bill Clinton’s constellation of previous denials-turned-admissions had
at least somewhat caught up with him. Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary
of health and human services, had firmly and publicly expressed
complete belief in Clinton’s denial of the Monica Lewinsky affair in
1998. A year later, when asked whether she believed Juanita Broaddrick,
Ms. Shalala would only say that she took the charges seriously, hadn’t
reached a conclusion about whether she believed Broaddrick, but didn’t
need to decide that in order to be “a patriot and a professional” and do
her job in the Clinton administration.
A
senior White House official, speaking only on condition of anonymity,
said: “Bill Clinton has got a problem. If he weren’t president he would
be in counseling. ... But I don’t think because he’s got a sickness,
that corrupts everything about him. ... He is a great president.” A
sickness? Perhaps, but sexual addiction is just one part of the mix of
influences shaping Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women. Former Clinton
loyalist George Stephanopoulos, whose book about life in the Clinton
White House, “All Too Human,” came out less than a month after
Broaddrick’s charges aired, said it “rips my stomach” to think of being
in the White House and trying to duck her story. He thought Clinton’s
lawyer’s denial was worded to give cover to the idea that there might
have been a consensual sexual encounter. The man he knew and worked for
from 1991 until 1996, he said, wasn’t capable of such an assault, but “I
did not know Bill Clinton in 1978.” Hardly a ringing endorsement from
someone who used to consider Bill a friend as well as a boss.
One
newspaper editor wrote, “[W]ho can say Broaddrick’s charges are
preposterous, outrageous, unthinkable? Who can say with certainty we
don’t have a rapist in the White House? Indeed, her story is so credible
that NBC News – nobody’s right-wing conspirator – aired it after weeks
of double-checking the details. Major networks don’t run such stories
every day.” The editor continued, “Jones, Willey and Broaddrick –
there’s something about Bill and sexual assault. He’s either the most
victimized man in America or our most famous victimizer. ... Alas, his
own may not have been the only lip Bill Clinton’s ever bitten.”
The
media didn’t give Clinton a free pass on the Broaddrick story, but
there did exist an overall lack of direction; “where do we go with it
from here,” summed up the sentiments of many journalists. With no legal,
criminal, or impeachment machinery pushing the story along it petered
out quickly, with most commentators’ final words centered on the sad
thought that no one will ever know for sure whether we twice elected a
rapist to the highest office in the land. Noting that Newsweek’s only
coverage of the Broaddrick story had been a pithy remark in its
“Conventional Wisdom” item-of-the-week box (she got a sideways arrow for
not coming forward sooner but, opined Newsweek, her charges “sound like
our guy”), one columnist summed up the reaction to Broaddrick this way:
“He raped you, Juanita? Yeah, sounds like our guy. But what’s your
point?”
Refusing
to comment directly on Broaddrick’s credibility, The New York Times
editorialized that Clinton’s “talk to my lawyer” statements were
insufficient responses: “There is no legal or constitutional remedy for
the [Broaddrick] situation,” wrote the Times. “But surely there is a
limit to how long Mr. Clinton can speak through his lawyer on these
matters. ... [I]t would be nice to hear Mr. Clinton himself address the
matter and provide his version of what transpired, if in fact the two
did meet in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978.”
Professor
Susan Estrich called The New York Times “deeply out of touch with the
people of this country” for making such an unreasonable request of
Clinton. The Washington Post also disagreed with The New York Times –
but for a different reason. Hearing Clinton speak directly to the matter
wouldn’t help us figure out Broaddrick’s story one bit, editorialized
the Post: “Mr. Clinton’s word in this realm by now has no value. That
leaves us with an accusation that cannot be reasonably accepted, nor
easily ignored. It is a mark of where Mr. Clinton has brought us as a
country that he cannot begin to ameliorate that fact.”
On
an episode of NBC’s “Today,” Dorothy Rabinowitz, the journalist whose
Wall Street Journal interview with Broaddrick brought the story into the
mainstream, defended her assessment of Broaddrick’s credibility. She
said that Broaddrick’s 21-year delay may mean the legal system offered
no recourse, but history still had a right to know her story in order to
evaluate the person of Bill Clinton. Rabinowitz, who had earned respect
among her peers for her investigative reporting about false claims of
child sexual abuse in the mid-1990s, added that talking face to face
with Juanita Broaddrick is to “find yourself in the presence of someone
you suspect is telling something that happened.” The show’s other guest
for the segment, Alan Dershowitz, dismissed Broaddrick’s story as
“gossip,” though he admitted that Clinton’s word wasn’t any better than
Broaddrick’s when it came to matters of sex.
Attacks
on Juanita Broaddrick’s character were kept to a minimum, but some
pundits took their shots. Bill Press, co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,”
wrote for the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t believe Juanita
Broaddrick for the following reasons: (1) she couldn’t remember the date
of the rape (“If she was scarred for life, wouldn’t she remember the
date?”); (2) she was cheating on her first husband at the time so at
most Broaddrick and Clinton probably had consensual sex (“If you’re
cheating on your husband, and then cheat on your boyfriend, do you tell
your boyfriend the truth?”); and (3) she attended a Clinton fund-raiser
and accepted appointment to a government post after the alleged rape
(“Why did she still want to support a man who raped her?”).
Former
White House Special Counsel Lanny Davis protested, “Is journalism about
reporting facts or not? ... It is not corroborated because her
girlfriend saw her with a swollen lip. That doesn’t make the charge of
rape a fact. ... How do we know she didn’t lie to all her friends? We
know that, voluntarily ... she swore out an affidavit that she now says
she lied about.” His protest might have been a bit more convincing if we
hadn’t watched a similar affidavit signed by Monica Lewinsky go up in
smoke just six months earlier.
Feminists
had trouble discounting Juanita Broaddrick’s allegations. Gloria
Allred, an attorney who filed the first formal charges against Sen. Bob
Packwood for sexual harassment, is a rape survivor herself who never
reported the rape to police. Whether or not anything could be done
legally about Broaddrick’s rape, Ms. Allred insisted that the public has
a right to know if the president is a rapist. Denise Snyder, executive
director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, cautioned people about viewing
Juanita Broaddrick’s two-decade delay in coming forward as a slight on
her credibility. When the assailant has “a lot of power and a high
public profile,” such delays are common, she said.
Patricia
Ireland – the then-president of NOW who also voiced support for
Kathleen Willey – issued a pre-emptive statement calling on the White
House to treat Broaddrick “fairly, respectfully,” and not to “trash this
woman,” whose allegations must be taken seriously. On “Larry King Live”
Ireland added that even if President Clinton looked America in the eye
and denied the rape, there’s a “certain credibility gap” to whatever
he’d say. She added that she understood why Juanita Broaddrick felt
reluctant to come forward for so many years.
Susan
Faludi, author of the influential 1992 feminist tome “Backlash: The
Undeclared War Against American Women,” found Broaddrick “credible” but
wasn’t sure “what Juanita Broaddrick wants done [about her
allegations].” So she used Broaddrick to take a swipe at conservatives,
for whom “women can be damned” unless “the perpetrator is Clinton.” By
contrast, feminist author Andrea Dworkin stated flatly, “I believe that
Clinton is a rapist. I believe the woman – and if I had doubts about the
woman, I trust what I perceive about him.” She classified “what he did
to Paula Jones” as assault, and from there, she said, “it’s a very clear
line to rape. ... Suddenly, every time you look at this man you have to
think about rape. It’s harder to sleep, it’s hard to work ... because
this man is the president. That’s obscenity – right there.” She didn’t
stop with castigating Clinton, either. “Essentially, while what’s left
of the women’s movement shows any support for Clinton, they’re
destroying the movement itself as any kind of refuge for women who’ve
been sexually assaulted,” Dworkin said cogently. Apparently at least one
feminist icon truly believes in feminism’s motto – the personal is
political – enough to apply it even to a leader who’s good on “women’s
issues” if that same leader mistreats individual women.
Around
this time – during and just after the impeachment trial – Clinton’s job
performance rating remained high, hovering at about 64 percent.
However, the percentage of people who believed him to embody the values
most Americans try to live up to had plummeted to about 30 percent, and
only about 35 percent of the public believed him to be honest and
trustworthy.
There’s
nothing schizophrenic about those numbers. A dishonest, untrustworthy
man can make official decisions favored even by those who think him
dishonest and untrustworthy. Pundit Morton Kondracke argued that nothing
should be done about Juanita Broaddrick’s story – legally or
politically. But as a “cultural test” people should know as much about
President Clinton’s “personal” behavior as possible, even if it meant
considering the possibility that a sitting president is a “monster” who
“sexually assaulted a woman, biting her lip to impose himself on her.”
One
month after Juanita Broaddrick’s charges aired publicly, Bill Clinton
faced reporters in his first solo press conference in over nine months.
One reporter had the audacity to pose this question: If the first
president was remembered for never telling a lie, what would be
Clinton’s legacy in this respect? “Clinton’s face tightened. Then, in an
edgy voice, he pleaded for people to look just as hard at the veracity
and motives of his critics as they have at his own.” In a “box score,”
Clinton went on, “there will be that one negative,” but “then there will
be the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times when the record will
show that I did not abuse my authority as president, that I was
truthful with the American people, and scores and scores of allegations
were made against me and widely publicized without any regard to whether
they were true or not.” He didn’t bother explaining which “allegations”
were true and which weren’t. And he never directly addressed Juanita
Broaddrick’s charges. Maybe he feared this was finally a he said, she
said battle he might lose.
Hillary Clinton LASHES OUT at Rape Survivor at NH Town Hall – After Questions About Husband Bill
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Monday, January 4, 2016
DEMOCRATS ELECTED A KNOW RAPIST NOW THEY WANT HIS WIFE!!! SICKENING!!!
Submitted by: Conservative 2 Conservative
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