ED KLEIN ON HILLARY: 4 - Hillary meets Juanita Broaddrick

In the Spring of 1978, during Attorney General Bill Clinton's campaign for governor, he and Hillary scheduled a joint appearance at a fund-raiser in Van Buren, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Crawford County.

The chairman of the Crawford County committee for the Election of Bill Clinton was an attractive thirty-five-year-old nursing home owner by the name of Juanita Broaddrick. She had volunteered to work for the young attorney general because, as she explained in an interview for this book, "all the women in this area were taken by his charisma, looks, and personality."

But Juanita was no longer "taken" by Bill Clinton. In fact, she was dreading seeing him at this night's event, for the last time they were in the same room, he had raped her.

Just three weeks before, he had come up to her hotel room in Little Rock. "He turned me around and started kissing me," she said, "and that was a real shock. I first pushed him away and just told him 'no.' . . . The second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting on my lip. . . . And then he forces me down on the bed. I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him 'no.' ... He wouldn't listen to me. . . . He was such a different person at that moment; he was just a vicious, awful person."

"I felt responsible for what happened," she explained. "You go back to the nineteen seventies and allow a man to come to your hotel room, you feel you get what you deserved. I accepted this guilt.

"When Hillary arrived with Bill at the fund-raiser, she made her entrance through the kitchen area," Juanita continued. "And I was going to leave immediately. But she made her way directly to me, making me very nervous. I was dumbfounded that she came straight to me.

" 'I'm happy to meet you,' Hillary said. 'Bill has talked a lot about you and what you have done for the campaign. And I want you to know how much I appreciate what you do for Bill.'

"I was falling apart emotionally. She would not let me go. She came close to my face.

"'Everything you do for Bill,' she said, looking me stern in the eye. 'Everything.'

"I extracted my hand from hers. And in that instant, I knew that she knew. I never thought for a moment there was any possibility that she didn't know that her husband had raped me."

Discussion and Questions
LYNNE CHENEY: Those defending Mrs. Clinton as a feminist heroine might be interested in a comment my daughter made when I told her I was moderating this panel. She said, “I think the people who want to defend Mrs. Clinton as a feminist heroine should be asked exactly which parts of her experience one should point to. What exactly has she done?” Then she quoted Peggy Noonan’s new book, “Mrs. Clinton is so famous, so celebrated for her accomplishments. She so quickly and eagerly refers to them. Yet when you look at the record, her reputation for accomplishment seems to be just another fiction.”

BURSTEIN: But if she gets elected to the Senate in her own right, that will be a wonderful signal to women who have been putting their energies and efforts into advancing their husband’s career that it’s not too late for them. And if Hillary has benefited from being Bill Clinton’s wife, well, George W. Bush has benefited from having a father who was President. The problem is you’re holding her to a higher standard.

INGRAHAM: Don’t you think we need some explanations from her about the events that completely gripped our country for two years? Her husband was impeached for lying under oath. People want to understand this. Was her marriage just a completely political bargain? Did she stick it out just to protect the political left wing? Did she know about Monica?

BURSTEIN: I think it’s outrageous of us to put ourselves in her place and imagine that she’s a fan of her husband, that she’s adopted every view he takes. Her choice is that she loves him, that she wants to stay married to him. Her reasons for that choice are none of your business.

CHENEY: What really drives me crazy is when Hillary acts like the happy wife. Walking hand in hand off the helicopter together at critical moments. It is just so distressing to me.

BURSTEIN: Passion and emotion and love are such confusing things in real life.

CHENEY: But hypocrisy is the thing that is most distressing.

BETTY FRIEDAN: As far as I’m concerned, Hillary Clinton and the President are good role models for the children of our country. They illustrate a marriage between equals. She was at the top of her law school class, he was in the middle of the same class.

She, through her intelligence and her efforts, helped advance his career. And now she’s moving on her own to run for the Senate in New York. This is a wonderful role model.

QUESTION: Nobody has brought up Juanita Broaddrick, and the fact that Bill Clinton has been plausibly accused of rape. Hillary Clinton has been alleged to have been complicit in helping to cover up not only that particular alleged abuse but all the other incidents that have gone on through this man’s career. Surely this is something that needs to be discussed when the subject of Mrs. Clinton’s feminism is raised.

BURSTEIN: I don’t believe Juanita Broaddrick’s is a credible story. Now maybe I’m wrong. But it’s very rare, in my experience, if something that awful happens, that there isn’t more to it.

So the answer to your question is simple: Hillary Clinton hasn’t done anything wrong by staying with a man she doesn’t know to have done the thing he’s accused of. If he did this thing, and she’s crazy, and I’m crazy, and everybody who thinks the story is made up is crazy, then we’ll be very sorry for ourselves one day.

FRIEDAN: Who’s Juanita Broaddrick? I’ve never heard of her.

FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’ve never heard of her?

FRIEDAN: No.

FEMALE: She’s the woman Bill Clinton raped.

BURSTEIN: I don’t think that that has ever been proved.

FRIEDAN: He raped her in the White House?

[crosstalk]

CHENEY: I’m going to step in as moderator and ask Christina to comment on whether she thinks Hillary as a feminist has in any way been undermined by her unsympathetic attitude toward the women alleged to have been imposed upon by her husband.

SOMMERS: What I find interesting with Hillary is that she was very much part of a group that supported Anita Hill. She was at the ceremony where Anita Hill received an award, and she’s very much on her side. Then when the tables were turned, she completely flipped positions. I thought at the time of Anita Hill that it was impossible to know what went on, and I don’t think we know exactly what went on with Juanita Broaddrick. The problem is, both cases were “he said/she said.” Although it’s important to keep in mind that one involved an alleged rape, while Clarence Thomas was never accused of anything more than some ribald banter and tasteless jokes.

But feminists came down very hard on the side that “women don’t lie about these attacks.” They insisted that in any sexual harassment lawsuit a woman has the right to investigate a man’s entire sexual history. Hillary Clinton supported that view when it seemed like a convenient weapon to be wielded against enemies. And Bill Clinton signed that harassment bill. Then they were hoist on their own petard. What bothered me so much about watching the Paula Jones episode and its sequels is that feminists would sound so different when it was their guy, and their power, on trial.

QUESTION: The First Lady has traveled around the world and received, in many cases, a rapturous reception from women.

Do you think by virtue of the model that she presents and the message she’s brought that more or fewer women will be clerks in their Supreme Courts? More or fewer will be successful in their lives?

INGRAHAM: I think she’s irrelevant. Hillary’s message around the world is largely one of scattered clichés and government largesse. She basically wants more U.N. money for more programs, more family planning, and more talk about lifting women up.

I don’t see Hillary’s actions being ones that lift women up out of poverty. What solutions is Hillary Clinton going to give women who want to start a business? Who want to play a sport? Who want to stay married to their husbands and live a happy life? I think she’s largely been either a bad influence for women, or had no effect.

SOMMERS: I have admired some of Hillary’s work abroad. There are many parts of the world where women have not had their first wave of feminism, and I think she’s a very able carrier of basic equity feminism to other parts of the world.

But we don’t need a feminist revolution in the United States. Her agenda at home is divisive at a time where we need more unity.

Published in Where is She Going? July/August 2000

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/3450/rapegate.html

'Sounds Like Our Guy,' But What's the Point?

By Jeff Jacoby, Mar 03, 1999

DIFFERENT reactions are possible to Juanita Broaddrick's accusation that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, but stunned disbelief isn't one of them. No one is sputtering, "Clinton? Force himself on someone? Impossible!" We know by now that with Clinton, anything is possible.

Sounds like our guy. Invite himself up to a married woman's hotel room, shove her on the bed, bite her lip so hard it swells to twice its size, rip her pantyhose? Yep, sounds like our guy. Agree to meet Kathleen Willey when she's in a financial crisis, grope her, force her hand to his crotch, mutter, "I've wanted to do this ever since I laid eyes on you"? Sounds like our guy. Send a trooper to fetch Paula Jones, pull her to the couch, expose himself and tell her to "kiss it"? Sounds like our guy.

The president is credibly accused of rape and nobody is shocked. For more than six years, Americans have been pelted with nonstop evidence of Clinton's depravity. By now his low character is so taken for granted -- even by many of those who approve of the way he handles his job -- that nothing he does retains the power to shock.

Actually, that's not quite true. Americans would be shocked beyond measure if Clinton were to admit manfully that the latest awful allegation is true.

But, of course, he never admits to the truth. He denies, he lies, he obfuscates, he perjures himself, he wags his finger at the TV cameras, he tells his aides and Cabinet secretaries that he is being set up, he goes to court with meritless claims of privilege, he goes on "60 Minutes" and bites his lip, he sends his wife to blame it all on vast right- wing conspiracies, he says it depends on what the meaning of "is" is. The truth comes out only as a last and desperate resort. And not always then.

ad nausea

Maclean's
March 8, 1999

Rape and a President
by Andrew Phillips

Nick Auf der Maur, the late Montreal man-about-town and political gadfly, had a favourite line about the enduring popularity of the city's perennial mayor, Jean Drapeau. Montrealers, he used to say with a wondering shake of the head, would keep on re-electing Drapeau "even if he was caught at high noon with a greased goat in Dominion Square."

Drapeau, it turns out, had nothing on Bill Clinton. The mayor may have been a minor-league autocrat, but his public life was devoid of personal scandal. The President's private failings are all too familiar, and if the evidence of last week stands, there is just about nothing that will dent the American public's support for him. Something quite extraordinary happened, and the collective reaction was to shrug and look away. What happened was this: a perfectly credible, well-spoken woman with no evident political or financial motive went on national television and accused the President of the United States of raping her in the spring of 1978, when he was the young, on-the-make attorney general of Arkansas, campaigning to be governor. She didn't actually use the word "rape," so harsh and ugly, but that's what it was, if you believe her, so long ago in a hotel room in Little Rock. It wasn't an "inappropriate relationship," an "unwelcome sexual advance," or any of the other euphemisms that surround the Clinton presidency. It was rape.

The news media, after tiptoeing around the story for weeks, in some cases for years, finally reported the sordid details. The woman, known to investigators during the Lewinsky scandal as Jane Doe No. 5, is a 56-year-old nursing home owner in the town of Van Buren, Ark., named Juanita Broaddrick. Her story -- recounted to, among others, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times -- is straightforward. She says she met Clinton in April, 1978, when he came to campaign at one of her nursing homes. He invited her to see him at his headquarters in Little Rock. When she contacted him on April 28, he talked his way into her hotel room, then started kissing her.

Here's Broaddrick's account, in an emotional interview with NBC: "I first pushed him away and just told him no. . . . The second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting on my lip. . . . Then, he forces me down on the bed. I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him no. He just wouldn't listen to me. . . . He was such a different person at that moment; he was just a vicious, awful person." On his way out the door, she said, Clinton put on his sunglasses, turned and, indicating her swollen lips, said: "You better get some ice for that."

Why believe her? Why even report it? In the post-impeachment climate of scandal fatigue and "let's move on," why care? The mainstream American media has found it an excruciating story to deal with. The problems with it are obvious -- starting with the fact that Broaddrick never reported it to the police and waited 21 years before speaking out. Her husband and three of her friends say she told them about the incident at the time and they saw her bruised lips, but there is not hard evidence that Clinton was even at the hotel when she was there. His lawyers say flatly that the allegation is "absolutely false." And indeed, early last year after lawyers acting for Paula Jones sought her out in connection with their sexual harassment lawsuit against the President, Broaddrick signed an affidavit denying the "rumours and stories" about her and Clinton.

And yet . . . the story rings true. Why should anyone be surprised that a woman would keep quiet about such an incident -- especially two decades ago, before rape shield laws prevented defense lawyers from ripping apart her character in court, and especially when the man she was accusing was the state's chief law enforcement officer? Signing the affidavit is no surprise, either: she did not want to be forced into the open by Jones's lawyers. Other women, notably Monica Lewinsky, have denied having sex with Clinton, then acknowledged the truth.

It was only when investigators working for independent counsel Kenneth Starr knocked on her door that Broaddrick agreed to tell her story, knowing that the legal consequences of lying to a grand jury are enormous. Her allegation was part of the huge "document dump" that Starr sent to Congress last year. Republicans decided not to pursue it during the Lewinsky impeachment trial, but they did urge wavering congressmen to read about it in a secret room on Capitol Hill where classified documents were kept. About a dozen took the trouble; nine of them voted to impeach.

Broaddrick's charge is unproven and, at this point, unprovable. The striking thing last week was that as the usual roundtables of pundits dissected the story, almost everyone, except for a handful of last-bunker Clinton partisans, assumed it was true. Feminists, among his most ardent defenders during the Lewinsky saga, did not rush to his rescue. Patricia Ireland, head of the National Organization for Women, called Broaddrick's story "particularly compelling" and urged people to "take her charges seriously." Richard Cohen, a liberal columnist for The Washington Post and a Clinton sympathizer, wrote in amazement that the ability of Bill and Hillary Clinton to float above such charges is "staggering" -- "the Clintons play by no rules. They have vanquished outrage." Newsweek's sole comment on the rape charge was an astonishing throwaway line: "Sounds like our guy."

Sounds like our guy? That's it?
Bill Clinton, it seems, has managed to change America's political culture more than anyone had ever imagined.

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