THE BROADDRICK FILES (young women voters need to know about the rapist and the enabler)

RELATED STORY - A few months ago, FReeper Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien confronted Hillary Clinton at Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire regarding the rape of Juanita Broaddrick. Hillary claimed that she didn't know who Broaddrick was. Here is the story - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1865782/posts

Shays Shocker Clinton Raped Broaddrick Twice. Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays said on a talk radio show Wednesday that, based on secret evidence he reviewed during the impeachment controversy, he believes President Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick, not once, but twice.

Talk-show host Tom Scott of Clear Channel Broadcasting, New Haven (WELI 960) asked Shays about the mysterious impeachment "evidence room," prompting the GOP moderate to say that Broaddrick "disclosed that she had been raped, not once, but twice" to Judiciary Committee investigators.

Shays, who is often hailed by the New York Times for his independent judgment and good sense, found the evidence compelling:

"I believed that he had done it. I believed her that she had been raped 20 years ago. And it was vicious rapes, it was twice at the same event." Asked point blank if the president is a rapist, Shays said, "I would like not to say that it way. But the bottom line is that I believe that he did rape Broaddrick."

News Behind Scandal 'C' Worth Pursuit I WON'T say Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia just to bury Juanita Broaddrick's story -- but the thought crossed my mind.

There's a ripple quality to Clinton and bad news that helps keep any one thing from gaining traction with the national news media, which has the attention span of your average poodle puppy. Scandal "A" is overtaken by Foreign Policy Problem "B," which is overtaken by Scandal "C" and so on.

Sometimes Clinton is lucky. Sometimes he has a hand in effecting his own escape. About to be impeached by the House? Thank goodness for Saddam Hussein and cruise missiles! In the end the press corps is exhausted, and reporters can't for the life of them see any need to pursue "that old story."

Broaddrick's account of being raped in 1978 by Clinton, then Arkansas' attorney general, likewise has slid beneath waves of ensuing events. At a journalism forum last week in Washington, Scripps Howard White House correspondent Ann McFeatters considered absolutely daft the notion that anything else could be done with the tale, as old as it is, especially with the nation at war.

But Broaddrick's treatment by the country's media elite reveals troubling truths about news providers, whose work is lapped up by the public, which speaks to pollsters who turn out the data that so closely drive elected officials these days.

Broaddrick's allegation that she was raped in a hotel room was whispered for years in Arkansas and faintly pursued by some reporters during Clinton's 1992 run for the White House. She was ashamed, didn't want publicity and wouldn't give interviews until confronted by Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

NBC News was on the story more than a year ago and finally got Broaddrick on tape in January, during the heart of Clinton's Senate trial. But it was held back and Clinton was acquitted. Some think the network wanted to kill the story altogether.

Then the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz got her own Broaddrick interview and wrote a story for the paper's editorial page. That produced follow-ups in the Washington Post and New York Times. NBC, by then scooped, ran its Broaddrick interview as a segment on "Dateline."

Then, nothing, like a dead telephone line. NBC's regular news show still hasn't mentioned the story, nor has ABC's. CBS made passing mention of The Washington Post's follow-up.

Clinton, sensing a compliant media, issued a denial through a lawyer and continued dodging questions until the Yugoslavian war clouds sufficiently gathered. At his first news conference in 10 months, Clinton dismissed mild questions about Broaddrick by falling back on his lawyer's denial.

Now many, like McFeatters, say there's nothing else to be done with a story which, if true, means a rapist sits in the Oval Office. It is, as Rabinowitz said at the Washington forum, the "elephant in the living room" no one wants to acknowledge.

Why? "When a story such as Juanita Broaddrick's comes along, much about it is troubling, sensational, even lurid ... and all the worries that took hold of media organizations were reasonable," said Fox News' Brit Hume. "But are these standards being neutrally applied? The answer obviously is of course not."

Reporters plunged into allegations, unsubstantiated and most quite aged, against Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. No one had to be begged to follow the story. Anita Hill's army of angry feminists and female legislators demanded a hearing. Likewise, charges that Oregon's Bob Packwood stole kisses from female aides caused a firestorm and gobs of press coverage.

Broaddrick, no. "There's an attitude here that when a story like this comes along and the subject is Bill Clinton, it does look different (to reporters) than if the charge is leveled against a Clarence Thomas or a Bob Packwood," said Hume. "The problem isn't that there's no place to go (with the story). The problem is no one's trying to get there."

McFeatters throws up her hands. Clinton won't talk and his spokesmen won't talk. There's a war going on. "We don't know how to prove this charge," she said.

Hume pointed out reporters routinely get answers from a stonewalling White House, but that takes persistence (lacking in much of the Clinton scandal coverage). If the press corps is "inclined to do so," he said, it will pursue a story "like the hounds of hell" until there's an answer. Not in this case, though.

One problem is a news media which, because it subconsciously favors liberal politicians and/or schmoozers, spends too much time examining its own navel instead of the man with the intern under his desk. Hume said news organizations are caught up in weighing the "impact" of what they do instead of making independent news judgments.

In the case of Juanita Broaddrick's very serious allegations of rape, newsroom self-censorship -- and his dangerous new war -- is giving Bill Clinton the biggest pass of his six-year presidency.

from the Wall Street Journal, 1999-Mar-5, by Cynthia Alksne, MSNBC legal analyst and former sex-crimes prosecutor in New York and Washington.:

Clinton Insults All Rape Victims Women have solidly supported President Clinton through the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment trial. On balance, we thought he was good on so-called women's issues and were not willing to turn our backs on him based solely on a consensual relationship with a young intern. Despite this history of loyalty, feminists need to take a much harder look at Mr. Clinton in the wake of Juanita Broaddrick's allegations.

Here, in a nutshell, is the problem: Ms. Broaddrick says the president raped her. Her word alone should be sufficient to require a serious response from the president, particularly in light of the support he has enjoyed from feminists and female voters. Instead, the president had his lawyer, David Kendall, issue a perfunctory statement that the charges were "absolutely false"--a statement Mr. Kendall is in no position to verify--and has refused to answer any specific questions. In essence, the president is suggesting that Juanita Broaddrick's corroborated word is not "evidence" and therefore does not merit a response.

Yet one woman's word is enough to prosecute a rapist. Rape cases are routinely won or lost when a victim takes the stand to accuse the defendant of the crime. Indeed, the law explicitly permits a jury to convict a rapist on the word of the victim alone if her testimony is deemed credible. And anyone who watched Juanita Broaddrick's NBC News interview with Lisa Myers would have to conclude that, at a minimum, Ms. Broaddrick was a credible accuser.

Ms. Broaddrick's accusations are even more troubling than a classic "he said, she said," rape allegation, because there is more evidence than just one woman's word. Her story is corroborated. She immediately told a friend about the rape; this same friend saw her immediately after her visit from Arkansas's then-attorney general. Her lip was swollen and blue from the alleged assault. She saw Ms. Broaddrick's pantyhose, which were torn in the crotch area. Ms. Broaddrick also told several other people that Mr. Clinton had raped her. But still, the only word from the president himself is an arrogant no-comment.

It is true, as the president's supporters have noted, that we cannot know for sure what really happened in that hotel room 21 years ago. It is too late to obtain medical evidence. There is no police report. And we do not know Mr. Clinton's schedule on the day of the alleged rape.

Instead, we have only one source of information that could unravel the mystery: Bill Clinton. The president could help matters by answering these questions: What, if anything, happened between him and Ms. Broaddrick? Was he in the hotel room with her? Did they have any physical or sexual contact? Did he rape her? What about consent? Does he have an alibi? Does he know of any motive for her to fabricate such a story?

Even if Mr. Clinton answered these critical questions, women--and the groups that purport to represent them--should demand something more of their president: He should repudiate any suggestion that a woman's word itself is not enough to credibly support a rape allegation. Unless and until this occurs, groups such as the National Organization of Women and anyone else who has ever fought for rape victims should be outraged, and should be doing much more than issuing tepid press releases begging the White House not to trash Ms. Broaddrick.

Feminists should also be outraged that the New York Times did not have one article about Ms. Broaddrick's allegations until five days after the story broke, and then only on page A16. And every feminist who has ever fought for tougher rape laws should ask herself these fundamental questions: What kind of man is Mr. Clinton? Do we have a sexual predator in the White House? A rapist? These are issues that need to be resolved by each of us individually. And we need answers from the president in order to judge the merits of these allegations.

When I was a sex-crimes prosecutor, rapists often got at least eight years of public housing--in jail, not the White House. If these allegations are true, jail is where Mr. Clinton belongs. And the fact that the passage of time makes these allegations impossible to prove is no excuse for punishing future rape victims by raising the bar and suggesting that their word is not sufficient, credible evidence upon which to prosecute an alleged rape.

Now, dear readers, you can't script things this well. Because Alksne wouldn't tow the dialectic line across from operative extraordinaire Oliver North, she got sumarily canned. This psyop stinks worse than a pig pen in August.

from National Journal's Cloakroom, 1999-Mar-1, by Vaughn Ververs, from http://opinionated.net/policonvo.asp?convo=672:

Cynthia, We Hardly Knew Ya MSNBC's Cynthia Alksne has been relieved of her duties as the left half of MSNBC's "Equal Time," one month after launching the show with co-host Oliver North. The network abruptly announced her departure in a release late Friday evening, which added that the former federal prosecutor will "return to her previous role as a legal analyst for MSNBC."

An installment of "Time and Again" was shown in the show's time slot Friday, a move the network says was previously scheduled.

"Cynthia is a highly regarded legal expert," MSNBC Vice President Erik Sorenson said, "and we are very pleased that she will continue as an important member of the MSNBC team."

Sources tell "Talking Heads" that the network felt Alksne's analysis was stronger than her skills as an anchor, that she didn't settle into the co-hosting role and never developed much on-air chemistry with North. The network release said Alksne will be replaced with a rotating roster of liberal hosts until a permanent replacement is found. North will continue to present the conservative view.

The change came quickly, given that by most accounts Alksne was just getting started. In an interview with "Talking Heads" after the show's first week, she made clear that they had been given only four hours of rehearsal time prior to the first live show, but that "we're getting better every night, I'm excited about that."

Alksne's final appearance also featured something of a departure from her role on previous shows. In the midst of discussing the rape allegation leveled at President Clinton by Juanita Broaddrick, Alksne made clear her opinions: "The way the feminists have sort of jumped on this and attacking her is a big mistake, and we need to be very careful. This woman should be treated as a crime victim, and respectfully, and let's not be knee-jerk about this, because there are larger issues at stake than Bill Clinton."

I Believe You Juanita I DIDN'T believe Gennifer Flowers when she said she had an affair with Bill Clinton. I felt the burden of proof was on the accuser. Then I didn't even listen to her whole story because her accusation -- that they had an adulterous affair to which she had consented -- seemed so, well, cheesy.

Then I read Clinton's own testimony and learned that he lied to the American people when he denied the affair. Now I believe Gennifer Flowers.

(I still don't believe Clinton when he testified under oath that he only had sex with Gennifer Flowers ``once.'')

I didn't believe Paula Jones' claim that Clinton dropped his drawers in front of her. I believed Clinton had a trooper invite Jones to a hotel suite, because there were corroborating witnesses. I could figure out what he wanted Jones for, but I didn't think he would be that crude.

Then, her case was thrown out of court, and Clinton still paid her $850,000. Now I believe Paula Jones.

I didn't know what to believe when Kathleen Willey came forward. She seemed credible. Her story fit with the Jones accusation and what we knew about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. So I believed that what Willey said could be true.

I didn't believe President Clinton when he told me he ``did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.'' I do believe he never would have rescinded that months-long lie if Lewinsky hadn't kept her dress.

I believe Juanita Broaddrick's charge that Clinton sexually assaulted her in 1978. I don't believe Clinton's attorney's denial.

I believe that this White House -- or Clinton's outside operatives -- will do everything possible to smear the reputations of women who tell the truth about Clinton. They'll sneer about book deals, they'll whisper about the women's twisted motives, they'll bash them for being poor.

I believe Broaddrick didn't come forward because she was afraid she would not be believed if she accused Arkansas' attorney general. I believe Bill Clinton hates women. He treats them as if they were fungible, abusable and disposable. Fortunately for Clinton, women-hating (unlike racism) is an acceptable vice in modern America. Hollywood glitterati fete him when he comes to town. A casting couch don can relate to this president. A rock star who cares about the environment doesn't care how the big guy mistreats women.

When Clinton comes to San Francisco, he's the toast of the town. Big donors don't refuse to attend his fund raisers. They pony up. They fawn. They get their pictures taken with him. The cream of The Special City throws big money at the women-hating president.

They don't care if he betrayed his wife. They don't care if he smeared his old girlfriends. They don't care if he lied under oath before a grand jury. They don't care if his defense is that Monica serviced him, but he never gratified her.

They don't care if Paula Jones told the truth. They don't care if he assaulted Juanita Broaddrick. They don't care how many more women get chewed up just so he can use them.

I don't believe the National Organization for Women stands up for women. NOW released a prim statement supporting Broaddrick's credibility but asserting that her charge of a rape 21 years ago can't be proven. That didn't stop them when they went after Clarence Thomas for talking dirty 10 years before.

I don't believe Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein care about women. Elected in the Year of the Woman, which was supposed to bring gender equity to the once male bastion of the Beltway, their offices had no response when asked if the Senatorettes had anything to say about Broaddrick's charge.

Party biggies don't care if he abuses women. They don't care about swollen lips or torn pantyhose. They don't care about uninvited gropes down the the hall from the Oval Office. They don't care if a cad is the role model for American youth. They don't care whom he hurts.

PERSPECTIVE: Threshold of the possible crossed many women ago I suppose when a journalist meets and writes flatteringly about a Juanita Broaddrick, he should expect to be deluged by letters and e-mail from a divided public--missives by turn praiseworthy, skeptical, excoriating, adoring, vaguely threatening, scatological, juvenile, lewd, loving, lachrymose and, in an inordinately high number of cases, breathlessly inquisitive.

Most of the curious ask for details about Broaddrick's financial status ("Are she and her husband strapped for cash and just looking for a movie about her life?") or appearance ("Be honest: Did she look attractive enough way back when to appeal to a powerful man who could have had a lot of women? Was she hot enough?" A question from a young man, as if you hadn't already deduced this). Some ask about my motivations ("Are your worshipful columns about her a first step toward collaborating on a book with Broaddrick?").

In any case, the letters, kind and critical alike, generally serve to remind me that most controversies are a kind of Rorschach test realized: We tend to see what we wish to see.

With that qualifier, we reach into the mail bag for a comment and a question from a friendly critic:

Query From Conflicted Woman "disgusted that you and others have dredged up a new trumped-up scandal"; and who "wishes you would crawl in a sewer and never come out"; and who "every day wishes the First Amendment could be amended to lock up in the deepest darkest hole people like you who would willfully lie and libel our president and do damage to his family and our country. . . ."; and who, in a postscript, adds, "Please send along my regards to your son and wife, whom I like reading about."

She demands to know: "How can you remotely think that a woman's uncorroborated sex claim about an event that supposedly occurred 21 years ago is fair game for a news story? Would you have gone after Lyndon Johnson if there had been a charge from an unknown person that he had been a hard-core drug fiend? Would you have gone after Richard Nixon if it had been said by some bum off the street that he liked little boys? Would you have gone after Michael Dukakis if it had been charged by a woman from his boyhood days that he hung out with organized crime figures? Can't you and the rest of the press see the sickness of giving space in your publications to out-of-the-blue charges?"

Answer: I appreciate your Johnson, Nixon and Dukakis examples. Certainly, if a man showed no previous history of dabbling in "hard-core drugs" or "organized crime" activities, it would be folly for the press to regard such charges with anything other than a towering doubt verging on incredulity. The threshold of what seems "possible" would not nearly be met.

Issues of "fairness" would trump the public's "right to know." There would be too much justifiable skepticism for us to give voice to accusations that could unjustly damage the reputation of public figures and, as a consequence, perhaps tip the scales of elections, political power, public policy and people's careers.

For argument's sake, let's say that we had a high-ranking public official, even a president, who had had a previous and well-known history of substance-abuse (this is not a cryptic allusion to anybody; we're simply posing a hypothetical here).

Let us say that during his presidential campaign years earlier, the official had admitted to a previous and "short-lived" cocaine problem; then assured the American people that, with the aid of counseling and the love of family and friends, he had conquered the demon; that it was dead and buried. The voters, moved by his candor and the tale of his redemption, overwhelmingly elect him, only for the press, a year later, to hear stories from two "out-of-the blue" strangers who claim that, a decade earlier, he had shot heroin on several occasions--followed by allegations from another stranger that, since taking office, the president has fallen off the wagon and smoked marijuana or done coke on a couple of occasions.

Try another hypothetical. Let's say that a charismatic senator had run into political and legal problems years earlier, in his private business dealings with unsavory S&L figures and reputed Mob thugs, for whom he had allegedly greased the skids with various governmental agencies, in return for political contributions and a share of the businessmen's profits. The charges never were proven to the satisfaction of either a jury or the public, the latter of whom elected the senator to the presidency, after he won their confidence by magnanimously apologizing for "the poor choices I have sometimes made in selecting my friends."

But three years into his term, two men "out-of-the-blue" talk publicly for the first time about how they were present at a meeting where the then-senator actually accepted a cash envelope from a different group of S&L poohbahs in a hotel room--an entirely fresh though unrelated accusation.

I believe, in the case of each hypothetical, it is clear how the press would respond and should respond. Believing that the threshold of the "possible" had been met, journalists would be derelict if they did not poke around to see what credence the new claims might have.

I think those are the proper analogies with respect to Juanita Broaddrick's charges about Bill Clinton. This is a man who has been accused by another woman of groping her in the White House, and still another of exposing himself in the Excelsior Hotel in an effort to woo her to perform a sex act.

This is a man who, on separate occasions on national television, fervently denied with misty eyes that he had had affairs with two women--bald-faced lies to which he confessed only when trapped and, in the case of one woman--the kid intern--when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the affair.

If recent history tells us anything, it is that nothing involving Clinton feels beyond possibility any more, not with a man so reckless, not after a year that has included the appearance of a semen-stained dress.

In short, the threshold of the "possible" of Juanita Broaddrick's charge was crossed many women and years ago, sadly. That is why we, as a corps of journalists, have listened not merely to her but to her friends who have offered what corroboration they can about her emotional state in the aftermath of the alleged rape, 21 years ago.

More will come out about Juanita Broaddrick in time. This is the way with any new public figure, of course. For the moment, some out-of-town reporters, while never meeting her, have taken to portraying her as the hurting wallflower, the diffident and shattered victim.

In truth, she is a remarkably prepossessed woman who built up a successful nursing home business in her early 30s, and who, at 56, lives in a lushly appointed colonial house on a 40-acre ranch. She had just come home the other day from having played in a tennis tournament, proudly noting that she had helped to beat the Otter Creek ladies in senior's doubles. She leads a patrician's life. She has no evident reason to lie here. That further explains why this charge feels in the realm of the "highly possible."

Clinton Rape Victim Watch Update Onetime presidential guru Dick Morris has noticed something reviewers had missed in Michael Isikoff's new book, "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story."

It's this tidbit from page 256 about Clinton's one-night stand with former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen:

"According to Gracen's later account, Clinton flirted with her -- then invited her to the apartment of one of his friends at the Quawpaw Towers. They had sex that night. It was rough sex. Clinton got so carried away that he bit her lip, Gracen later told friends. But it was consensual."

Appearing Tuesday night on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Morris noted, "There's a very important revelation in [Isikoff's] book that hasn't received a lot of attention."

Morris paraphrased the passage quoted above and then pointed out that Clinton bit Gracen's lip, "... just as he'd bit Juanita Broaddrick's lip, according to Juanita Broaddrick. And [Gracen's] statement was made before Juanita Broaddrick spoke."

Two months ago, Broaddrick told the Wall Street Journal and NBC News that Clinton had bitten her lip to get her to submit as he raped her 21 years ago.

Morris addded, "Now if there was a rape trial of Bill Clinton right now and this woman, Gracen, was called as a witness and confirmed the M.O.; that would be a) admissible and b) very decisive."

What about Gracen's claim, as Isikoff reports, that her Clinton sex was consensual?

The author sources his lip-biting account to Gracen's friends, at least one of whom has weighed in on the rape question. Gracen confidante Judy Stokes was interviewed by Paula Jones investigator Rick Lambert in December 1997.

Snippets from Stokes' Jones case deposition have appeared in the press, including an account of a tearful Gracen coming to Stokes after her Clinton encounter, saying the sex was "something she did not want to have happen."

Last month, Lambert elaborated on Stokes' version for NewsMax.com's Carl Limbacher:

"I talked to Judy Stokes for an hour and a half," said Lambert. "At first she was reluctant to burn her bridges with Liz. But I finally asked, 'Do you believe Clinton raped her?' She said, 'Absolutely. He forced her to have sex. What do you call that?' " Lambert concluded, "Stokes was totally convinced it was rape." (See Archives: "The Jane Doe Case Files - Part 1") [included in the top level of this chapter -Ed.]

In April 1998, after months of eluding subpoenas from Jones lawyers, Gracen finally came out of the closet to the New York Daily News. Yes, she said, she and Clinton did have sex -- after denying it for the previous six years. But it was consensual, Gracen insisted.

Rather than deny the charge, White House spinmeisters were mum -- almost as if they were relieved by this version of Gracen's story.

Most reporters, including Isikoff, prefer to accept Gracen's public rape denial over what friends say she told them back in 1982. That's exactly what happened when news of Juanita Broaddrick's rape charge first hit the press.

Gracen's April 1, 1998, rape denial came just three days after NBC's Lisa Myers first reported that Juanita Broaddrick had told four friends in Arkansas that Clinton had raped her. Broaddrick herself had denied the assault in an affidavit filed with Paula Jones' lawyers nearly three months earlier.

With the exception of NBC's Myers, no one in the major media thought this issue was worth pursuing. Most reporters still don't.

Juanita's courage - and Clinton's lies It is with a heavy heart and not a little nausea that I resign from the Bill Clinton defense team.

I have run fresh out of the benefit of the doubt and can no longer bend way over backward. Saddest of all, the cost of keeping a staunch defender of reproductive rights sitting in the White House just climbed out of my price range.

Like all Americans, I got to choose this past week whether I believe Bill Clinton or a 56-year-old Arkansas nursing home operator named Juanita Broaddrick.

Unlike the legions who came before her, Broaddrick did not allege that sometime during the last two decades she had a consensual sexual affair with Clinton. She didn't say that he made a pass (crude or benign), which she rebuffed and he never tried again. Broaddrick said Clinton raped her.

Not a jump-from-the-hedges stranger rape. A "date" rape. The kind that rarely results in an arrest, let alone a conviction, because it almost always comes down to the man's word against the woman's.

Since Broaddrick told her story to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and - in five hours of tapes - to Lisa Myers of NBC's "Dateline," many people have busied themselves casting doubt on her word.

Why did she stay silent about the alleged assault for 21 years? (She says she figured nobody would believe her or they'd say she "asked for it"; she wanted to purge the ghastly event from her life.)

Why did she file a false affidavit about it when Paula Jones' ubiquitous lawyers gave her the chance to sing? (She knew her privacy would be shattered and she says she didn't have the guts to face that.)

Why could she remember only that the incident happened in the spring and not the exact date or at least the month? (It wasn't exactly a day she wanted to commemorate each year; she never forgot the important part.)

Why now? (She read one-too-many "true" stories filled with lies about her and her husband; the guilty burden of her own 21-year silence broke her resistance.)

In truth, Broaddrick had absolutely nothing to gain by speaking up now and everything to lose, especially her privacy and good name. The impeachment trial is over, the statute of limitations on the alleged crime has long run out.

As NBC's exacting research revealed, no right-wing foundation seems to be bankrolling Broaddrick. No book agent has promised a contract. Her upper middle-class lifestyle, 18-year marriage, non- existent police record and apparent lack of any psychosis indicate a solid, believable citizen.

After the past 13 months, Bill Clinton is almost uniformly mistrusted by the people of his country, his party, his closest associates, his friends and even his family. Whatever virtues people still see in him, veracity is not among them.

So, when Clinton's personal lawyer says Broaddrick's accusation is "absolutely false," it is as if a vapor has landed on his side of the scale.

All the times before, those of us on the defense team went through the same drill: Even if he's lying (and usually he was), it's a lie about messing around, about cheating on his wife, about making dumbass, fraternity-boy passes. Even if the accusation is true, it's about unseemly but not illegal sexual behavior, like harassment or assault.

This time, the drill breaks down. If he is lying, it's about crossing a legal and moral line that no feminist (and few women in general) would think of defending. Because proof or disproof is impossible, each of us can only weigh the facts and bestow the benefit of the doubt on the most credible person, either the president or his accuser.

The latter choice opens one up to the truly disgusting prospect of being lumped in with the likes of Kenneth Starr, Henry Hyde, the House managers, Bay Buchanan, the Heritage Foundation and every other "family values" fascist who wants to cram a narrowly prescribed morality down the throats of 250 million Americans. (Thus the aforementioned nausea.)

It is a risk I will have to take. Maybe the president really is telling the truth. This time. But someone else will have to make that argument in his defense. I have no choice but to choose Juanita.

Arkansas woman describes alleged assault by Clinton in TV interview WASHINGTON (AP) - Expressing relief that she is finally telling her story, a sometimes tearful Juanita Broaddrick appeared on national television describing an alleged sexual assault by Bill Clinton 21 years ago.

''I was a little bit uneasy, but I felt a real friendship toward this man and I didn't really feel any danger'' when he asked to come up to her Little Rock, Ark., hotel room during a nursing home conference in 1978, she told NBC's ''Dateline.''

Taped Jan. 20 but held by the network until Wednesday night's airing, Mrs. Broaddrick cried briefly as she detailed the alleged assault.

She said he forced himself on her after she ''pushed him away and told him `no.' ... I just was very frightened. He was ... just a vicious, awful person.''

Asked what she now thought of Clinton, she replied: ''My hatred for him is overwhelming.''

Clinton, who was attorney general of Arkansas in 1978, refused comment earlier in the day on Mrs. Broaddrick's allegations, saying he stood by the statement of his attorney, David Kendall, who called the accusations ''absolutely false.''

Mrs. Broaddrick told NBC nobody tried to intimidate her to remain silent and no one paid her to keep quiet or to speak out. She said she had filed an affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case denying she'd had any unwelcome advances from Clinton because she was unwilling to tell her story at that time.

Clinton opponents accused NBC of sitting on the interview conducted by Lisa Myers in order to protect the president and that the interview, had it appeared earlier, could have had an impact on the Senate impeachment trial that ended with Clinton's acquittal Feb. 12.

NBC said it had needed time to complete reporting on a complicated story. While the network tried to check out Mrs. Broaddrick's account, The Wall Street Journal did its own interview with Mrs. Broaddrick and other media organizations followed.

''I just couldn't hold it inside any longer,'' Mrs. Broaddrick said in trying to explain why she is finally coming forward with her account. She said she didn't want her granddaughters and nieces asking her, ''Why didn't you tell what this man did to you?''

She said she went to a fund-raising event for Clinton weeks after the alleged assault.

''I think I was still in denial,'' she said. ''And I still felt very guilty at that time that it was my fault by letting him come to the room.''

Mrs. Broaddrick said she was unable to recall when Clinton assaulted her, so NBC determined that a nursing conference had been held at the hotel where she was staying on April 25, 1978. The network said it could find no evidence Clinton had any public event the morning of the alleged assault and ample evidence from various public records that he was in Little Rock later that day.

Meanwhile, the woman at the center of Clinton's impeachment scandal, Monica Lewinsky, told ABC's Barbara Walters she wanted to apologize to the nation for the yearlong political ordeal triggered by her affair with Clinton, The Washington Post reported in today's editions.

Walters interviewed the former White House intern last Saturday, and the Post reported on some highlights of the interview, without direct quotes, attributing its information to a source who was present during the interview, which airs next Wednesday on ''20/20.''

Ms. Lewinsky told Walters she still had warm feelings toward Clinton, but she also promised never to have an affair with a married man again.

Clinton privately admits sex with Juanita Hickey (Broaddrick), but still claims it wasn't rape As the White House maintains an official silence on Juanita Broaddrick's charges of rape, Bill Clinton has admitted privately to his closest advisors he was with her at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock on April 25, 1978, and that they did have sex, but he claims the sex was consensual, not forced.

"The President has admitted to his closest advisors that he and the woman had a sexual encounter on that morning, but he maintains it was consensual sex and says he did not, in any manner, assault her," one White House source confirmed over the weekend. "It is a very, very sticky situation."

Other sources say the President's legal advisors have told him to admit nothing about that morning 21 years ago, fearing that a confirmation of even a consensual sexual encounter between he and the Arkansas nursing home operator would further establish her credibility and raise even more public doubts about his.

"There is a problem here," one aide said. "The President cannot deny being at the hotel. He was. He cannot deny sex. There was sex. But he does deny rape."

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has known for several years about Clinton's visit to the hotel when he was Arkansas Attorney General and is part of the team of advisors guiding the current White House strategy, sources say.

A number of Washington reporters have been told, on "background" that Clinton has admitted at least a sexual encounter with Mrs. Broaddrick, whose name was Juanita Hickey at the time.

William Bennett, author of The Death of Outrage, told NBC's Tim Russert on Meet the Press Sunday that reporters have been backgrounded on the issue.

"On background, as you know, as your reporters have pointed out, the White House people are saying, 'Well, he was in the hotel room, but if something went on, it was consensual,'" Bennett said. "Now, is it too late to ask for an inquiry on this."

But White House sources tell Capitol Hill Blue that there is no longer any doubt over whether or not the President has sex with Mrs. Hickey (Broaddrick). The only question is over whether or not the sex was rape.

"There are plausible charges of rape here - rape, by the man who is now president of the United States," Bennett continued. "It's not a question of impeachment. It is not a question of conviction. It is a question of asking for answers from the president of the United States. He's got records, when he was attorney general of Arkansas. They're in his personal possession of where he is on that date. He will not release those records."

Broaddrick, in interviews with The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and NBC's Dateline, tells a detailed and horrifying story of rape by Clinton in the hotel room in 1978. The encounter left her with a severely swollen and cut lip, a fact corroborated by three other witnesses.

But the White House fears that admission of yet another sexual encounter by Clinton, even if consensual, would worsen the shift of public opinion that started with the emergence of Broaddrick's story. Polls taken after her appearance on Dateline show that a majority of Americans believe her story of rape and not the President's carefully worded denial that was issued in a short, two-sentence statement through attorney David Kendall.

"Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false," Kendall said. "Beyond that, we are not going to comment."

As with past Clinton denials, Kendall's statement is less than it seems when examined closely. Clinton was not "the President" in 1978 (Jimmy Carter was). "Mrs. Broaddrick" was in fact "Mrs. Hickey" and the charge was not "assault" but sexual assault and rape.

Others say White House stonewalling has already increased public doubts about Clinton's behavior.

"There's erosion, we can't deny that," one aide said Sunday. "We have to recognize the potential for real damage here."

Democrats are also worried about erosion of support from women's groups that backed Clinton through both the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals.

When asked if Broaddrick's story had damaged the President, NOW President Patricia Ireland said "he is seriously damaged at this point."

Although much of the mainstream press is still shying away from the Broaddrick story, the Saturday New York Times editorialized:

Unless Mr. Clinton wants to serve out the remaining two years of his presidency oddly isolated from the people he leads, he must find a way to resume a normal dialogue with the American people and the press. It may be that he can add little to David Kendall's terse denial about the Broaddrick allegation, but it 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.

But while the majority of mainstream news outlets in the U.S. ignore the Broaddrick story, some news organizations have started to investigate charges that Clinton assaulted a young woman in England while he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1969 and another young woman while he was a law student at Yale University. Capitol Hill Blue, which first published the story of those and other forced sexual attacks by Clinton over the last 30 years, has received more than a dozen inquiries from news organizations in the U.S. and England from journalists investigating the incidents.

"We've tried to be a helpful as we can while at the same time protecting the sources that put their faith in us," said Capitol Hill Blue publisher Doug Thompson. "The bottom line is we did our own legwork and investigation into these charges and the best advice we can offer to other news organizations is that they do the same."

Clinton Beseeched To Comment On Broaddrick Allegations USA Today (3/1, A11, Drinkard) reported a "chorus of Republican voices challenged President Clinton on Sunday to respond personally to" Juanita Broaddrick's accusation of rape. But USA reported "leading Democrats argued that the matter should be dropped, and even some Republicans appeared reluctant to bring up the issue, afraid of further alienating a scandal-weary public."

The New York Post (3/1, Morris) reported Sen. Paul Wellstone (D- MN) "said yesterday that President Clinton ought to respond to the rape allegations." Wellstone "said the 21-year-old rape charges, though difficult to prove, are 'very serious,'" adding: "I think the President should speak to it." Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) "agreed," saying on ABC's "This Week": "Clearly, the President has to offer, it seems to me, some explanation beyond referring everybody to (Clinton lawyer) David Kendall."

The Washington Times (3/1, A1, Price) reported Clinton "came under heavy fire yesterday to respond more fully to" the charges. But Democrats "were far more cautious in suggesting how Mr. Clinton should respond to Mrs. Broaddrick's charges."

On Fox News "Beltway Boys" (3/28), Fred Barnes commented, "We need to hear from the President and the press needs to badger him until he answers questions about this accusation, questions like why did you go and seek out Juanita Broaddrick in 1991, 13 years after the alleged attack?" Added Morton Kondracke: "Well, the amazing thing about this and something that ought to really shake the White House is that I can't find a single person around, including lots of friends of Bill Clinton of long- standing, who think that it's impossible that he did this. I mean, there's no -- really no way of proving it for sure, but the fact that even his friends don't doubt it is really serious. And I agree with you. I think that the press should ask, but Clinton's not going to answer because he doesn't want.want to be parodied, saying, 'I did not do that.'"

Republican Sen. Don Nickles said on CNN's Late Edition (2/28), "I think he's going to have to answer the question. My guess is the media's going to be asking. This is a very, very serious charge that Juanita Broaddrick has made. I watched part of that show on NBC. She's very, very credible. And you know this is the most serious allegation, this is more serious than anything that was ever alleged about Bob Packwood or Clarence Thomas, or anything. And, you know, I think the President's going to have to give some answers, as unpleasant as it is. She sounds very credible and it makes Kathleen Willey, it makes Paula Jones all sound pretty credible."

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell said on FOX News Sunday (2/28), "There's no question if Ronald Reagan had been accused of this, I don't think the press would have let him get away with saying, see my lawyer. Clearly, the President has to offer, it seems to me, some explanation beyond referring everybody to David Kendall. "

When asked on CNN's Late Edition (2/28), "Do you think the President has an obligation now to go beyond what his attorney David Kendall has said," Republican Sen. Fred Thompson responded, "The President has got to answer some questions about this to the American people. Everybody wants to get this over with. Nobody likes to have to deal with this but we continue to be confronted with this, and having some lawyer, who is not involved in it at all, make some kind of perfunctory comment and then hide from American people is not the way to go. And I hope the President realizes that eventually."

When asked on ABC's This Week (2/28), "what should be done now" about Broaddrick's charges, Republican Rep. John Kasich said, "I've really paid very little attention to it. . I'm really not involved in that at all." Kasich added, "I don't know what the procedure is in terms of investigating this. If somebody wants to look into it, that's fine. But in terms of what John Kasich or the House Republicans think about this, frankly, I think that the proper authorities ought to handle it."

The New York Times (2/27), in its lead editorial, challenged Clinton to stop hiding behind lawyers and answer Broaddrick's charge. "It 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."

When asked on ABC's This Week (2/28), "What do you make of Juanita Broadrrick's story," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle responded, " Well, any story like that is serious. Obviously, there is no way we'll ever know what all the facts are and it's been a long time. I think what we have to do now is turn to the nation's business. There's a scandal-weariness around that, I think is understandable." Donaldson: "Are you saying, Senator, that at this point, no matter where the truth might lie.we ought to drop it and not try to find out." Daschle: "Well, I don't know if there's any other option for us. There's not any way of knowing just what our recourses are going to be here." Donaldson: "Do you think the President ought to address this subject?" Daschle: "I think he's addressed it the way you would expect the President to address it and I don't think you're going to here anything more from him, nor do I think it's probably going to lend any additional insight or new information. Let's move on."

On Fox News " Beltway Boys" (3/28), Democratic Rep. Martin Frost commented, "Well, I really don't know anything about the alleged facts in this case. I think that the country wants us to get on with the business at hand, wants to get on with dealing with the problems the country faces. The president has to decide how he's going to handle that and I don't have any particular advice one way or the other. I will tell you this, that I think that the country wants us to get on with dealing with education and health care, with Social Security and with problems that people care about."

When asked on CNN's Late Edition (2/28), "Do you think the President has an obligation now to go beyond what his attorney David Kendall has said," Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman said, "I think that is that is really ultimately up to the President. I mean this is an allegation that is obviously very, very serious, more serious than the other allegations that have made been made against the President because this is an allegation of sexual assault. The other allegations had to do with immoral behavior, this is potentially illegal behavior but it is ultimately, more elusive, because it is effectively unproveable. . So I'm afraid this will stay like a cloud overhead for a while. And the ultimate judgment is going to have to be made by all the American people as they watch this happen. But whether the President says anything more is up to him. In fairness, I think we can't rush to judgment here."

Broaddrick interviewer Lisa Myers was asked on NBC's Meet the Press (2/28), "Why do you believe this story is newsworthy, why is it relevant when the allegations occurred some 21 years ago?" Myers responded, "Well, because Juanita Broaddrick was Jane Doe No. 5 in the Paula Jones case. She had been interviewed by Ken Starr, but probably most importantly, that the information which Starr sent Congress about here was reviewed by 40 Republicans, many of them wavering right before the vote on impeachment. And while not a single one of them said, 'I voted to impeach because of that,' it clearly influenced some of their decisions." Russert: "What specific information did you request from the White House, and what was their response?" Myers: "Well, about 19 days before the story aired, we sent the White House a letter requesting basically any information they had about Juanita Broaddrick, any reason she should not be believed, and we also asked for any information they had about the President's whereabouts on six days in April and May of 1978; one of the dates was April the 25th, the day we believe the alleged incident occurred. And we kept waiting for information from the White House. We also asked not only where Bill Clinton was that day, we asked, 'Did he know Juanita Broaddrick?' Had he ever been in a hotel with her? Had he ever had any intimate sexual contact? Did he apologize to her in 1991, as she claims?' And we got back the two- sentence denial from David Kendall, and that's it."

When asked on NBC's Meet the Press (2/28) if, "do you believe that this story is newsworthy?" Howard Kurtz commented, " It's a very tough call for a lot of news organizations because these are ancient and unproveable, essentially, allegations. But when you have an on- the-record interview, or in the case of NBC, on-camera with Juanita Broaddrick making this kind of serious charge, when you've talked to people who say she told them at the time, then it is-and when you have the White House refusing to answer questions, it's hard to say that it's not a story." When asked the same question, Gene Lyons responded, "My feeling is that the House managers and Kenneth Starr made it news and that, therefore, there was nothing wrong with doing the story. I think the story, as I saw it, was a balanced story; that is to say, anyone who's at all a skeptical individual who wants to look at it in a different way, who wants to entertain different possibilities, can certainly construct them out of what was presented. It's certainly not provable. It shows why there's a statute of limitations under the law because, I think it's clear to most people, we're never getting to the bottom of this story after 21 years." Asked, "What would have happened if this story came out during the impeachment trial," Kurtz said, "It would have exploded like a nuclear bomb. I'm not saying it would have changed the outcome of the trial, but given that supercharged atmosphere, and I can't help but believe that this was in the back of the minds of some NBC executives who had this interview obviously for more than a month, that would have been a very controversial and explosive thing to do." Russert: " Where does the story go from here?" Kurtz: "Well, it depends on whether the rest of the press, but more importantly the public, which, after all, feels that the press has been out of touch on all these sexual inquisitions, Monica Lewinsky and so forth for a long time, whether they feel like this is something that has to stay in the news or whether it just kind of fades."

On FOX News Sunday (2/28) Brit Hume commented, "NBC at the end of the day did the right thing. They put it on and it was a fine and solid piece of work." Juan Williams added, "But, you know, they didn't put it on the nightly news show, which is their prime show. And secondly, they did it after the trial was over which took it out of where it could have had impact in terms of the President's fortunes. So, I don't know why you're congratulating it." Hume responded, "You can argue that they felt it was so inflammatory and so failing to be subject to ultimate proof that they needed to do that in fairness. I don't happen to agree with that. . It's a respectable argument. But, the fact is that that was a story in dire danger of being utterly suppressed."

George Stephanopoulos commented on ABC's This Week (2/28), "People are not paying attention to this and I don't where it can go. . I can't say it's true. I don't think anyone here can say it's true. I don't know that it's not true." Sam Donaldson added, "We don't know whether it's true. Absolutely not. But I think we should find out. . We want to hear the President's side of this." Donaldson continued, "NBC News should be commended for a fine job of journalism. They did not conclude the story was true. They laid out what they could about this story and what they could discover."

When asked on NBC's Meet the Press (2/28) "what will be the political, moral and cultural fallout of these allegations," William Bennett responded, "Well, at the moment, it looks like it may be sad to say nothing. At the moment, it looks like there are clearly serious and plausible -- there's a plausible notion that the president of the United States has committed rape. It's a plausible idea. People who've watched the interview that you just showed, an excerpt, believe her by a pretty wide margin. But it also appears, judging from most of the media and most of the public reaction, the silence on Capitol Hill, that most people are just too tired to inquire into the question as to whether the president of the United States committed rape." When asked the same question, NOW President Patricia Ireland commented, "I hope that some of the fallout will be an additional focus on how weak some of the sexual harassment laws are and how difficult it is, still, to bring forward charges of rape. I agree with Bill that people are tired, but I think what they got very tired of very quickly was being told that they had no moral judgment. . Forty Congress members were briefed, but Starr's people and the House managers didn't feel that the public could deal with this. We weren't allowed to know. We weren't allowed to have the political power of knowing that because they considered the report inconclusive, but they showed it to the wavering House members. What does that say about these kind of puritanical politicians' view of the public in general?"

US News (3/8, Cannon, Lavelle) reported Norma Rogers Kelsay "told US News that she accompanied (Juanita) Broaddrick to Little Rock the day of the alleged attack -- and called her friend shortly after she'd met with Clinton." Kelsay said "her friend was in tears and her mouth was red and swollen." Said Kelsay, "I thought she had been mugged." After Broaddrick told her "that Clinton had forced her to have sex," Kelsay said, "We were both in a state of shock," adding, "I remember her pantyhose were ripped."

US News (3/8, Cannon, Lavelle) reported House impeachment manager Rep. Asa Hutchinson " interviewed Broaddrick for the impeachment inquiry," focusing on "whether the White House pressured her to keep quiet." Hutchinson concluded "there was no information that she had that would have been admissible into evidence." Hutchinson said he "doesn't doubt Broaddrick's story." Said Hutchinson, "She comes across as a very believable witness," but, "the proceedings in the Senate concluded the matter." He added, "I do not see anything moving forward because of these revelations. The public can judge it for themselves and make their own determination. But it's over."

NBC SET TO RESTRICT BROADDRICK FOOTAGE NBC NEWS executives are washing Juanita Broaddrick right out of their hair. NBC NEWS has issued an order restricting the use of Juanita Broaddrick's DATELINE interview, it has been learned. Effective March 1 at 12:01 AM, NBC outlets will be restricted from using the exclusive Broaddrick footage. "No wonder the White House isn't concerned, no one will see her anymore," one frustrated MSNBC anchor said off-the-air. MSNBC and CNBC producers will have to work through NBC lawyers, on a case by case basis, to receive authorization to use any of the Lisa Myers/Broaddrick session. NBC NEWS President Andy Lack could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

Clinton Harassment Continued after 'Rape' Bill Clinton personally tried to contact Juanita Broaddrick within a year of an April 25, 1978 encounter where, she says, he brutally raped her at Little Rock's Camelot Motel.

The stunning revelation was offered this weekend by Mrs. Broaddrick herself, in a message she asked to have posted on the Free Republic website. "Freepers" have been following her case closely ever since NBC refused to air an exclusive interview with the alleged Clinton rape victim in January.

Mrs. Broaddrick had previously acknowledged only two instances where she and Clinton had personal contact: The month of her alleged rape and again in 1991 when she was summoned out of a meeting to hear Clinton's apology. But in her latest communiqu=E9 she mentions a third contact from Clinton, " ... once on the telephone in '78 or '79 when I told him to stop calling me."

Broaddrick did not indicate how many times Clinton tried to contact her before demanding that he "stop calling me."

Last week Broaddrick wrote Daniel Stidham, founder of the website "Boycott NBC!" to deny that she was the "Juanita" alluded to in taped conversations between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. The two women had referenced a two hour-plus conversation between Clinton and a "Juanita", whom many presumed to be Juanita Broaddrick.

"Please be assured that the 158 minute (phone call with) Juanita is not me and that I have nothing to hide regarding Starr, Clinton or anyone," Broaddrick explained to Stidham, who posted her message to Free Republic on Sunday.

Broaddrick's son Kevin Hickey denied last week that Broaddrick was the "Juanita" in question. Linda Tripp, who knows the identity of the mystery "Juanita", backed Hickey's denial Sunday on ABC's "This Week with Sam and Cokie."

The smell of guilt The White House unleashed its smear campaign against Juanita Broaddrick Tuesday night, sending schlockmeister Lanny Davis to MSNBC to rant and rave about how "unclean" everyone should feel after discussing Mrs. Broaddrick's claims of rape at the hands of William Jefferson Clinton.

"The President has denied this! It's untrue! You all should feel dirty just discussing this," Davis practically screamed. Davis said the earlier affidavit that Mrs. Broaddrick filed denying anything happened was proof that Clinton was innocent.

Those words may come back to haunt Lanny. We seem to remember Clinton denying a few other things: Sex with Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, et al. And both Monica and Gennifer filed affidavits claiming nothing happened, only to later come forward and tell the truth.

But the word that should haunt a professional liar like Davis is "unclean." He should know a lot about feeling "unclean." He's hung about the filth and slime at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for so long that he no longer recognizes the stench.

There's no longer any doubt that Bill Clinton is a rotting, disgusting, sexual deviate. His own admitted actions with Monica Lewinsky were disgusting enough.

Now we're learning more about Clinton's sexual obsession, one that won't allow him to accept "no" from any woman who comes into his lust-crazed field of vision.

Davis threw a public fit because House Impeachment Counsel David Schippers, interviewed earlier by MSNBC's John Hockenberry, referred to what happened to Mrs. Broaddrick as "rape" instead of "alleged rape."

Hockenberry quickly injected the word "alleged" into the conversation with Schippers, but Davis was so out of control that it didn't matter.

We have no doubt that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick in that Arkansas hotel room 21 years ago, just like we have no doubt that he raped 19-year-old Eileen Wellstone in England 30 years ago.

There's no reason to believe Bill Clinton's denials. He is a pathological liar who has been caught, time and time again, in lie after lie. He looked the American people in the eye last year and denied a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. At that time, Lanny Davis went on national TV and ranted and raved about how everybody was out to get his "innocent" president.

There's no valid reason to believe Bill Clinton when he claims he didn't rape Juanita Broaddrick. This man is a sexual predator who puts his own sexual desires above his marriage, his duties as President and his oath of office. There are too many women out there who tell horrifying stories of sexual abuse at the hands of this man.

So we have a message for Lanny Davis and any other idiot who tries to defend the criminal of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Take your rants and your raves and your attempts to silence witnesses and stick them right up your lying asses.

Bill Clinton is a rapist. That's a fact you can no longer hide. And that stench you smell comes from the lying degenerate you choose to serve and defend.

That's what's coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania since Juanita Broaddrick went public with her story about rape at the hands of William Jefferson Clinton.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart won't discuss it. He refers reporters to Clinton's lawyer.

And Clinton's lawyer? David Kendall won't discuss it. He will only hand over a short statement that says the "allegations" that the President "assaulted" Mrs. Broaddrick are false.

Notice he didn't say the President didn't rape the woman who was then Juanita Hickey. He didn't claim Clinton wasn't in her hotel room. He didn't even claim there wasn't sex. He just claimed Clinton didn't assault her (and notice he didn't deny "sexual assault," just your plain, everyday, garden-variety assault).

But one group that has kept its head up its collective ass through most of Clinton's sexual gymnastics did come out of the closet Thursday. The National Organization for Women issued a statement that called on Clinton to avoid his usual "Nuts and Sluts" defense tactics and to leave Juanita Broaddrick alone.

NOW President Patricia Ireland also said, in an offhand way, that she believes Broaddrick's story, saying it was both credible and disturbing.

Dr. Stephanie Yarrow is a clinical psychologist who treats rape victims. We asked her to watch Juanita Broaddrick's interview on NBC Wednesday night and give us her best clinical analysis.

We agree. We've also talked with more than a half dozen women who say Clinton either forced himself on them sexually or tried to.

"What we have here is the textbook pattern of a serial sexual predator," she adds.

from TPDL 1999-Feb-19, from the Wall Street Journal, by Dorothy Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal's editorial board:

Juanita Broaddrick Meets the Press VAN BUREN, Ark.--To any reporter, it was the kind of story that doesn't come along often in a career--an alleged 1978 sexual assault involving William Jefferson Clinton, then attorney general of Arkansas. From the viewpoint of Juanita Broaddrick, it has been a trial and concern ever since reports began emerging in the 1992 presidential campaign, through the Paula Jones case and into the impeachment proceedings.

Indeed, her story was crucial to the outcome of those proceedings- -just one among several reasons it is far more than another now- irrelevant Jane Doe account. It was when several wavering House Republicans read the Jane Doe material from the independent counsel's office that they decided they would vote to impeach. As Jane Doe No. 5, Mrs. Broaddrick had filed an affidavit denying that Mr. Clinton had subjected her to--as the delicately phrased document put it--"unwelcome sexual advances." Interviewed by the independent counsel's office, she said that affidavit was false, and that she had been assaulted--an account essential to understanding the second presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

Since the 1992 campaign, journalists had chased after Mrs. Broaddrick, a resistant quarry if ever there was one. With the advent of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal last year, the chase took on a new level of intensity. A Fox News crew pursued her down the highway, as she tried to outrace them at 90 miles an hour. Time magazine reporters trying to get to her pretended they were covering a local tennis benefit. The Broaddricks' phone rang incessantly with requests for interviews, all of them refused until one weekend last January.

Mrs. Broaddrick finally agreed to see NBC's Lisa Myers, who had already done a brief report on her in March and who had been calling her regularly for nearly a year. Within a day, Ms. Myers and a crew were on their way, even as an ABC producer was on the phone asking if Mrs. Broaddrick would come to New York to meet with Barbara Walters. Too late--nor was she about to vault from home, where she was surrounded by all that gave comfort and warmth, to go rushing to New York to talk about this with a stranger. It was hard enough with a reporter familiar to her.

First she had to break the news to her obdurately protective husband that, after all the years of running from the media, she had consented to go on camera. She is clear enough, in her mind, about how she had come to this decision. On New Year's Eve, as the family sat around a table celebrating with friends, someone passed around a copy of the Star, which had a report about her saying, among other things, that Mr. Clinton had bribed her husband to keep him quiet. The rest of New Year's Eve was a ruin. So was the day that followed, as she contemplated all the layers of tawdry rumor about her that had multiplied in the wake of the other, larger scandal involving the president. Perhaps the time had come, she thought, to get the facts out and put an end to all the stories, as Ms. Myers, a respected veteran reporter, had so long argued.

Still, three hours before the crew started shooting, Mrs. Broaddrick began to shake with fear as she considered the consequences, what she would be telling, and about whom. He was the president. She thought of asking if it was too late to get out of the whole thing. Still, soon enough, the camera crew had set up, the interview begun. The filming went on from midmorning to evening, and then it was over.

The interview took place Jan. 20, just over a month after the president's impeachment on Dec. 19. The Senate trial had been under way for nearly two weeks--focused, at this point, on whether Monica Lewinsky should testify. At NBC, the debate was what to do about the Broaddrick interview--a large question. NBC had scheduled the program for airing on the Jan. 29 episode of "Dateline," Mrs. Broaddrick heard--but it did not air then or later. The network had an explosive story on its hands, to be sure, and also an exhaustively investigated one. NBC's researchers had combed through the Broaddricks' entire lives, through dusty basement files and court records. "They got to read," Mrs. Broaddrick marvels, "old papers about the case we settled with two employees fired for theft 20 years ago."

As the days passed, with no Broaddrick interview--and the Feb. 12 Senate impeachment trial vote imminent--NBC News spokesmen told all callers the "Dateline" report was still a work in progress, requiring more investigation. Other sources at NBC asked-- profoundly off the record--how much more confirmation could the story need? They had four witnesses giving corroborating testimony--citizens with nothing to gain and possibly much to lose by going public and talking, as the husband of one witness kept warning her. Still, they had come forward. NBC had investigated and investigated, and it was not yet enough. Word went out from NBC that the network had to cross-check dates, or lacked enough dates. Meanwhile, for any journalist asking what happened to the interview with Mrs. Broaddrick, the office of NBC News president Andrew Lack had a simple, uplifting message--namely that NBC wanted to make sure the story was "rock solid" journalism.

Mrs. Broaddrick understood her position. All she had tried to avoid by refusing all these years to talk to the press, all that she had feared--that she would not be believed, that she would be passed off as just another bimbo with a Clinton story--had now come to pass, in her view. As soon as it was evident there was to be trouble about airing the piece, she recalls, Lisa Myers told her: "The good news is you're credible. The bad news is you're very credible." Mrs. Broaddrick repeats this more than once, as though trying to puzzle its meaning--but its meaning of course is entirely clear to her, as to everyone else hearing it. It meant that to encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was an event that in fact took place. "Too credible" sums the matter up nicely.

It isn't hard to see what had given NBC pause. There was, first of all, the detail. Then the subject herself--a woman of accomplishment, prosperous, successful in her field, serious; a woman seeking no profit, no book, no lawsuit. 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 that the nudgings of anxiety can't quite suppress--a woman entirely aware of life's bounties. She sits talking in the peaceful house on a hilltop overlooking the Broaddricks' 40 acres, where 30 cows, five horses and a mule roam. An effervescent dog called Wally and a three-legged companion, Pearl, rush around in their midst. It is a good life all right.

The story: In 1978, 35-year-old Juanita Broaddrick--a Clinton campaign worker--had already owned a nursing home for five years. Since her graduation from nursing school she had worked for several such facilities and decided she wanted to run one of her own. It was that home that Attorney General Clinton visited one day, on a campaign stop during his run for governor. He invited Juanita, then still married to her first husband, to visit campaign headquarters when she was in Little Rock. As it happened, she told him, she was planning to attend a seminar of the American College of Nursing Home Administrators the very next week and would do just that. On her arrival in Little Rock, she called campaign headquarters. Mrs. Broaddrick was surprised to be greeted by an aide who seemed to expect her call, and who directed her to call the attorney general at his apartment. They arranged to meet at the coffee shop of the Camelot Hotel, where the seminar was held--a noisy place, Mr. Clinton pointed out; they could have coffee in her room.

They had not been there more than five minutes, Mrs. Broaddrick says, when he moved close as they stood looking out at the Arkansas River. He pointed out an old jailhouse and told her that when he became governor, he was going to renovate that place. (The building was later torn down, but in the course of their searches, NBC's investigators found proof that, as Mrs. Broaddrick said, there had been such a jail at the time.) But the conversation did not linger long on the candidate's plans for social reform. For, Mrs. Broaddrick relates, he then put his arms around her, startling her.

"He told me, 'We're both married people,' " she recalls. She recalls, too, that in her effort to make him see she had no interest of this kind in him, she told him yes, they were both married but she was deeply involved with another man--which was true. She was talking about the man she would marry after her divorce, David Broaddrick, now her husband of 18 years.

The argument failed to persuade Mr. Clinton, who, she says, got her onto the bed, held her down forcibly and bit her lips. The sexual entry itself was not without some pain, she recalls, because of her stiffness and resistance. When it was over, she says, he looked down at her and said not to worry, he was sterile--he had had mumps when he was a child.

"As though that was the thing on my mind--I wasn't thinking about pregnancy, or about anything," she says. "I felt paralyzed and was starting to cry."

"This is the part that always stays in my mind--the way he put on his sunglasses. Then he looked at me and said, 'You better put some ice on that.' And then he left."

Her friend Norma Rogers, a nurse who had accompanied her on the trip, found her on the bed. She was, Ms. Rogers related in an interview, in a state of shock--lips swollen to double their size, mouth discolored from the biting, her pantyhose torn in the crotch. "She just stayed on the bed and kept repeating, 'I can't believe what happened.' " Ms. Rogers applied ice to Juanita's mouth, and they drove back home, stopping along the way for more ice.

For some time to come, Mrs. Broaddrick relates, she chastised herself for agreeing to coffee in a hotel room. "But who, for heaven's sake, would have imagined anything like this? This was the attorney general--and it just never entered my mind."

All the way home, she says, they talked about two questions: How could a man like this be governor of a state? The other, more urgent one was what to tell David, the man she loved, about the condition of her face. She decided to tell him she had been hit in the mouth by a revolving door. His answer: "That didn't happen." A few days later, she told him what had actually occurred, and it had its lasting effect. In the years that followed, they would never go to any meeting concerning nursing homes if they knew the governor would attend. Still, one day, when they ran into Mr. Clinton, he greeted them with his customary affability. This precipitated a scene wherein her husband grabbed Mr. Clinton hard, by the hand, and warned him: "Stay away from my wife and stay away from Brownwood Manor [her nursing home]." The governor, she recalls, tried to pass it off as joshing, but had to wrest himself from Mr. Broaddrick's grip.

But Mr. Clinton didn't forget her, as it turned out. In 1984, her nursing facility was judged the best in the state, which brought a congratulatory official letter from the governor. On the bottom was a handwritten note: "I admire you very much." That contact was not quite as memorable--or personal--as the one that occurred in 1991, when she was called out of a meeting concerning state nursing standards. She had no idea that the person who had summoned her was Gov. Clinton, who waited by a stairway for her. He took her hands, she recalls, and told her that he wanted to apologize, and asked what he could do to make things up to her. She said nothing and walked away. For a time, she and Norma wondered what had brought this on. Not long after, Mr. Clinton announced he was running for president.

Trouble began in 1992, when the story Mrs. Broaddrick had shared with a small circle of friends reached a wide public, thanks to a business associate by the name of Philip Yoakum. A bitter opponent of Mr. Clinton, he urged that she come forward during the presidential campaign, which she declined to do. When the Paula Jones lawsuit came along, the plaintiff's lawyers approached her, but Mrs. Broaddrick was determined to stay clear of involvement. That was how she came to sign the false affidavit.

It was this matter that the White House spokesmen and others point to when dismissing her account. Her lawyer, Republican state Sen. Bill Walters, prepared the affidavit--the model for which he says he got from White House lawyer Bruce Lindsey, who was happy to oblige. Her lawyers, Mrs. Broaddrick relates, didn't actually know the facts--that the sexual advances in question were very far from consensual. Her goal was to keep out of everything.

When Kenneth Starr's investigators came around, explains her 28- year-old son, Kevin, a lawyer, it was a different matter. "I told my mother--and she understood it--that this was another whole level. She knew it was one thing to lie in a civil trial so she could get away from all this, but another to lie to federal prosecutors and possibly a grand jury."

Fearful of punishment for that earlier perjury, she was prepared to admit to the independent counsel's officers--after receiving immunity--that her prior affidavit had been false. In the event, it became a footnote in the Starr report, and carried no weight as far as obstruction of justice charges were concerned. Both Mrs. Broaddrick and her lawyers emphasize that no one from the White House had harassed her or subjected her to other pressures aimed at keeping the story quiet.

Which does not mean the White House is rushing to facilitate any coverage of this story. Mrs. Broaddrick reports that NBC told her its investigators were waiting for the White House to answer some 40 questions relating to this matter. Asked for a response to Mrs. Broaddrick's charges, a White House spokesman told this writer yesterday that the story was so old that Mr. Clinton's personal lawyer, David Kendall, was the one to answer it. After repeated phone calls, Mr. Kendall's assistant said he was unavailable for comment.

In the meantime Mrs. Broaddrick gets intermittent calls from NBC investigators, still hanging out at the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, waiting. In the meantime, too, spokesmen for NBC News still announce their intention to make certain the story is solid--a heartening testimony to the elevated standards of journalism that have now apparently seized the network. Mrs. Broaddrick laughs, noting that NBC is still seeking answers and working on the program, which the network may one day air--an event for which she is not holding her breath.

from TPDL 1999-Feb-20, from the Washington Post p.A1, by Lois Romano and Peter Baker:

Jane Doe No. 5' Goes Public With Allegation Clinton Controversy Lingers Over Nursing Home Owner's Disputed 1978 Story Her story circulated in Arkansas for years and when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his enemies tried to get her to tell the world. She refused. Five years later, she opened her door to find private investigators representing Paula Jones. Still, she would not talk. "I wouldn't relive it for anything," she told them.

In the 15 months since, countless others have come calling. Agents sent by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. The House Republican managers prosecuting President Clinton at his impeachment trial. Reporters from around the globe. She has talked and exchanged electronic mail with scandal impresario Lucianne Goldberg and once sought advice from Clinton accuser Kathleen E. Willey. Regular updates about her are posted on the Internet and dissected on talk radio.

Now, after years of laboring to avoid the public spotlight, Juanita Broaddrick, the woman known in government documents only as "Jane Doe No. 5," has decided to speak out about her sensational yet ancient and unproven allegation that the future president sexually assaulted her in a hotel room a generation ago.

The airing of her charges has come too late to have the impact desired by those who had urged her for so long to go public, now that the Senate has acquitted Clinton at his impeachment trial and virtually assured that he will finish his term in office. But Broaddrick's story is just one of the many loose ends of the Clinton saga that are likely to linger as he moves through the final two years of his presidency.

"It was 20 years ago and I let a man in my room and I had to take my lumps," Broaddrick said in an interview as she described why she waited so long to come forward. "It was a horrible, horrible experience and I just wanted it to go away."

It never did. Broaddrick, 55, a nursing home operator from the tiny northwest Arkansas town of Van Buren, said yesterday that she finally decided to break her public silence because there was "so much misinformation out there." In one recent example, she said, she was incensed by an account in a supermarket tabloid that reported her husband had cut a deal with Clinton to keep quiet, an assertion she dismissed as completely false.

Clinton Team's Denial The Clinton legal team has denied her allegation as "false and outrageous" and the president's advisers in the past have noted that Broaddrick once said so herself. When Jones's attorneys first subpoenaed her in their sexual harassment lawsuit against the president, Broaddrick swore out an affidavit and testified in a deposition that Clinton did not make unwelcome sexual advances toward her in the late 1970s.

"Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false," Clinton's personal attorney, David E. Kendall, said in a statement released by the White House yesterday. "Beyond that we are not going to comment."

Broaddrick later recanted her sworn testimony in the Jones suit under a promise of immunity from Starr, saying she lied initially because she did not want to be drawn into the case against the president. Only in recent weeks did she agree to allow reporters to quote her account. NBC News last month conducted an interview that has yet to air. The Wall Street Journal printed a lengthy piece on its opinion page yesterday. And The Washington Post was granted permission yesterday to use interviews conducted off the record starting last April.

Hers has been a story hidden in plain sight since last March, referred to in vague terms in Jones's court filings and Starr's impeachment report yet never explicitly a part of the now- concluded congressional debate over whether Clinton should be removed from office for trying to cover up his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. Few in official Washington who have been privy to the Broaddrick story have been entirely sure what to make of it.

Starr investigated briefly but dropped it after determining that it did not fit the pattern of obstruction of justice he was investigating because she stated Clinton never tried to influence her story. House Republicans urged wavering colleagues in December to read the sealed records of Broaddrick's FBI interview to shore up support for impeachment. And the House managers secretly contacted her to say they might summon her as a witness, yet quickly decided that her allegations were not relevant to the articles of impeachment they were prosecuting in the Senate.

Broaddrick, who owns a nursing home in Van Buren and a facility for mentally retarded children in Fort Smith, Ark., said she first met Clinton in April 1978 when he was the state's 31-year-old attorney general making his first run for governor and she was working as a volunteer for the campaign.

During a campaign stop at her Van Buren facility, she said, Clinton talked with her and invited her to visit his campaign office in Little Rock. Broaddrick, then 35, agreed to do so a week later, on April 25, while in the capital with a friend for a conference sponsored by the American College of Nursing Home Administrators. "We were very excited," she said. "We were going to pick up all that neat stuff, T-shirts, buttons."

Staying at the now-defunct Camelot Inn, Broaddrick said, she called the campaign headquarters and eventually talked with Clinton on the telephone. She later recalled he said he was not going to his headquarters that day and suggested they meet in the hotel coffee shop instead.

Arriving later in the lobby, he called and asked if they could have coffee in her room instead because there were too many reporters in the lobby, Broaddrick said. "Stupid me, I ordered coffee to the room," she said. "I thought we were going to talk about the campaign."

As she tells the story, they spent only a few minutes chatting by the window -- Clinton pointed to an old jail he wanted to renovate if he became governor -- before he began kissing her. She resisted his advances, she said, but soon he pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her. She said she did not scream because everything happened so quickly. Her upper lip was bruised and swollen after the encounter because, she said, he had grabbed onto it with his mouth.

"The last thing he said to me was, 'You better get some ice for that.' And he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door," she recalled.

With no witnesses and the passage of so much time, Broaddrick's story is difficult if not impossible to verify, although her husband and a friend told The Post in separate interviews that she related her account to them contemporaneously. Norma Rogers, an employee and friend who traveled with her to the conference, said that she returned to the hotel room that day to find Broaddrick badly shaken and her lip swollen. They quickly packed and left, stopping to get ice for Broaddrick's lip on the way back to Van Buren, both later said.

Rogers, who has since moved to a suburb of Tulsa, Okla., and uses a married name, and Broaddrick said they had not talked for several years until the episode was resurrected in the Jones lawsuit. "It's true unless she has been lying to me for 20 years and I don't think she did," Rogers told The Post last spring, before the two reestablished contact. "We were close enough at the time that if something else had happened I believe she would have told me."

Rogers's family had its own unusual experience with Clinton that could affect her view of him. As governor in December 1980, he commuted the life sentence of a man, Guy L. Kuehn, who had killed Rogers's father, Ray Trentham, a school custodian, during a robbery.

Husband Supports Story Broaddrick's current husband, Dave Broaddrick, also backs up her story, saying she told him about the alleged encounter with Clinton days afterward. At the time, both Dave and Juanita Broaddrick were married to other people, but having an affair. They eventually married in 1981.

"I was very angry but there was nothing I could do," he said yesterday. "I was put in a very helpless situation. If it happened today, it wouldn't matter who it was, I would confront it. At the time I was not able to because of my personal situation and I have to live with that."

Otherwise, though, there is little to document the account. Separate items in the April 25, 1978, edition of the Arkansas Gazette indicated that a nursing home administrators conference was held at the Camelot Inn on that date and that Clinton had only one publicly announced event that day, an evening appearance in nearby Conway. White House officials and the state attorney general's office said they do not have records of his schedule from then and the Camelot has since closed.

Broaddrick said Clinton called her at the nursing home several times afterward but she would never take the call. The next time she recalled seeing him was in 1991, when she said she was summoned out of another nursing home meeting in Little Rock to meet with him.

"It was unreal. . . . He kept trying to hold my hand," she said. "I can still remember his words. He said, 'Can you ever forgive me? I'm not the same man I used to be.' . . . I told him, 'You just go to hell.' And I walked away. I was shaking."

Broaddrick never reported the alleged incident to authorities and said it never occurred to her to do so, because Clinton was a rising politician while she was "young and vulnerable" and in the middle of an extramarital affair.

"I had blamed myself all these years," she said. "I am a businesswoman, I made money. But I was insecure about men."

Broaddrick's name first surfaced more than a decade later when Phillip Yoakum, a former friend who said she had confided the story in him, took it to Republican Sheffield Nelson, who lost a race for governor to Clinton. Yoakum brought Nelson to her nursing home in 1992, and they urged her to come forward, but she did not.

Jones's lawyers heard about her from another Republican activist in Arkansas who led them to Yoakum. After their private investigators visited Broaddrick on Nov. 13, 1997, her lawyer, Bill Walters, a Republican state senator, contacted a Clinton lawyer and asked for a draft affidavit for her to sign denying the "rumors and stories" about her and Clinton. "These allegations are untrue," she said in the Jan. 2, 1998, affidavit, "and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me or cause further disruption to my family."

Unswayed, the Jones team used an uncorroborated letter from Yoakum to raise the allegation in court filings last March 28, just days before a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit.

Starr's Inquiry FBI agents working for Starr then approached Broaddrick and after being promised that she would not be prosecuted for perjury she disavowed her previous sworn testimony without getting into details, sources have said. Starr made note of her change of heart in a passing reference in an appendix sent to the House along with his Lewinsky impeachment referral. The FBI interview, which deemed her account "inconclusive" according to the sources, has never been made public, although a variety of House Republicans read it in a sealed room before voting to impeach Clinton on Dec. 19.

The House Judiciary Committee Republicans who would handle Clinton's prosecution in the Senate first got in touch just after Thanksgiving. Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.), who knew Walters from GOP political circles, met with Broaddrick, focusing not on the alleged assault but on whether anyone tried to silence her.

The House team later sent two investigators to meet with her. And another manager, Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), had "a five- minute conversation" with Broaddrick but also told her she would not be relevant to the trial.

"From my standpoint, I think it was appropriate behavior on our part," Hutchinson said. They never pressed to include the Broaddrick allegation in the trial, he added, because "it would have been wrong to throw out something pejorative to the president and not probative to the issues involved."

The Discussion Spreads Although her allegation had been covered in the news media sporadically, it became the subject of widespread discussion in political and journalistic circles in mid- January, when NBC News correspondent Lisa Myers conducted a videotaped interview with Broaddrick at her Van Buren home. Word of that interview was leaked to Internet columnist Matt Drudge, whose report triggered thousands of calls to NBC from viewers angry that the account had not been broadcast.

Fox News Channel later reported the allegations, but without an interview with Broaddrick. As the president's impeachment trial moved toward a verdict, the Broaddrick controversy was all over the Internet and talk radio and was mentioned on some cable talk shows.

Her version of the allegations emerged publicly for the first time yesterday when Dorothy Rabinowitz, an editorial writer on the Wall Street Journal's conservative opinion pages, published a lengthy account of her interviews with Broaddrick last week, granted after Broaddrick grew frustrated with NBC's hesitation.

"Juanita has never been in control of this story," Dave Broaddrick said yesterday. "She told it when she has had to in legal situations. This is the first time, under no pressure, she has been able to be in control of the story since it happened, and that's a refreshing place to be."

Looking back, Juanita Broaddrick said yesterday that she does not believe she made a mistake by keeping quiet in 1978 but wishes she had come forward in 1992. "I feel that had I come out in '92, that it may have made a difference," she said. "I regret that."

As for going public now, she said, "I feel like I have gotten the biggest weight off my shoulders. I did it because of my twin granddaughters -- they're 12. . . . When they ask me about this in a few years, I want them to say, 'That was a neat thing you did.' I didn't want them asking me, 'Why didn't you come forward?' "

Staff writers Lorraine Adams, Charles R. Babcock, William Claiborne, Juliet Eilperin, Guy Gugliotta, Howard Kurtz and Susan Schmidt and staff researchers Nathan Abse and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Perspective: A horror too dangerous to forget about VAN BUREN -- Last Tuesday morning, having returned from a weekend of gambling incognito with her mother in Tunica, Mississippi, Juanita Broaddrick brought news of her week and a comment about the latest gossip and speculation floating around about her and Bill Clinton. "The phone doesn't stop ringing from the TV people, but I'm ignoring it," she said. "My husband and I just want it behind us. Oh, are you hearing the same thing I'm hearing about Clinton?"

"That he's going to say if he has to--if somebody remembers seeing him around that hotel the day I was there--that it was consensual."

A woman sensitive to nuances, Broaddrick had read the recent words of the president's attorney David Kendall, who declared that "any allegation that [Clinton] assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick is absolutely false. Beyond that, we're not going to comment."

Conspicuous by its absence in Kendall's statement was an emphatic denial that Clinton may have been alone with the former Juanita Hickey in a hotel room. The attorney has left himself wiggle room. On the remote chance that he might need it, he can still play the slut-and-nut card, just in case somebody's recollection should be remarkably jogged and a nation learns that Bill Clinton was seen getting on or off a Camelot Hotel elevator on a spring day in 1978, or that someone glimpsed him walking down an upper-story hallway in the Camelot.

Another detail, potentially more provocative, sprung from Broaddrick's mind a few days earlier, another thing that had gone without mention on the "Dateline" interview. She recalled seeing "two policemen" in proximity to Clinton when he allegedly summoned her out of a 1991 nursing-home meeting in a hotel conference room and apologized for what he had done to her--before, according to her account, she told him to go to hell and wheeled away. "The policemen seemed there to protect him and, even though they couldn't have heard us, we were in their sight near a stairwell; they'd have seen how angry I was," she said, adding that the possibility existed the policemen could have been state troopers assigned to Clinton.

The dogged will pursue that lead. "It might not be over quite yet," someone said to Juanita Broaddrick on Tuesday, but she didn't seem to hear. "Consensual," she mumbled incredulously. "If he really said consensual, wouldn't that just be. . . " She faltered, couldn't find the word she wanted.

She sighed and mentioned the swirling gossip out there, mostly skepticism about her motives. The skepticism had come from Clinton diehards and feminists loyal to his "agenda" and Alan Dershowitz and a columnist at Newsweek magazine, Jonathan Alter, who asserted that the charges had been floated "by the same old right-wing enemies of Clinton in Arkansas." It was one of those retread columns filed a thousand miles away from Arkansas, by someone who had failed to do even the elementary legwork that would have revealed Broaddrick's disdain for so many of Clinton's "right-wing enemies."

From Broaddrick's view, this is the truth about her relationship with Clinton's "right-wing enemies": Two of them, Sheffield Nelson and Philip Yoakum came to her during the closing months of the 1992 presidential campaign, having heard rumors in Arkansas about the alleged rape, and asking her to tell her story publicly to stop Clinton from being elected president, assuring her they had her best interests in mind.

"They did a pretty good sell job on me," she remembers. "Philip Yoakum did most of the talking and kept saying, 'We can't let this man be president. You are holding the presidency in your hands.' It was moving. But it was too difficult to see myself verbalizing what had happened to the world. I wondered what my friends and family would have to go through. I was scared to death of everything, I just wanted it to go away. So I told [Nelson and Yoakum] I couldn't talk about it."

She recalls with disgust that Yoakum liked to go around describing himself as "a friend of mine when he was nothing like that; just somebody I did business with." In time, Yoakum forgot his promises to protect Broaddrick's best interests. Ultimately, after becoming convinced that she would not help him savage Clinton, he betrayed her, suggesting in a letter she had been paid off for her silence by persons unknown. Later, one of Paula Jones' attorneys boldly suggested, without evidence, that she'd been bribed or intimidated.

The tabloids gave voice to the tripe, the whispering about her as a bribe-taker grew louder, and Broaddrick had to ask herself which was worse--the speculation that she had rolled over for money, or the hounding that her family would endure if she went public. "All these people who'd said they were friends obviously had their own agendas," she said a week ago, while sitting on her couch, listening to the phone ring yet again. "But I had to ask myself whether I wanted people to keep throwing out their own spin about me. Finally, I felt I had no choice but to speak."

She has had to answer the standard doubts and questions since. She concedes she attended a 1978 fundraiser for Clinton only a few weeks after the purported attack--just the behavior, maintains Broaddrick, of a woman in shock and denial, one wracked with guilt and shame over her "stupidity in letting a man up to my room." She and a friend, Norma Rogers, tell identical stories about how Broaddrick became ill with fear soon after arriving. She left only minutes after Clinton appeared.

She remembers many things about the "horrific nightmare at the hotel" and not others. She recalls wearing a blue skirt and white short-sleeved blouse. Her critics point to her failure to remember a date as evidence of her disingenuousness, but, from the beginning with this journalist, she placed that 1978 morning in springtime ("between late March and early May. I know because there were small leaves just starting to grow on the trees the day he came to visit our nursing home a little before").

The gaps in her account are almost inevitable, given the passing of 21 years and the denial mechanism that turns on our mind's fog machines about some details. Ask women who've been attacked and, as often as not, what they remember is not a date but the clammy terror that came when somebody tore at their clothes--and the sweat, say, of a hot summer night. Whether it was June or July matters not at all.

We have long heard this line of reasoning from astute feminists, the same ones who stood up once to ensure that Anita Hill and Desiree Washington (Mike Tyson's rape victim) would be guaranteed a fair hearing, the same ones whose voices are so curiously muted or altogether contemptuous of Juanita Broaddrick now.

This is not because they and others steadfastly believe in this president's innocence. To the contrary, there exists, on the underside of the American consciousness, a frightening acceptance of the possibility that Clinton did this. And we seem scarcely bothered, if most polls are to be believed. It is as if we have made our peace with the knowledge that this president comes to us with disturbing pathologies; that the same obsessive quality that has enabled him and other super-achievers--by sheer will and against the odds--to win elections and hold power, carries with it a dark side. It speaks to our new fatalism and nihilism that we are resigned to him, his pathologies and the possibility of this rape. It is dangerous. It is why some of us cannot let this go.

The Sound of Silence Silence is deafening in the wake of Juanita Broaddrick's charges MARCH 7 -- There are many things that I find curious about the way the country has dealt with the recent rape allegations made by Arkansas woman Juanita Broaddrick, against Bill Clinton. Broaddrick=92s charges have been common knowledge among media and political elite for some time. They have been discussed and written about on the Internet for over a year, but it is not until recently that anyone has heard her story. Since the airing of the NBC interview with Broaddrick, people have been saying (and not saying) some interesting things.

Let's start off with Iowa senator and presidential apologist Tom Harkin. On the surface, it now seems as if Mr. Harkin has had a slight change of heart, as he has noted in a recent statement. Yes, he claims that if word of the Broaddrick allegations had been out during the impeachment trial, this might have changed the outcome. Even he might have voted to remove the President under these circumstances.

Really, Mr. Harkin? I am more willing to Monica Lewinsky=92s testimony than I am to give this latest revelation one second of consideration. The man who blocked evidence, called the case 'a pile of dung', and served as the staunchest presidential defender now contends that his mind could have been changed! If you consider that this statement was made to an Iowa news service, it's easy to understand that Harkin expected to get away with this absurd claim. Fact is, ALL of the senators knew of the Broaddrick charge during the impeachment trial - they chose to ignore it because the vast majority of the public didn't know. My guess is that they were pretty confident it wouldn't ever hit the mainstream and Harkin forgot he was living in the world of the Internet, a world where one does not make a statement like this in a vacuum.

Where are the feminists? At this point, it appears a very difficult choice for them. While most claim that this is a serious, credible charge, they appear unsure what can be done about it. Stephanie Salter and Cynthia Alksne have jumped ship. Others, like Susan Estrich, are hanging on for dear life.

Don't forget the National Organization for Women. NOW has released a statement, declaring their support for Juanita Broaddrick. They have ''warned" the White House not to attack her, and decided that she is a 'credible' presidential accuser. Despite their support, it's important to understand what they have NOT said. After watching a recent Patricia Ireland appearance on MSNBC, I decided that they should rename NOW to the National Organization for Wafflers. There is no outcry - the only call for resignation was made by the Dulles chapter of NOW - not only for the resignation of William Jefferson Clinton, but also for Patricia Ireland herself. The feminists are not marching on Washington, they are not mobilizing. There are no 'I Believe Juanita=92 T-shirts in great quantity.

Where is the First Lady? Unlike the public support she gave to Anita Hill, Mrs.Clinton has remained silent, continuing her Senate charade in an attempt to change the subject. However, in a recent U.N. appearance, she made this startling statement: "It is, as the Secretary of State Madeline Albright often says, no longer acceptable to say the abuse and mistreatment of women is cultural, we must call it what it really is - it is criminal." Could this be an attempt to create a little distance from the President, or is it just business as usual? Only time will tell.

Finally, where is the media? At this point, no one should be surprised with the lack of media coverage. In the wake of the Broaddrick allegations, the major networks failed to mention the story on their evening newscasts - not even NBC - the network that aired the interview with Broaddrick! This lends support to the theory that NBC had no intention of airing the interview at all. To date, they have cut a 5-hour interview to 23 minutes and aired it 1 month late, after the President was safe from impeachment, opposite the Grammys. Their latest move was to restrict affiliates from showing ANY of the Broaddrick footage at all. If not for front page stories in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post (not to mention the protesters, angry letters, emails, and faxes they received), detailing the Broaddrick allegations and NBC=92s spiking, the story may never have seen the light of day. The latest polls report that between 40 and 50% of the American People do not even KNOW that their president has been accused of rape!

Once again, the story is left to be told on the internet, by the 'new media'. Referred to by the big boys as 'tabloid journalism', it is fast becoming the only way to get the real story. With their ratings and respectability fading with each passing day, network news organizations continue to take shots at the credibility of the Internet and its new 'Citizen Journalists.' The candle of the mainstream media is starting to dim, making way for a fresh point of view, void of corporate ownership, political ties, or blatant liberal agendas. It is only in the age of Clinton that the President of the United States can be accused of rape and it NOT be a story - that is the real 'Fleecing of America.'

For the last year, we have listened to all sides voice their opinions on Monica Lewinsky. Her 20/20 interview drew Super Bowl style ratings, confirming the falsehood of the liberal mantra 'the American People are tired of all this' - tell that to ABC. One year later, a credible woman has brought forth serious allegations against Bill Clinton and the silence is deafening.

Bill's Biting Ways One of the more shocking aspects of Juanita Broaddrick's rape allegation against President Clinton is the way she says he forced her to submit.

After pushing her down on a hotel room bed, Broaddrick says Clinton bit her lips until they bled. Broaddrick's nurse-friend Norma Rogers told Paula Jones investigators Rick and Beverly Lambert, who were recently interviewed for an upcoming NewsMax.com report, that the wounds were so bad that one lip was nearly torn in two.

According to a former rape investigator with the New Orleans Police Department, who contacted NewsMax.com confidentially, lip biting is a common M.O. for rapists.

"The reason rapists bite is because, even with the full weight of her attacker on top of her, the woman is often able to resist the parting of her legs by locking her ankles. The rapist's arms are busy keeping her pinned down. The only weapon the rapist has left is his teeth, which he uses to bite while demanding she open her legs.

The lips are very sensitive. Biting them is so painful it distracts the victim, allowing a rapist to overcome her resistance. The victim can only hold out for so long as the blood flows into her mouth. Some women are stronger than others and I've seen their lips half- torn from their faces before they give up."

'I WAS SEXUALLY ATTACKED BY C0LD BASTARD BILL' JUANITA BROADDRICK said yesterday "Bill Clinton is a cold bastard who might have been killed if he had not been governor of Arkansas." Broaddrick claims Clinton sexually assaulted her in a Little Rock hotel room in April 1978. "If my husband had his way at the time he would have killed him," she told me from her home in Van Buren, Ark. "If as governor of Arkansas he had not been so well-protected, I shudder to think what my husband would have done or what would have happened."

Broaddrick was 35 at the time of the alleged assault and now is a highly successful owner of a nursing home who lives on a 40-acre estate. She then recounted in detail the allegations of the sick saga: "In 1978 Clinton, who was then the attorney general running for governor, dropped by the nursing home which I owned, The Brownwood Manor. "He talked to the residents, and there was a picture in the newspaper. I was a volunteer for his election. I was working as a volunteer out of Crawford County for his campaign for governor. "He invited a nurse and myself to drop by and see him when we were in Little Rock. The next week, the nurse and I had a seminar to go to in Little Rock. "My name then was Juanita Hickey. And when I called it was almost as if the campaign office was expecting the call. They said Mr. Clinton said to call him at his apartment.

"I called him and at that time we were staying at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock, which is now the Doubletree. We arranged to have a cup of coffee at the Camelot Coffee Shop. "When he arrived, he said to me, 'There are too many reporters around. Why don't we have coffee in your room?'" You willingly went to the room with Clinton? I asked her. "He was the attorney general and running for governor. And I wouldn't have thought for a second that anything would have happened. "I believed in his politics. I thought he was bright, eager and wanted a change in government," she said.

"He started making some stupid small talk about an old jailhouse on the river that he wanted restored. And then he started to make some very unwelcome advances. "I told him that I was very involved with a man and resisted. Resisted quite strongly, but that didn't help." Delicately asked what exactly happened, Broaddrick said: "It is far too personal to talk to a man about this." She said she had talked in detail about the horrific allegations to Lisa Myers of NBC and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. "But it is easier talking to a woman." Rabinowitz reported that during the alleged assault, Clinton bit Broaddrick severely on the lip, ripped her panty hose and was allegedly intimate with her to the point where she "felt paralyzed and was starting to cry."

Broaddrick told me: "He was in my room for about 20 minutes. Something very bad did happen. And after it was all over, he just put on his sunglasses, adjusted his clothing and said 'You'd better put some ice on your face.'

Broaddrick, described in court papers as "Jane Doe No. 5," admits she filed a false affidavit denying any sexual contact with Clinton. Her story has reportedly been corroborated by at least four witnesses who, up until the independent counsel inquiry, remained silent for fear of what they believed would be a scandal that would irreparably harm them. But in 1991, she would meet Clinton again. It was at a nursing home convention in Little Rock. "I was called out of the convention by my name," Broaddrick said. "There he was standing outside the convention by the stairway. I wish I had walked past him," she recalls. "He gave me a profuse apology and said he was a changed man. I gave him a few choice words and left. I was very angry and he was covering his tracks."

Shortly after, Bill Clinton announced he was running for the presidency. What would she say to Clinton if she saw him today? "Well, I would certainly avoid that," she said. "But let me tell you, when his face comes on television, it's a race between myself and my husband to turn it off or switch channels." Broaddrick is not selling her story, is not writing a book and has nothing to gain except embarrassment. The NBC interview never appeared and to this day remains a journalistic mystery.

"A week after I did the interview with NBC I was still pretty shaken up about the whole thing. I called and asked them what was happening," she said. "I was told that I was very credible and they were still researching the story." What NBC does with their exclusive interviews is entirely their business. But journalists still have giant question marks on their face as to why it has not yet appeared. "I honestly don't know why, but one has to wonder," Broaddrick said. "Considering that I gave the interview at the time of the impeachment hearings, I don't know. "Anyway, I've said what I've said and I think that no one would doubt my credibility. "As for Clinton himself, it's quite obvious what I think about him."

If the allegations by Monica Lewinsky are true, if the allegations by Paula Jones are true, if the allegations by Kathleen Willey are true, and if the allegations by Broaddrick are true, then there is a particularly important resident of Pennsylvania Avenue who needs a lot of professional help.

Kendall says Clinton rape allegation 'absolutely false' WASHINGTON (February 20, 1999 2:38 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - President Clinton's lawyer has denied an Arkansas woman's charge that Clinton sexually assaulted her more than 20 years ago when he was the state's attorney general.

Juanita Broaddrick's account first appeared in a column on the editorial page of Friday's Wall Street Journal. In an interview with the Washington Post published Saturday, Broaddrick said Clinton forced himself on her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978.

"It was 20 years ago and I let a man into my room and I had to take my lumps," she told the newspaper. "It was a horrible, horrible experience and I just wanted it to go away."

"Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false," said Clinton lawyer David Kendall. "Beyond that we are not going to comment."

White House officials declined to comment on Saturday, referring reporters to Kendall's statement.

Ford Building Secrets Cloud Clinton's Future The folks at NBC aren't the only insiders who know the secret details of Juanita Broaddrick's story, which she recounted to NBC's Lisa Myers last month in an eight-hour interview the network now refuses to air.

The House Judiciary Committee still retains control over sealed evidence stored in D.C.'s Gerald Ford Building -- evidence known to include Broaddrick's account of her alleged 1978 rape by Bill Clinton.

On Thursday, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) hinted, in an exchange with WABC radio's Sean Hannity, that the veil of secrecy over the sealed Broaddrick evidence could soon be lifted:

WEXLER: We were operating [during Clinton's trial] under the House rule that said all the information that the House had received from Ken Starr was not to be disseminated until the House voted to send it out.

HANNITY: OK, so we'll find out probably in the next few days whether or not we can delve into this a little bit more.

Flashback to impeachment eve. Wexler's House colleague, Rep. Tillie Fowler (R-FL), tells CNBC's Chris Matthews that material on Broaddrick "and others" is under seal because of tentative plans to use it at trial. But those plans never materialized.

Now that Clinton's trial is history, the need for secrecy is gone. And, as Wexler suggests, the House Judiciary Committee could release the Ford Building evidence with a simple majority vote.

That evidence, after all, was gathered on the taxpayer's dime. And, presumably, "we the people" are now entitled to know why congressmen left the Ford Building "horrified" (Rep. Chris Shays) and "nauseated" (Rep. Matt Salmon). Or why another was reportedly reduced to tears by what he saw (Rep. Mike Castle).

Wexler told Hannity that he could not comment on the specifics of the Ford Building secrets. But he knows what they are and admitted that, if the charges are substantiated, "it would be extremely serious -- there's no question about that."

NBC Civil War over Rapegate NBC Puts Heat on Rapegate Protester Is NBC trying to kill the messenger? After postponing its scheduled broadcast of Lisa Myers' interview with alleged Clinton rape victim Juanita Broaddrick, the network was bombarded with protests. One of the most effective efforts was a website created last week under the banner, "Boycott NBC!" (See Website Created: Boycott NBC!)

The site offered links to NBC executives and correspondents as well as connections to NBC affiliates and their sponsors. Internet activists complaining through the site report getting some nasty return e-mail, including one threat to sue for harassment.

On Wednesday, "Boycott NBC!" was shut down, forcing its creator Daniel Stidham to spend the entire day trying to repair the damage.

It seems an NBC affiliate had contacted Stidham's internet service provider and complained that one of his links promoted "spam" (bulk e-mail). Stidham dropped the link and "Boycott NBC!" was back in business. That is until the next day, when his ISP removed the page from their server altogether.

The server informed Stidham that his use of copyrighted material went against company policy. The copyrighted material, it turned out, was a list of contacts at the complaining NBC affiliate, which offered the information on its own website.

Mr. Stidham explained that he had no idea the list originated with NBC, since it was forwarded to him by a third party. Rather than incur more wrath from the network, Stidham dropped the information from his page.

Andrew Amirault continued his vigil Wednesday outside NBC's New York offices protesting their refusal to air the Jaunita Broaddrick interview where she alleges Bill Clinton forced himself on her over 20 years ago.

Amirault says that while protesting last Saturday (See Media Turns Pro-Broaddrick Rally into Anti-GOP Protest ), hardly anyone knew of the NBC censorship of Broaddrick's story. But that has changed completely.

Says Amirault, "I had the most moving conversations with people I think I have ever had. Yesterday, people of all walks of life -- doctors, policemen, construction workers, retirees -- poured their heart out to us, and asked: What can we possibly do about all this horror? The American people really do care about what's going on. They just don't know how to get from despair and paralyzing fear to hope and power."

The NBC decision to ice the Broaddrick interview has caused a major uproar within NBC, itself.

Many NBC employees "couldn't have agreed more with us," says Amirault. "Not a few NBC people said `Air the Tape!' or gave us thumbs up."

The Intimidating Ordeal of Juanita Broaddrick Insights from a Women's Advocate Who Knows Her A women's advocate and rape crisis counselor who has befriended Juanita Broaddrick told NewsMax.com on Sunday that the Clinton accuser has no political or financial motive and has not timed her allegation to coincide with the President's Senate impeachment trial.

But despite Broaddrick's lack of ulterior motives, her friend believes that NBC News will not air the January 20 interview Broaddrick gave to Lisa Myers until the trial is over.

This friend, with years of experience with women like Broaddrick, stressed that her relationship with the alleged Clinton rape victim is primarily supportive -- and that she is neither Broaddrick's spokesperson nor has she counseled her in a professional capacity.

Since the Rapegate controversy exploded two weeks ago, Broaddrick's friend has become the target of what she says appears to be a White House inspired intelligence-gathering operation. She agreed to be interviewed by NewsMax.com only on condition of anonymity, sharing insights on rape and the challenges confronted by victims like Broaddrick.

Why do rape victims like Juanita Broaddrick often wait so long before coming forward?

"The experience of rape can intimidate the victim for years - possibly forever. Many women who've had it happen never report it. It's far worse when the perpetrator is a powerful person like Clinton. Society finds a woman more credible when she's accusing someone of lower status who just jumped her from behind the bushes. It's the well connected perpetrator who most often gets away with it."

"No. While rapists are completely capable of having normal relations with their wives and girlfriends, once they rape, they often do it again -- especially if they know they can get away with it."

How do rape victims and their counselors feel when feminist leaders turn away from sexual abuse victims like Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick?

"We keep in contact with women across the nation who've had things like this happen. And I can tell you, they were really upset with Clinton even before Juanita's case came to the forefront. It's annoying when people think Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland speak for us."

"As a rule we generally don't encourage rape victims to go public because we know what happens to them. It's very unpleasant because most people don't want to believe the victims. A victim like Juanita may think she can get this out of her system with one interview and then it will be over. But it will never be over. Her life will be changed forever. I never advised Juanita to come forward."

"People who say she should take her story elsewhere don't understand that most victims are emotionally exhausted after an interview like that. It's not easy to recount the intimate, embarrassing details of a rape experience. Now that NBC won't run it immediately, it's almost like saying they don't believe her. That's every rape victim's nightmare. Besides, what guarantee does she have that the next network won't do the same?

"It's Juanita's decision to do what she feels is best for her. Victims tend to think with their emotions. The truth comes out on their own terms and on their timetable, as frustrating as that may seem to others who care deeply about the victim's well being."

"No way. The statute of limitations for rape in Arkansas is 6 or 7 years. He's not going to be prosecuted no matter how much evidence she has."

Do many rape victims come forward after waiting 20 years, as Juanita Broaddrick has.

"Oh yeah. The majority stay silent forever but we've had several who have sought counseling after 10, 15, 20 years of keeping the assault secret. We get referrals from psychiatrists who say they have a patient that needs to talk to us. And we try to be there for them if they have a panic attack or a nightmare -- or if they run into their rapist, which does happen."

According to an ABC News investigation, which was revealed through an inter-office memo uncovered by NewsMax.com's executive editor, Christopher Ruddy, Juanita Broaddrick did encounter her alleged rapist thirteen years after her assault. The memo recounts an incident just before Clinton announced presidential his bid.

Clinton had Broaddrick pulled from a meeting and offered what ABC insiders describe as an "apology". He also asked her "if there was anything he could do." (See: Leaked ABC News Memo Details Rape Allegations -- NewsMax.com, Dec. 22. 1998) [BELOW]

"I can only tell you that Juanita never took anything to stay silent. I know one of the witnesses associated with this case, Phil Yoakum, has made that charge. But it's not true."

Would Broaddrick have felt intimidated when Clinton, as governor, compelled her to meet him again?

"It's rare that a rapist will seek his victim out again but it happens. Usually an encounter like that, even with others present, puts the victim into a state of shock. So she would probably just listen to him as long as it was in a non-threatening situation. But I won't comment on whether Juanita herself felt intimidated or not. I can't speak for her."

Based on court documents that claim Broaddrick had been intimidated, House Judiciary Committee members considered calling her as a witness in the Clinton impeachment trial. In interviews with investigators from both the Office of Independent Counsel and the Judiciary Committee, Broaddrick would not say she was threatened.

But the question arises: What happened in that 1991 meeting between Juanita Broaddrick and Bill Clinton? Was her second encounter with her alleged rapist an intimidating experience in and of itself?

Would other rape victims be frightened if the governor of their state, who just happened to be their onetime tormentor, summoned them to a meeting?

The person who counsels women like Broaddrick won't say what her friend actually felt at that moment, adding only: "Right now I'm concerned for her because I believe NBC is jerking her around. And the longer NBC waits, the more time the White House has to discredit her. It took all that she had to make the decision to grant an interview. Now that she has made that decision, Juanita's story should be heard."

NBC Anchor on Rapegate: `I've Recused Myself' Sgt. Schultz would be proud. The comedic "I know nothing, I see nothing," obedient Nazi soldier from "Hogan's Heroes" has nothing on CNBC anchorman Brian Williams, who told a Boston talk radio audience Tuesday that he'd rather not know why his own network is keeping Juanita Broaddrick's bombshell interview on ice.

When WRKO's Howie Carr pressed Williams for an airdate for Broaddrick, the dapper newsman replied:

"Well, there's a two part answer. Number one is, in a lawyer-like way, I can safely say that I've recused myself from knowing too much about this story. And I hope you can understand that my boss spent an entire day on this matter before he left on a trip for Asia this week."

Williams' boss is Andrew Lack, the NBC News Chief believed to be holding the Broaddrick blockbuster till Mr. Clinton is safely out of the impeachment trial woods.

being reported. And people should know, and I mean this in all sincerity having covered the Clinton White House for two years, there were hundreds of things you learn that you don't report because you can't show germaneness ... They're searching for germaneness."

Carr then confronted Williams with examples of other stories his network had deemed germane, like a false TODAY Show report based on rumors that Chicago's Cardinal Bernadin had molested a boy.

The anchorman explained that NBC didn't want to make a similar mistake with Broaddrick's allegation against Clinton.

NBC's must have discovered it's journalistic conscience very recently, since just weeks ago Williams' CNBC colleague Geraldo Rivero let investigative pornographer Larry Flynt debut his dirt on Rep. Bob Barr to a national television audience.

Elsewhere's on the NBC circuit, Don Imus, whose morning radio show is simulcast on MSNBC, retracted comments made on Monday suggesting that Juanita Broaddrick couldn't remember when she was assaulted by Clinton.

Imus had been contacted by Broaddrick's son Kevin Hickey, who complained about erroneous information being spread by NBC sources.

from TPDL 1999-Feb-9, from NewsMax 1998-Dec-22, by Christopher Ruddy "Special to Insider Cover":

Leaked ABC News Memo Details Rape Allegations A civil war is brewing in the news room of ABC's World News Tonight over allegations that in 1979 Bill Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas woman, when he served as the state's Attorney General.

NewsMax.com has obtained an internal ABC News memo that was emailed to the top news producers earlier today about the controversy.

Chris Isham, a top ABC News producer, distributed the memo which lays out out the scintillating facts surrounding the alleged incident, and the interest sparked in the subject by Republican Congressmen who last week were permitted to review the Starr documentation of the case.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had turned over additional documents and FBI statements with new details about the President's sexual activities. The ABC memo reports that about two dozen Republicans reviewed the new material the Thursday and Friday before the historic impeachment vote. Some may have been swayed to have voted for impeachment based on the material.

The memo states that Arizona Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth told ABC News -- off-the-record -- that the material makes Clinton out to be "a sexual predator."

The Broaddrick incident may be cited in a Senate trial of the President, Isham suggests.

NewsMax.com has learned that Isham's memo comes as a result of a feud between World News Tonight Executive Producer Paul Freidman and network anchor Peter Jennings. Jennings -- reputed to have a eye for the ladies much like the President's -- has vehemently objected to ABC news reporting on the subject.

The memo, in an apparent shot at Jennings, states, "...the potential that a rape charge could be leveled at the President makes the story one that can't be totally ignored."

Forwarding a memo by Josh Fine which is a good summary of the Juanita Broddrick (Jane Doe #5.) Her case MAY have tipped some moderate Republicans to vote yes on impeachment and MAY be introduced in the Senate proceedings.

Juanita Broaddrick was subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case. She filed an affidavit that said "These allegations (that Clinton had made unwelcome advances towards her) are untrue." The allegations are that she met Clinton in 1979 when he was attorney general and that he raped or assaulted her. She owned nursing homes in Northwest Arkansas and was in Little Rock for a convention. Clinton met her in the afternoon and they made plans to meet later that night. He said the best place to meet was in her room (at the Camelot Hotel) since that way no one would see them (he was, after all, married).

They then went up to her hotel room in Little Rock and evidently had sex. It is unclear if he raped or assaulted her but that is the allegation made by Phillip Yoakum. Yoakum is a Fayetteville man who says Broaddrick told him in 1992 that she was raped by Clinton in the late 70's. I interviewed Yoakum in March and found him entirely uncredible. He had facts wrong, was a total Clinton- hater, and his claims to being friends with Broaddrick are untrue. The other person who supposedly knows about what took place is Norma Rogers-Kelsay, a friend of Broaddrick's who went to the convention with her in Little Rock and drove back with her to Van Buren where they live). Tamara Lipper spoke with Rogers on the phone in March. Rogers said that Yoakum was telling the truth. She was with Broaddrick before and after the incident and said that she was in "quite bad shape after."

In 1991 Broaddrick was at a nursing home convention in Little Rock and a man pulled her out of a meeting (this is all according to Rogers-Kelsay). The man took her to Bill Clinton and he apologized for hurting her and asked if there was anything he could do. She didn't understand at the time why he had taken that step but soon realized the real reason after he announced his candidacy for President a few months later. In the 1992 campaign these rumors began to circulate and Sheffield Nelson, a longtime Arkansas Clinton-hater, tried to get her to come forward. She did not. Yoakum evidently was at a meeting with Rogers and Broaddrick where they discussed the incident and whether or not Broaddrick should talk publicly about it. Evidently Broaddrick was worried no one would believe her (similar to what happened with Gennifer Flowers).

That was the last anyone heard of her until she was subpoenaed in the Jones case. Apparently Lisa Myers went to Van Buren and spoke with Broaddrick about her giving an interview. I also spoke with Broaddrick. She made it abundantly clear that she had no interest in her name getting out and didn't want to talk about it. She also made it clear that she was not denying that something had happened.

Last month the Schippers group sent two investigators to talk to her. One of them was Diana Woznicki, a Chicago police sergeant who is on loan to the investigation. We're not sure who the second person was. The conversation took place at the office of Broaddrick's attorney, Bill Walters, in Greenwood, AR. Walters says that the ground rules for the interview was that there would be no discussion of the underlying incident. The only topic that could be discussed was the possibility of obstruction. According to Walters, there is no obstruction despite the claims in the Yoakum letter. The Yoakum letter claims that Broaddrick's husband Dave said he was going to get a few favors from Clinton for keeping his wife silent.

Late last week Republicans began to stream over to the Ford building to look at the materials. According to a source of mine there were about two dozen members who went to look at the material on Thursday and Friday. Many Republicans were talking up the new material as evidence that could come up at trial because it would show a pattern and practice of behavior (paying off or influencing women to keep quiet). According to Rep. Inglis under federal rule of evidence 441(B) something showing a pattern or practice can be admissible in a trial. But it is unclear if Rehnquist would rule this admissible since it isn't a typical trial.

There is some question whether there is actually new evidence from the Woznicki interview or members are just seeing the Yoakum/Rogers evidence for the first time and consider it new. The big question is what does Broaddrick say. If she won't talk about the incident then there is only Yoakum and Rogers to show that she was raped/assaulted. If she won't say she was obstructed it would be hard to prove that. Still, the potential that a rape charge could be leveled at the President makes the story one that can't be totally ignored.

I'm told by two senior Republican members of Congress that Stephen Buyer (IN), Jim Ramstad (MN), and Steve Chabot (OH) were encouraging their colleagues to look at the materials. I'm also told George Radanovich (CA) took a special interest in the Broaddrick interview. Rep. Hayworth told me on background that the materials make Clinton out to be a "sexual predator."

There were rumblings from some Democrats (none of whom have seen the materials) that there was pressure put on undecided Republicans to vote for an article of impeachment based on the new materials. But two of the members rumored to be swayed, John Porter of Illinois and Jay Dickey of Arkansas told Ariane and I that they never went to view the materials.

from TPDL 1999-Jan-29, from the Electronic/Evening Telegraph (London). by Hugh Davies in Washington:

A FURIOUS row was reported at a major television network yesterday over whether to broadcast an interview with a woman who was allegedly raped by President Clinton in 1978 when he was the attorney general of Arkansas.

The woman, now 54, is said to have broken a long silence to talk to an NBC News reporter, Lisa Myers, about what the network has referred to as an "explosive" allegation. According to Matt Drudge, the Internet operator who disclosed a year ago that Newsweek was "sitting on" the Monica Lewinsky scandal, network executives have come under enormous pressure from the White House not to broadcast the story.

Another network source was quoted as saying: "There is a civil war developing between those pushing for the interview to air and those who think it is completely reckless."

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the questioning of Miss Lewinsky yesterday became a major sticking point in backroom dealings at the Senate trial of Mr Clinton, with argument raging over how a videotape of her cross-examination was to be handled.

Democrats were trying to stop the tape being shown next week on a screen in the well of the Senate, especially if she is grilled on the seamier aspects of her affair with the President.

According to the Drudge report, the woman was "emotionally drained" after the in-depth session with Miss Myers. She had told a friend: "I am so afraid of what is going to happen now." Network sources avoided any comment on the affair. But the suggestion is that the woman may have given details of the alleged incident.

The claim first surfaced last March in a court document filed by lawyers in Paula Jones's sexual harassment case. The attorneys claimed that Mr Clinton "forcibly raped and sexually assaulted" the woman at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. He then allegedly "bribed and intimidated her" to keep silent.

Miss Myers said NBC talked to four people who confirmed that the woman had spoken of the assault at the time. The woman denied any sexual encounter with Mr Clinton in an affidavit prepared to assist him in the Jones suit. She later told the FBI during the Starr investigation her affidavit was "false".

Recently, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee denied sending aides to talk to the woman. Investigators close to Mr Starr were said to have worried about the claim being so old. The White House described the allegation as "outrageous and false".

Sources Contradict NBC's Rapegate Alibi According to the insider political tipsheet "Hotline", NBC sources claimed on Thursday that Lisa Myers and her "Dateline" team are still working to corroborate serious allegations, believed to involve rape, leveled by Juanita Broaddrick against President Clinton. Reportedly, the network wants the story to be "rock solid" before airing it.

The Drudge Report blames White House pressure for the apparent media-cover-up, which NBC, not suprisingly, denies.

But early last week, Inside Cover's exclusive on the scene source revealed that Broaddrick's claims had been corroborated in NBC interviews by multiple witnesses close to the victim.

"They are still stalling," our source revealed last week. "NBC's investigators have gone through everything." Broaddrick's husband and four of her friends were interviewed; people in whom Broaddrick had confided within days of her alleged Clinton attack.

In the Paula Jones case, the strongest evidence that she was telling the truth came from six contemporaneous witnesses who backed her claims.

NBC appears to have interviewed at least five similarly strong corroborating witnesses, including nurse Norma Rogers - who treated Broaddrick's bruises on a bus ride home from the scene of the crime.

One source close to Broaddrick describes her as exasperated and bewildered: "After keeping this secret for 21 years, going public was the hardest decision she's ever made in her life. Why did they send a crew down here for if they didn't want to run the story?"

Broaddrick is said to have described NBC's on-again, off-again waffling as "Unreal". She wonders if "Clinton people" at NBC are pressuring "Dateline" to back off.

One source who spoke to her recently said, "Juanita's been raped twice. First by Clinton, now by NBC."

from TPDL 1999-Feb-2, from the Southwest Times Record 1999-Feb-1, by Mary Crider:

House panel questions VB woman on Clinton A Van Buren woman cited in court documents in connection with an alleged 20-year-old sexual encounter with President Clinton is once again at the center of national media attention.

The Times Record has confirmed that Juanita Broaddrick, owner of the Brownwood Manor Nursing Facility, has been questioned by representatives of the House Judiciary Committee at the Greenwood office of Republican state Sen. Bill Walters, who is her attorney. Several committee members, including U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Fort Smith, are serving as House managers and prosecuting the impeachment case against Clinton before the U.S. Senate.

Broaddrick, 56, confirmed that she granted NBC news reporter Lisa Myers an extensive on-camera interview.

Broaddrick, known as Jane Doe No. 5 in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, has refused repeated requests for interviews from the Times Record over the past several months. Her husband David Broaddrick said Thursday he and his wife objected to the Times Record's running a story, although he said much of the information currently circulating about his wife's alleged relationship with then-Attorney General Bill Clinton in the late 1970s is false.

In a Jan. 2, 1998, affidavit filed by Jones' legal team, Juanita Broaddrick denied that Clinton made unwelcome sexual advances toward her and also denied that they had non-consensual sex in the late 1970s.

However, in an April 8 deposition taken in Walters' office by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigators, Broaddrick said the affidavit was false, according to the Starr report. Her actual testimony is sealed.

The Drudge Report, a Washington-based Internet newsletter, and the Falwell Confidential, a conservative facsimile newsletter for pastors and Christian leaders, have charged that NBC is not running its story on the Broaddrick interview because of White House pressure.

The Drudge Report, which brought the Monica Lewinski story to national attention, alleges that NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has threatened to resign if the piece airs.

NBC spokeswoman Barbara Levin denied that Brokaw threatened to quit and said when contacted in New York by the Times Record she did not know why the interview has not aired.

In March 1998, NBC aired a report of allegations that Clinton sexually assaulted Broaddrick in a Little Rock hotel. The report cited documents in the Jones case claiming that Clinton intimidated Broaddrick to remain silent.

Much of the information about Broaddrick on numerous Internet sites is based on an unsigned letter to Broaddrick by Phillip Yoakum, a Fayetteville Republican and an outspoken opponent of Clinton. The letter recaps the alleged assault in detail, which Yoakum said he learned years earlier from Broaddrick.

Yoakum taped a meeting at which Sheffield Nelson, Broaddrick and he had discussed the incident, according to the letter. Nelson is a long-standing political foe of Clinton's, having lost the governor's race to him in 1990.

Yoakum accuses the Broaddricks of having worked out a deal with Clinton to keep quiet about the hotel incident.

Yoakum says he has given copies of the tape to his attorney and to Nelson to use "anyway he might choose" although he says he will use them himself only if forced to by the Broaddricks in court or in the press - or to protect himself or his family, a reference to threats he alleges David Broaddrick made against him.

"What's on Drudge is highly inaccurate in some places. The quotes from Juanita are not (quotes). Nothing has come from us. The story is not out there and it won't be until we're ready," David Broaddrick told the Times Record Thursday.

Unlike Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Kathleen Willey - all of whom have accused Clinton of sexual contact - the intensely private Broaddrick has to date never publicly accused Clinton of unwanted or inappropriate sexual behavior.

Until she granted Myers' request for an interview, Broaddrick and her husband have declined interviews with tradtional and tabloid news media. They have consistently refused to confirm or deny the incident.

Their lives have been disrupted by frequent clashes with and attempted contacts from reporters. The two spend much of their time at their rural Crawford County home behind a locked gate and electrified fence.

Russert Calls Rapegate Right-wing Trash NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert compared his own news division's Juanita Broaddrick bombshell to videos accusing President Clinton of murder, when challenged Tuesday morning about NBC's Rapegate cover-up.

Appearing on the "Imus in the Morning" radio show, Russert grew testy and defensive under the host's questioning about the alleged sexual assault by the President:

RUSSERT: Ah, er, ah, I'm not going to get into where we are. It's a work in progress about a whole lot of things.

RUSSERT: I mean, you know - there's a videotape available if you want that says President Clinton murdered people. I mean, put it on the screen.

When Imus kept going Russert switched tactics, hoping to joke his way out of the tight spot:

RUSSERT: Well, there's something to life. But I much prefer this whole thing about the naked cowboy and you.

IMUS: Man, you should run for office, the way you answer thesequestions. You could very easily - well, you're too nice a guy to be president.

Imus was apparently not impressed by Russert's efforts to dodge the issue, if the change in the next two "Imus in the Morning" news broadcasts was any indication. His newsman-partner Charles McCord read at length from the original Lisa Myers March 28, 1998 report on Broaddrick, which identified her allegation against Clinton as "rape".

The nearly year-old Myers' piece had not been in the previous hour's news rotation.

After Russert left, Imus said he doubted NBC would be a party to any Rapegate cover-up, then tossed this barb at his erstwhile friend: "It would be as if they set a truck on fire, or accused somebody of planting a bomb."

The references were to past NBC News debacles involving a staged car explosion passed off as spontaneous and a false report fingering Richard Jewel as the Olympic Park bomber.

Russert's attempts to discredit Juanita Broaddrick's story as right-wing fiction are contradicted by Inside Cover's exclusive on-the- scene source, who revealed last week that NBC had nailed the story down through multiple witness accounts and an investigation of Broaddrick's background that found her "squeaky clean".

NBC's predicament was best summed up by Myers herself, who explained NBC's delay to Juanita Broaddrick with these words: "The good news is, you're credible. The bad news is, you're very, very credible."

Media Wags Circle the Wagons on Rapegate NBC received some much-needed air support this weekend for holding its own bombshell interview with alleged Clinton rape victim Juanita Broaddrick. It came from CNN, the network that brought America the notoriously bogus "Tailwind" expose.

The Rapegate cover-up reached a fevered pitch on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," featuring CNN's Bernard Kalb, UPI's Helen Thomas, Chris Bury of "Nightline," and Fox News Network's David Schuster. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz played master of ceremonies.

Kurtz set the segment up by reminding CNN viewers that Broaddrick's charge was "a sensational but uncorroborated allegation," according to the Washington Post, that involved "unsubstantiated claims," according to CBS.

Asked by Kurtz if it was difficult to corroborate such "a complicated story," Nightliner Bury tried to explain NBC's "To report, or not to report" Hamlet act, saying:

"This is all a matter of distinctions. Is this a story about someone trying to interfere with an affidavit, interfere with the judicial system? If so, that's a sensational story and you run it. If it's a 20-year-old-plus story about a sexual incident that may not be corroborated, then it's not a story and you don't run it."

No corroboration? As NewsMax.com has reported, Juanita Broaddrick's story has been confirmed on the record by the nurse who treated her after the assault as well as by four other witnesses who spoke to NBC.

"The Washington Post using that escape phraseology, 'sensational but uncorroborated,' gives you a green light to publish any bit of trash that you want because you're not responsible. ... The moral dilemma here is that a network should not use that story unless there's independent corroboration. And then you make a determination if there's any special relevance to the issue at hand. You've got a double challenge here."

Broaddrick's story trash? As NewsMax.com has reported, NBC investigators thoroughly checked out her claim and her background. Their verdict: She's "very, very credible" and "squeaky clean."

A scowling Helen Thomas suggested that Broaddrick, who had filed a false affidavit last January denying sex with Clinton, should be indicted rather than allowed a network forum to tell her story:

"If Starr had [focused on the Broaddrick story] so much, he's already indicted a woman under the same circumstances for changing her story."

And as far as the House trial managers reported interest in the Broaddrick case, Thomas, the grande dame of the Washington Press corps, complained:

"They should be asked what proof they have. You know, this constant being interviewed and never being asked a relevant question. And is it material, really? Where was she 20 years ago? ... I think, if it had relevance then, Starr would have dealt with it. I don't know if we've become the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury and everything else. I'm not saying we shouldn't search for the truth, but if it isn't in the realm -- and they have so much already to make their judgments on."

Only Fox's Schuster played it straight, explaining the obvious to the White House press corps spin team:

"The reason so many people are complaining about NBC is because their story now doesn't appear to be any different than the last time they did it. Back in March, they went through, they talked to [Broaddrick's] friends, they talked to a nurse, they felt they had the story then and they went with it. The problem is, why now are they not going with it if they've got the interview with the person and the story appears to be the same?"

Chris Bury worried that the story was leaking out, despite the best efforts of the mainstream press to suppress it:

"You have congressmen, House managers, who are mentioning the story unasked, on interviews on national television. Yesterday at the White House briefing, you had a reporter asking [Press Secretary] Joe Lockhart [about it]. So it's the elephant in the room, it's the rat in the room, and it's leaking all over the place."

Kalb closed the segment by chastising the "Reliable Sources" panel for even mentioning the allegation:

"We on this very program now are giving this story an additional momentum by discussing it. It's picking up new legs because we are discussing it and possibly even arousing curiosity about it."

"So why are you doing it?" snapped octogenarian Thomas, growing testy at the thought that the media's Juanita Broaddrick cover-up might not succeed.

from TPDL 1999-Jan-27, from the Drudge Report, by Matt "I am a journalist dammit" Drudge:

DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX 01/26/99 23:59 UTC BROADDRICK: 'I'M SO AFRAID' NBC HOLDING INTERVIEW WITH 'JANE DOE'; WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE HAS NETWORK BRASS ON PAUSE, SAY SOURCES

Juanita Broaddrick said she was emotionally drained after her exhaustive interview with NBC's Lisa Myers last week. And since giving the interview, Broaddrick has confessed to a friend: "I'm so afraid over what is going to happen now."

NBC NEWS hotshot Lisa Myers has conducted an in-depth interview with "Jane Doe #5", according to media sources in an around the network. The interview with Juanita Broaddrick of Arkansas went down late last week and is now being held tight by the network.

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that in the past 24 hours, network executives have come under enormous pressure from the White House not to air the interview!

"There is a civil war developing," one network insider said on Tuesday. "Between those pushing for the interview to air and those who think it is completely reckless."

The interview, believed to have been conducted inside of Broaddrick's home in Arkansas, is being described as "provocative."

"At this late stage, the White House is trying to pull off another Aldrich!" declared one Myers supporter.

[ABC NEWS was hit with White House pressure after its Sunday morning show booked former FBI agent Gary Aldrich to appear after the release of his book UNLIMITED ACCESS. Leon Panetta, White House chief of staff at the time, called vice president for news coverage at ABC Robert Murphy and urged him to cancel Aldrich. George Stephanopoulos also hit Murphy in a separate call. Stephanopoulos, whose use of spin so impressed ABC NEWS executives they later hired him, once even lobbied CNN president Tom Johnson to keep coverage of Paula Jones off the air when she first accused Clinton of sex harassment back in 1994.]

Media excitement grew after a well-armed NBC crew was spotted outside of Broaddrick's home late last week.

"It was obvious that something was going down," reports one eyewitness. "The were cameras and a sound crew."

A second news network, reacting to reports that NBC was conducting the interview, later captured Broaddrick arriving and leaving a Tennis Club.

"They chased her car, at times going at high speeds... her husband went wild," says one network insider.

Now a pro-Myers NBC NEWS source reveals: "Anyone who says that her interview with Broaddrick is a dud, is just simply spreading misinformation."

Last February, the DRUDGE REPORT alerted readers who were following the Paula Jones sex case that there was great interest swirling around a woman named "Juanita." She was code named "Jane Doe #5."

A month later, NBC's Myers explored the "Juanita" story in a nightly news shocker: A woman claims she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton back in the 1970s!

The following is a flashback to the first Myers report on "Juanita" that aired on NBC NIGHTLY NEWS on Saturday, March 28, 1998:

"The explosive new allegation tonight is that President Clinton sexually assaulted a woman 20 years ago in Arkansas. It involves an alleged encounter at this Little Rock hotel in the late 1970s, between then Attorney General Bill Clinton and campaign worker, Juanita Broaddrick. In court documents today, Jones' lawyers claim Clinton quote 'forcibly raped and sexually assaulted' Broaddrick, then quote "bribed and intimidated her" to remain silent. Sources say that Broaddrick, now 54, recently denied under oath that such an assault occurred. But Jones' lawyers claim she had told their investigator she had suffered a quote 'horrible thing' at the hand of Clinton, and did not want to relive it. And NBC NEWS has talked to four people from Arkansas who say Broaddrick told them of such an assault years ago.

Today's charge is largely based on a letter from this man, Philip Yoakum, a friend and business associate of the alleged victim. In a letter to Broaddrick, written in 1992, Yoakum, a Republican writes, I 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.' In an interview with NBC NEWS, Yoakum said Broaddrick told him that Clinton invited himself to her hotel room, allegedly to discuss her nursing home business.

Mr. PHILLIP YOAKUM (Arkansas Businessman): Mm-hm. Yes, 1981 is when she told me.

MYERS: Yoakum admits he is no fan of the president and that he unsuccessfully tried to get Broaddrick to tell her story when Clinton first ran for president.

Mr. YOAKUM: And she says, Who would believe me, little old Juanita from Van Buren?'

MYERS: There was another woman at that hotel that day, a nurse and friend of Broaddrick who says she iced her friend's face after the assault. In a telephone interview with NBC NEWS, this woman, who admits she dislikes Clinton, said Broaddrick was distraught, her lips were swollen at least double in size. She told me they had intercourse against her will.' Again a White House spokesman dismissed the charge as outrageous, false, and the work of the president's long-time political opponents.' The White House also noted that Broaddrick herself already denied the allegation under oath.

Bar Complaint Filed on Jane Doe #5 Affidavit Miami attorney Jack Thompson has stepped into the breach left by the lethargic Kenneth Starr and skittish Paula Jones Judge Susan Webber Wright. Lawyer Thompson's latest focus: Jane Doe # 5 -- and the false affidavit submitted to Judge Wright's court taking the President off the hook on an alleged rape rap.

Jane Doe # 5, aka Juanita Broaddrick, first swore to Paula Jones attorneys that Clinton hadn't attacked her, only to recant that denial when questioned by Starr's investigators. Reportedly, House Judiciary Majority Counsel David Schippers learned more about Broaddrick's story and that explosive information is being kept from the public.

But only Thompson seems to have noticed that Broaddrick's 180 degree turnabout puts Clinton attorney Bob Bennett on the hotseat for filing yet another false affidavit -- besides Monica Lewinsky's -- with Judge Wright's court.

What follows is the letter submitted by Thompson to the Virginia State Bar Association, outlining the new charges against the world's most famous sex lawyer.

Ms. Shannan Falyear Virginia State Bar 707 East Main Street, Suite 1500 Richmond, Virginia VIA FAX

Re: Bar Complaint Against Bill Clinton's Lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, Complaint File #99-888-0862

Please augment my currently pending formal bar complaint against Mr. Bennett in the following regard:

Mr. Bennett filed in Paula Corbin Jones v. William Jefferson Clinton an affidavit sworn to by a Ms. Juanita Broaddrick stating that she was not raped by then Governor Clinton. Ms. Broaddrick has now recanted to the Office of the Independent Counsel that affidavit. Her recantation has been reported to Congress by the OIC. Mr. Bennett knows that and yet has not taken any steps whatsoever to correct the false record, which by his own misfeasance he recklessly created, as already set forth in this complaint file.

Indeed, certain members of the House of Representatives reviewed the evidence surrounding and disproving the false Juanita Broaddrick affidavit submitted by Mr. Bennett, including medical records corroborating her rape by Clinton, and decided to vote for impeachment of Mr. Bennett's client based upon what they learned to be the truth about the sexual assault and the efforts by the Bennett-led legal team to cover it up.

As you know, the ways in which Mr. Bennett created a false record are set forth in the earlier filings to be found in the Complaint File #99-888-0862.

Further proof that Mr. Bennett is still knowingly involved in this obfuscation were certain public statements he made today suggesting that perjury is no big deal. One would expect Mr. Bennett to say that, given the fact that he has been caught participating in the submission of serial perjuries to a court of law.

Thank you for adding this letter and the allegations herein to the Bennett file.

Congressman Reduced to Tears Over Secret Clinton Rape Evidence Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon told the Arizona Republic it left him "nauseated". Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays told the New York Times it was "horrific". Those are just two of the on the record reactions from House members who have viewed the evidence now being kept under lock and key in D.C.'s Gerald Ford Building -- about a rape allegedly committed in 1978 by then- Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton.

Now Inside Cover has learned that the secret House material on the alleged rape of Jane Doe #5, a.k.a. Juanita Broaddrick, is so powerful and convincing that it actually reduced another House member -- a man -- to tears.

Thursday night, on CNBC's "Hardball," host Chris Matthews alluded to an unnamed Representative who Matthews said was brought to tears as he reviewed the Broaddrick material.

Reached by Inside Cover Friday on Sean Hannity's WABC radio show, Matthews revealed that, "the word is it was (Rep.) Mike Castle. Check it out." Inside Cover will do just that, though Castle's office was closed at press time.

Matthews own assessment of the Juanita Broaddrick rape charge against Clinton? "I think it's believable. I think it's very credible. I know a reporter for the Washington Post who I've known for 20 years and she told me that she interviewed this woman and found her highly, in fact, totally credible." Matthews added, "Clinton sounds like a vampire."

While the White House gleefully watches as Larry Flynt and James Carville blackmail GOP Senate trial managers with insider dirt, Republicans remain reluctant to release the bombshell Broaddrick material. Matthews said Henry Hyde has decided not to introduce any evidence substantiating Broaddrick's charge at trial.

The "Hardball" host has reported in the past that Broaddrick's story was the last straw for more than a few pro-censure Republicans, who promptly reversed course and voted for impeachment. With two impeachment articles passing by a margin of five votes or less, Mr. Clinton might not be standing trial today but for the secret rape evidence against him.

Perhaps Americans will learn the closely guarded details of what brought Rep. Castle to tears and Mr. Clinton to impeachment -- after the President is acquitted by the Senate.

Congresswoman: Rape Allegation to Surface at Clinton Senate Trial Documentation Said to Sway Several Republicans to Impeach

Florida Rep. Tillie Fowler has seen top secret documents describing an alleged rape by Bill Clinton and says the accusation could play a role in the upcoming Senate trial of the impeached President. The material was made available to all members of the House and was said to be conclusive enough to persuade several wavering Republicans to vote for impeachment last Saturday.

In an impeachment eve appearance on CNBC, Fowler was asked about the documents, now sequestered in D.C's Gerald Ford Building, by Hardball host Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: And can you give us any definition as to what additional information involving Jane Doe # 5 and other material like this that is leading people in your caucus to vote for impeachment in addition to the publicized material?

FOWLER: Well, to me what we already know is sufficient to move forward with impeachment and that is what I base my decision on. There is information there that I think goes more to the character of this man and to what he will do that has been deemed too salacious to release.

FOWLER: I won't speak to that. But there are things in there that are not good. I have made my decision, as I think most of us have, on the evidence as to whether it goes to perjury...

MATTHEWS: Help me out here. Why are members of the Republican caucus willing to read material that accuses the President of things like rape and make decisions based on that information but are not willing to disclose it after they learned it?

FOWLER: Well, I think there are some rules right now about that. It's not supposed to be disclosed because this is part of what's going to be used, I believe, in the trial.

U.S. News & World Report's Major Garrett, another Hardball guest, reported that 15 to 20 House Republicans accessed documentation on the rape allegation. After Fowler's bombshell revelation, Garrett confirmed that the material, "can be grist for the Senate trial and may in fact be grist for the Senate trial."

On March 28, ABC and NBC News reported that material released by Paula Jones attorneys included accounts from four witnesses who said that Juanita Broaddrick, of Van Buren, Ark., had told them that then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton had brutally raped her in 1978. One witness, a nurse identified as Norma Rogers, told NBC's Lisa Myers that she had treated Broaddrick after the assault, applying ice to Broaddrick's lips which were swollen to twice their normal size. According to Rogers, Broaddrick said that Clinton had sex with her "against her will."

The appendix of Ken Starr's impeachment report to Congress reveals that on Jan. 2, 1998, Jane Doe # 5 filed an affidavit with lawyers for Paula Jones denying that Bill Clinton had made unwanted sexual advances towards her in the late 1970's. But, according to Starr's investigators, Jane Doe # 5 later testified that her sworn denial had been false.

Reportedly, Starr's FBI interviewers had found Jane Doe's latest account "inconclusive" and Starr decided to omit it from his final report to Congress.

But apparently the information, once shared with wavering Republicans, did have an impact as they considered their impeachment votes.

Saturday's New York Times reported that Republican moderate Mark Souder, who had planned to vote against impeachment, was "bothered" by the new information, worrying that "it might be true." Souder ended up voting for Impeachment Article 3, which charged Clinton with obstruction of justice. Asked whether the secret reports had changed his mind, Souder said, "They were part of it, but it was not the fundamental thing....It was based on looking at everything in totality, not at any particular bit of information," Newsday reported on Sunday.

CNBC's Matthews suggested that the secret information had moved more than a few wavering Republicans to vote for impeachment:

"I'm told today that one of the reasons Republicans are voting for impeachment is that they know more than we know. There's more in this report that's over at the Ford Building on Capitol Hill that contains dirty stuff about this President, that for whatever reason wasn't formally released, but is apparently infecting the thinking of a lot of Republicans. A lot of the borderline guys are going to vote for impeachment tomorrow because of what they've read."

The material on explosive allegations by Broaddrick and other women is believed to be comprehensive, with several House Republicans taking up to four hours to review it, according to Saturday's Washington Post. On Friday, Rep. Ann Northrup described the secret information as "specific and graphic."

from TPDL 1999-Feb-4, from the Washington Times, by Bill Sammon and Frank Murray:

The Clinton story that's too hot to handle The White House tried to pressure the Fox News Channel not to broadcast a story about a woman who claims President Clinton raped her 21 years ago and then coerced her into denying it under oath, network sources said yesterday.

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart on Tuesday warned a Fox White House correspondent not to run the story, noting that NBC News had interviewed the woman in Arkansas and had not put the story on the air.

Fox ran the story anyway, and Internet scribe Matt Drudge yesterday published Mr. Lockhart's unheeded words of warning, which the White House did not categorically deny, but said were off the record.

Asked yesterday about pressuring the cable news network, Mr. Lockhart said: "I'm just not going to discuss the private conversations I have, even if others can't keep them private."

Mr. Drudge quoted Mr. Lockhart as telling Fox: "You guys will regret this. Clinton haters have been putting this story out for a decade now, as far back as the '92 campaign."

According to the Drudge Report on the Internet, Mr. Lockhart went on to warn the correspondent: "If you go with the story after NBC News decided not to, there won't be any argument about whether Fox News is right wing or not."

James Kennedy, spokesman for the White House Counsel's Office, later called Fox to argue that Mr. Lockhart's phone call had been off the record, Mr. Drudge said. The network aired the story without using Mr. Lockhart's quotes.

Persons close to the network said Mr. Drudge extracted the Lockhart quotes from the network's computer system, but another person close to Mr. Drudge said this was not so, that he obtained the quotes by talking with "real live sources."

In any event, persons at the network confirmed the accuracy of the quotes to The Washington Times yesterday.

The use of the quotes irked some Fox journalists, who intended to honor the White House off-the-record request. Mr. Drudge declined comment.

Mr. Lockhart was asked by Bill Sammon of The Washington Times yesterday at his regular White House briefing whether such pressure was heavy-handed spin control or appropriate behavior for the White House press secretary.

"If this is your way, your side way, to get into writing the story, go ahead and write the story," Mr. Lockhart said. "I'm not going to help you. You've already written it."

Mr. Lockhart replied: "If any of you think I'm in a position to pressure anyone, you give me more power than you think I have."

Bill Plante of CBS joined in the questioning: "Did you make the call, as has been reported?"

Mr. Lockhart replied: "I'm just not going to discuss the private conversations I have, even if others can't keep them private."

While persons close to Fox confirmed that the White House tried to spike their story, others close to NBC insisted yesterday no such pressure had been brought to bear by the White House. That has been the subject of intense speculation in Washington for nearly a week. Some NBC correspondents said the story, based on correspondent Lisa Myers' lengthy interview last month with the woman in question, Juanita Broaddrick, is still being corroborated and might well be broadcast.

Mrs. Broaddrick's attorney, William P. Walters of Greenwood, Ark., yesterday confirmed to The Washington Times that his client broke her self-imposed press silence two weeks ago to tell her story on camera to NBC.

"They have not elected to run it as of yet," said Mr. Walters, who said Mrs. Broaddrick was not paid for the interview. "We do not know if they will run it."

FBI agents working for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr visited Mrs. Broaddrick in Arkansas in April to ask her about the incident, which is said to have occurred when Mr. Clinton was the Arkansas attorney general. Two investigators for the House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry recently questioned Mrs. Broaddrick, who is referred to in legal documents as "Jane Doe No. 5."

At issue is her claim that Mr. Clinton raped her in 1978. Her vivid descriptions of a violent sexual assault were corroborated by a nurse who said Mrs. Broaddrick told her during treatment that she was injured by sexual intercourse with Mr. Clinton "against her will."

Mrs. Broaddrick was portrayed as the victim of a "brutal rape" in a letter subpoenaed almost a year ago by Mr. Starr. That October 1992 letter, written to Mrs. Broaddrick by a friend named Phillip D. Yoakum of Fayetteville, Ark., recalled unsuccessful efforts by himself and Sheffield Nelson of Little Rock, a Republican candidate for governor of Arkansas in 1992, to persuade her to go public with "how you resisted until he ripped your clothes off and how he bit your lip until you gave into his forcing sex upon you."

Mrs. Broaddrick has at various times told the story, and at various times withdrawn it.

Friends and others in Arkansas say she is fearful for her family's business interests, two homes for the elderly and mentally retarded in Fort Smith and Van Buren, Ark., which are licensed by the state of Arkansas and which receive government payments.

Paula Jones' attorneys -- to whom Mrs. Broaddrick recanted her accusation that Mr. Clinton raped her -- produced documentary evidence in federal court that Mrs. Broaddrick contradicted her own denials.

In a March 1998 filing, they called Jane Doe No. 5's story significant evidence that Mr. Clinton "forcibly raped and sexually assaulted her and then bribed and/or intimidated her and her family into remaining silent about this outrage."

The attorneys argued it was relevant despite its age because it contradicted Mr. Clinton's deposition testimony that "in my lifetime, I've never sexually harassed a woman. ... I never have and I wouldn't."

In a tape recording obtained last month by The Washington Times, Mrs. Broaddrick told private investigators for Mrs. Jones that her story was "so horrible" she wouldn't repeat it.

"Bad, bad, bad things, I can't even begin to tell you," she told Dallas investigators Rick and Beverly Lambert at her home on Nov. 13, 1997, in a conversation recorded without her knowledge.

If subpoenaed, she said, "They won't get anything out of me. I'm sorry. ... It's very private. We're talking about something 20 years ago. I'll deny anything."

The Broaddrick tape was subpoenaed in March from Mrs. Jones' attorneys by Mr. Starr, but apparently not forwarded to Congress with the other material.

The Broaddrick case, recounted by Mr. Starr in documents provided to members of Congress, is said to have helped sway wavering House Republicans toward impeachment in December. The Republicans reviewed this and other evidence withheld from public view in a secure room at the Capitol.

When the impeachment was forwarded to the Senate, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, said "67 votes may appear out of thin air" to convict the president if senators "spend plenty of time in the evidence room."

Colleagues Call for NBC Reporter's Release "Free Lisa Myers" Those were the words emblazoned on Brit Hume's blue lapel button as he closed his Thursday night Fox News Channel news broadcast. Hume was joined by FOX 's Jeffrey Birnbaum and Morton Kondracke, who also sported Myers buttons.

"And finally we wanted to send our best wishes to our colleague at NBC News, Lisa Myers. She has done remarkable reporting on the Clinton-Lewinsky case. And her latest coup is the only interview anyone has done on tape with the mysterious Jane Doe # 5. NBC News, however, has yet to air that interview. And we just wanted Lisa to know that we were thinking about her over here at FOX News and we wish her well." (Camera close-up of "Free Lisa Myers" button)

Media F.O.B. Slams Rapegate Victim with Apparent NBC Leak Is NBC trying to discredit its own Rapegate exclusive by leaking details of Juanita Broaddrick's blockbuster interview to Clinton friendly reporters?

Anyone who heard Newsweek's Eleanor Clift Wednesday night certainly got that impression, as she slammed the Rapegate victim as a less than credible witness.

Appearing on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Clift claimed that Broaddrick's story had "numerous discrepancies" and insisted that NBC was sitting on her story because it didn't check out.

"She can't even remember that date when it happened," Clift barked, after host Sean Hannity challenged her on NBC's cover- up.

Clift's apparent insider revelation about Broaddrick's story begs the question: How does she know? Since she told all to Dateline, Broaddrick and her husband have refused to comment on the content of the interview, hanging up immediately on most reporters who call. The detail Clift cited has not been reported elsewhere.

Dubbed "Eleanor Rodham Clift" by Clinton critics, the Newsweek reporter is a famous presidential apologist and could be expected to mount a vigorous defense against any prospective Clinton rape charge.

But Clift's claim that NBC is sitting on Broaddrick's story because it lacks credibility flies in the face of what Broaddrick herself was told by NBC's Lisa Myers last Tuesday.

Explaining NBC's skittishness, Myers warned Broaddrick: "The good news is, you're credible. The bad news is, you're very, very credible." The network's private investigators combed through the Clinton accuser's backround and deemed her "squeaky clean".

On Monday, NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert also tried to discredit his own network's Rapegate exclusive, comparing the story to videos distributed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell charging Clinton with complicity in murder.

NBC News Sits On A Bombshell It is obvious that nothing short of a bombshell could shatter the unity of the 45 Democratic Senators and persuade a dozen of them to vote to convict President Clinton and remove him from office. NBC News has been sitting on such a bombshell. It is an eight-hour on-camera interview by Lisa Myers with Juanita Broaddrick in which Mrs. Broaddrick charges that she was brutally raped by Bill Clinton in 1978, when he was attorney general of Arkansas. Lisa Myers first reported this on the NBC Nightly news last March.

She said then, "In court documents today, Paula Jones's lawyers claim Clinton `forcibly raped and sexually assaulted' Broaddrick, then `bribed and intimidated her' to remain silent. Sources say that Broaddrick, 54, recently denied under oath that such an assault occurred. But Jones's lawyers claim she had told their investigator she had suffered a `horrible thing' at the hand of Clinton and did not want to relive it. NBC News has talked to four people from Arkansas who say Broaddrick told them of such an assault years ago."

Broaddrick has since been deposed by Ken Starr's investigators, and her deposition is said to be an important part of the still-secret evidence that persuaded wavering House Republicans to vote for impeachment. If Juanita Broaddrick could tell the Senate what Bill Clinton did to her, even diehard Clinton loyalists might find it hard to vote to keep him in office. The airing of her story by NBC might have forced the Senate to convert its pro forma exercise into a genuine trial where her testimony might have had some impact on those Senators who say that the fuss is about nothing more than consensual sex between two adults.

It was reported on the Internet that NBC had planned to air the Broaddrick story on January 29. That was not true. Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, has said, "If we honestly had a buttoned-up bombshell, we would go with it in a flash." The story would be aired, he said, when they had adequate corroboration for it. NBC obviously had far less corroboration for the story they aired last March than they do now. The March story contained a serious error-the claim that Clinton had "bribed and intimidated" Broaddrick to remain silent. Broaddrick herself has said that is false. NBC has obviously raised the bar for this story. They still have three investigators in Arkansas working on it, but a reliable Arkansas source says that all the major elements have been documented, and the investigators are busying themselves with minor details.

What has kept it from being given an air date? Robert Wright, the chairman of NBC, told me that they were still missing a piece of very crucial information, and he didn't feel comfortable airing the story until they got it. He told me, off the record, what the missing information was, and he okayed my checking it out with Mrs. Broaddrick.

She informed me that NBC had that information and the documents that proved it. I was able to confirm this and inform Bob Wright that he had been given false information. He responded that he must be out of the loop farther than he thought. He said he would look into it. In an earlier conversation he had acknowledged that there were people with clout at NBC News who, like CNN's Rick Kaplan, were friends of Clinton's. When, in our second conversation, I told him that I was going to write that it looks like the Kaplan clones at NBC are responsible for the delay, he did not agree, but he did not protest my saying it.

The prime suspect would be the president of NBC News, Andrew Lack. Washington bureau chief Tim Russert reports to him, and Lack reports to Wright. It is not likely that Russert would sabotage a story that one of his best reporters had been working on for a year by telling Lack that they were still missing indispensable information that they actually had. Russert assured me that there were no phone calls to NBC from the White House about this story, but he could not possibly know if Clinton or one of his aides had spoken to Lack. When asked about Andrew Lack, a retired CBS correspondent came up with "Kaplanesque."

In 1992, Rick Kaplan, who was then with ABC News, was suspected of having been behind ABC's sacrifice of a big scoop-Clinton's infamous 1969 letter to Col. Eugene Holmes. The letter explained why he had not kept his promise to enroll in the ROTC at the University of Arkansas, a promise he made to escape induction. ABC's delay in reporting the story helped save the Clinton candidacy. It appears that a Kaplanesque official at NBC News has now helped save Clinton's presidency by sabotaging the timely airing of NBC's exclusive interview with Juanita Broaddrick.

When I saw your name, I thought I was living through that nightmare all over again. Point by point. Confess that I couldn’t stomach those details again. I hope you mentioned that the Democrat Senators never looked at the report of Kenneth Starr. Correct me if I am wrong.
It’s possible Bill Clinton would not have been President if they had.
Thanks for posting what really happened.

But in his book, Schippers reveals a stunning new detail as he recounts Woznicki’s version of Broaddrick’s story.

“One evening, years before, in 1984 or 1985, Mr. and Mrs. Broaddrick had attended a function in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The couple didn’t realize that Clinton was the keynote speaker. When they found out, they returned to their hotel room.

“In the course of the evening, (Juanita’s husband) David went down to the bar and found himself standing next to Clinton. Clinton stuck out his hand and said, ‘You’re with Juanita, aren’t you?’

“Broaddrick squeezed Clinton’s hand as hard as he was able. He looked Clinton right in the eye and, continuing his grip, said, ‘Don’t you go near her or near her home; don’t you even so much as look at her.’

“Startled, Clinton pulled his hand away and said, ‘I didn’t know she was with you when that happened.’ “

When “that” happened? Clinton wasn’t mystified by Mr. Broaddrick’s angry demeanor and ominous-sounding words. He accepted the warning without protest and asked for no further explanation. His sanguine reception of Broaddrick’s hostile behavior has only one explanation.

Undoubtedly, Clinton knew exactly why Broaddrick was upset about “that.”

Certainly David Broaddrick had understood. Without explicitly saying so, the future president of the United States had just acknowledged he was a rapist.

No Dems went to the Ford Building. Even if they had, it would not have made a difference. The only thing that could have made a difference was if Trent Lott saw that Clinton’s victims testified before the Senate. Lott is a coward and didn’t do that. There was no chance to convict Clinton in the Senate with the American public being convinced he was a rapist. Public opinion might have changed things.

To this day I still can’t believe that Clinton got away with this and so many many other things.

I mean, intellectually I know it, but Dear God Above how in the world did he manage it?

DIRTEXPOTUS at large, still up to his same old game.

And now, here comes Hillary! If we can’t stop that.... woman (using the term loosely) this country is doomed.

It began with the bombing of the Murrah Building. Clinton used that to create the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and “hate talk radio” and save his presidency. He galvanized support against the dreaded right wing. By defending anything he did, they were fighting the right wing. It was evil, but he pulled if off brilliantly.

The techniques that were employed by David Copperfield to lure women (using subordinates to make contact, promises of future employment oppportunities, etc.) are predatory and are being exposed by the press as the sick conduct that they were. However, these were the same techniques used by Clinton decades earlier (Arkansas state troopers, Wiley’s job opportunities, denial when caught) and the press gave him a pass. Clinton and Copperfield are both predators, but why should one get a pass and not the other? Couldn’t following Clinton’s role model behavior be an excuse for the magician?

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