FR EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Prudhomme confronts Hillary over Broaddrick rape, is threatened with arrest

How is it that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the smartest woman in the world, does not know who Juanita Broaddrick is?

Earlier today I spoke with Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien, our own KPfromDerryNH. I knew she was heading for a showdown with Hillary today and didn't know if they would even let her into the event. She became somewhat famous for challenging Al Gore at a townhall meeting in New Hampshire in late 1999. Kath asked Gore if she believed Juanita Broaddrick, and Gore claimed he knew nothing about the story.

In 2000, I worked with her to plan a rally in New York. The great New York FReepers really got involved with the event. Kath spoke about being a rape survivor like Juanita, and after a poignant speech, she delivered a video copy of the Lisa Myers interview with Broaddrick to Hillary headquarters.

Hillary, if you are such a great defender of women, Help bring this rapist to justice. Maybe you can also explain how a trafficker of women made many visits to your White House, spent two days in the residence quarters, and laundered 645K to the DNC through Charlie Trie.

I spoke with Katherine at about 9:45pm, Eastern. She spoke with great emotion, and the day had been very draining for her. She was going to try to write it up tonight, but I guess it is getting too late. She confronted Hillary face to face, asking her if she believed Juanita Broaddrick. When Hillary said she didn't know about Broaddrick, Kath explained that she was the woman who accused Bill Clinton of rape. Hillary's handlers or Secret Service demanded that she leave and threatened her with arrest. That is the short version.

OKAY, HERE IS HER STORY. Admin Mod, can you put it up at the end of the original post?

Today I Met Hillary in Nashua, N.H. also known as “The Gate City”
by Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien

Today, Friday the 13th of July was my lucky day. I went to Daniel Webster College to meet Hillary Clinton.
I knew that the chance of that really happening would be slim. I arrived a little late but just in time for the program, that had been billed in the paper as free and open to the public to begin. I had called Hillary headquarters for tickets a few days prior. A friendly staffer told me that my tickets would be at the door and that there would be a 1/2 to 3/4 hour question time after her talk.
“Great”, I thought to myself, that will be a good time to see how open and free it really is. I’ve seen pre selected questions before and I loathe that process, it’s a sham.
When I got there, they did not ask my name or anything. It was fantastic that they gave out water bottles. I found the crowd of about a couple hundred strong to be a bit anemic in their overall vibe.
People were pleasant but not wicked thrilled to be there. I thought it would be a much different feel. Bill Clinton spoke for a bit, then Hillary spoke. I don’t care what any of her enemies say, the truth is she is looking better than ever now. Hats off to her hair, make up and style people. I hoped my luck would hold and she really would take random questions.
Throughout her speech, she made some points I agreed with, such as let’s treat our returning veterans better and interest rates on student loans should be as low as they can possibly be. Amen.
When she was done talking music started. Not looking good for that question asking session I dared to hope for...
I went up to the group heading towards the stage to meet her or her husband. It gets cozy fast in those crowds. There was a lady next to me, wearing a tee shirt that declared her as a health care voter, who had two canes she used. I tried to help her squeeze in a bit and half joked with her to whack the folks pushing in front of her with one of her canes. The poor lady might have fallen over if she did. For goodness sakes-can’t Hillary get staffers to watch out for and help those folks. Just a little free advice. Get them all up front, life is hard enough for them. The lady gave up and left.
I was not too far from the former President so I called out to him but he didn’t see me. Hillary came up next and I held out an old light green colored postcard towards her as others were holding tickets, baseballs and stuff like that.
She took my postcard, signed it and asked “Whose is this?” I said it was mine and asked her if she believed Juanita Broaddrick. “Who is that?” she asked.
I replied “The woman who said she was raped by Bill Clinton in 1978.”
“I don’t know anything about that” Ms. Rodham Clinton said, still holding my card
“I sent you a videotape of the interview she gave to Dateline NBC and I’m sure you have received it, I sent it by certified mail and that’s the receipt showing your office got it that your holding.”
At some point around this time someone behind her asked my name so I told them what it was.
She gave the receipt back to me.
I asked her again if she believed Juanita Broaddrick.
“I don’t know what your talking about.” she then started going back towards the direction she had come from, away from her husband.
I had to yell so she would hear me over the music as I asserted “That’s not true!” and went on to ask her “Why are you doing this? You’ve always been so good to rape survivors.”
I was thinking about how she started Arkansas’ first rape crisis hotline and helped start its first rape crisis center. I would have loved her way back then for that.
The people around me suddenly discovered they did not like me and began making vehement requests to have someone get me out of there.
A well groomed, handsome man in a suit with one of those clear, curly wires in his ear, a Secret Service agent perhaps, grabbed both my arms above the elbow and began pushing me backwards and telling me I had to leave.
So I did. Well, I began to.
An enthusiastic, yet clueless young campaign worker invited me to take a sign up card thing so I could get campaign updates.
I declined her offer by muttering a swear phrase that encourages people to go have fun with themselves but I don’t think she heard me.
As I passed the media stage I thought I’d at least talk to some media folks and tell them my side of the story. I had printed it up on a sheet of paper I could give them.
About four guys in suits with wires in their ears were joined by an equal number of Nashua Police officers who told me I couldn’t do that. So I began to leave again..
All eight of them were kind enough to escort me toward the gate. Who says chivalry is dead?
As officers of the law, I will obey them but I couldn’t see why I was such a threat. I’m 130 or so pounds soaking wet, I was wearing a dress and heels and so upset and humiliated I’m was trying hard not to cry and not always being successful.
This was a very hard thing for me to do. I try to be polite but I also know that I must be bold and assertive as well to get the answers I want. I know my intentions are pure and this gives me confidence. At that moment, knowing my intentions were honorable, this caused me to be very angry too. I declared that the event was a sham. To me it was. If a candidate wants to earn the right of having said they were vetted by the tough, hard question asking New Hampshire citizenry, then I respond that she must earn that right. Hillary is not doing that, walking away from tough questions and not being brave enough to take random ones that a whole crowd can hear. Does she think were stupid?
As we all walked on, I was struck by the irony of what the Nashua Police were doing. I asked them how they could square what they were doing to me with what they do all day long for work, fight crime and have to kick me out when all I did was ask a tough question. I asked them how they could sleep at night.
I told them I was a polite person, I never did anything wrong. I wanted to say I’d been a Girl Scout Leader and all I ever do in life is take care of other people. I’m even doing laundry right now as I write this.
One of the men asked me what I asked about. I told them I asked about Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who said she was raped by Bill Clinton and that I couldn’t figure out why Hillary would have ever cared about 18 minutes of blank tape during the Watergate scandal but never wanted to know where her husband was on April 25, 1978, a date he will not account for and the date Broaddrick says the rape happened.
I pointedly asked one of the officers that a man running for governor would have those records, an Attorney General would have those records, right?
They world be someplace, right? No answer, I wasn’t expecting one anyway.
We got to the road and that’s when it got really weird. One of then asked me where I was parked. I pointed towards my car near the airport. Another asked me if I was ok to drive.
“What!?, yes I can drive, I’m fine to drive!” He must have thought I was nuts or he deals with so many drunks this is an automatic question..
I began to walk towards my car, I wanted to get out of there so bad.
An officer started talking about the fence, the gate or whatever but I tried to tell him “OK OK, I’m leaving, I’m leaving” but he kept trying to tell me about the gate.
I could not disobey the officer who was trying to make me listen to what he had to say so I had to walk back to him.
I said “Yes, sir yes, sir, I’m listening, I’m listening.” That’s when he told me that on the other side of the gate was state property. After I crossed over it, if I were to come back I would be arrested.
I was shocked, I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket in my life. I said stuff like “What!?, I’ll be arrested!?”
“Why,why would you arrest me? What did I do?”and “I can’t believe this, why?”
He only said the same thing over again but this time with an emphatic “Mamn” at the beginning of his sentence.
I thought about walking to the fence as fast as a snail or coming back over just 1 inch to find out why I’d be arrested.
But that would be a high price to pay just to find out and I had to get to my job. How do you call in to get someone to cover for you because you got arrested ? I don’t want to find out. Well, my story ends there and my washing machine just stopped...

***** FROM REASON ONLINE *****

The President in the Attic
Who is Bill Clinton?

Charles Paul Freund | May 1999 Print Edition

By Charles Paul Freund In 1999, Washington discovered the politics of the insane. President Bill Clinton, fresh from procedural exoneration in a dismal impeachment trial, was credibly accused of having brutally raped a woman 21 years earlier. Then, nothing happened.

The allegation was made by Juanita Broaddrick, a wealthy Arkansas nursing home operator with no known ties to the president’s enemies and no apparent agenda, and was reported in the mainstream press in February in a lengthy op-ed essay in The Wall Street Journal, in a front-page news story the next day in The Washington Post, and later in a notoriously delayed 30-minute NBC Dateline piece that offered independently discovered evidence that tended to confirm her account. But nothing happened.

Among the appalling details of Broaddrick’s story was Clinton’s use of his teeth in the alleged attack: Her description of his savage biting of her upper lip is described by rape cops as a known M.O.; rapists will use their teeth to terrify and subdue their victims. Broaddrick says that as a result, her lip was swelling badly even before Clinton left the hotel room where, she says, the attack occurred. She attributes to him the exit line that may yet become his rhetorical signature: “You’d better put some ice on that.”

If this story is true, it has profoundly disturbing implications about the president’s character. Yet the day after this scene appeared in The Washington Post, the capital’s Sunday talk shows were devoted to the possibility that the president’s wife might run for a Senate seat. These programs did take up the rape allegations later, after NBC finally ran its piece. And then nothing happened.

Nothing, at least, that did not indicate the lunacy to which the capital has descended under Clinton. The president declined to address directly charges that he was a brutal criminal; instead, his lawyer, David Kendall, offered a terse denial: “Any allegation that the president assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false.”

But language and plain meaning have been assaulted repeatedly by Clinton, and Washington actually parsed this statement in search of the smug alibis of logic the president is pleased to allow himself. Let’s see, 20 years ago Jimmy Carter was president, so is Clinton really denying that Carter assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick? In 1978, there was no Mrs. Broaddrick; she was then Juanita Hickey, so maybe Clinton isn’t denying that he assaulted Mrs. Hickey. And anyway, who knows what advantageous meaning Clinton is assigning to the term assault?

So nothing happened, and one essential reason nothing happened is that nothing was scheduled to happen. Washington, its politicians, its interest groups, and most of its journalists, suddenly found themselves the prisoners of procedure. As NOW President Patricia Ireland said repeatedly about the allegations, “There is no forum.” That is, the criminal statute of limita-tions had long ago expired, so there was no legal forum in which to proceed. The impeachment trial had concluded, so there seemed to be no realistically available constitutional remedy. (Anyway, Democrats had spent months arguing a definition of high crimes that would have excluded criminal rape even if it were proved.)

As no official rape-related events were scheduled, the papers apparently concluded they had nothing to write about, so no rape follow-ups appeared in their news pages. The charge was pronounced unprovable, and Washington “moved on.”

Indeed, Washington assumed a certain compulsive posture; like a mental patient who can’t stop washing his hands, it could only do what it was impelled to do. And what the capital seemed impelled to do was to follow its strictly scheduled routine. Hearings, for example, were scheduled to address mail sweepstakes chicanery, so legislators showed up and righteously denounced such behavior. The press showed up and reported the hearings. But there was no scheduled forum in which to address the assault allegations—never mind their implications—so no one could conceive of a way to address them.

Of course, scrupulous adherence to routine is a well-known strategy of avoidance. The Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Heinrich Böll employed the syndrome as a parable in his powerful portrait of postwar Germany, Billiards at Half-past Nine. Böll’s main character does everything according to the strictest schedule. To break the routine is to risk thinking; to think is to risk facing the moral implications of a compromised life. Rich though the material may be, no one in Washington is known to be writing Hearings at Half-past Nine.

The capital has rarely shown itself to be so unimaginative, or to conceive of itself in so mechanistic a fashion. What usually happens is that once scandalous news breaks, the press, often aided by interested parties who stand to benefit from further coverage, works to produce “second-day” stories and further follow-ups that keep an important narrative going. Indeed, if there is anything “mechanistic” about the capital, it is the so-called scandal machine of press, politicians, and interested outsiders that has so often been triggered in the past.

For example, Republicans (or even a principled Democrat) might reasonably have called on the president to respond more fully to this serious charge. An interest group—say, NOW—might have staged a photographable demonstration in defense of a woman’s dignity, as it has been wont to do in other situations involving years-old, unresolvable charges. Someone—a Cabinet member? a women’s rights advocate?—might even have asked the president for a meeting to discuss the matter.

Reporters might have written about Capitol Hill reactions, or interviewed credentialed rape experts about Broaddrick’s account and memory, or tried to ferret out the 40 questions posed by NBC that the president wouldn’t answer, or profiled dissident feminists (a Virginia chapter of NOW has long demanded Clinton’s resignation; the feminist e-zine Merge regularly refers to Clinton as an “asshole”). There were polls to be taken, other public charges of threats and harassment against women to re-examine, possible leads in Arkansas, where the Broaddrick story has been circulating for years—a whole world of unwritten, unreported stories.

Instead, the Broaddrick story moved immediately to the opinion pages, the discussion shows, and Web sites. Opinion is vital to keeping a story going, but it can rarely drive a story on its own. Only news can do that. (That’s especially true in an administration as impervious as this one is to mere judgment.) No follow-ups appeared on the major news pages. No major interest groups went beyond an immediate and usually ambiguous press release. And as for the behavior of senators and members of Congress, it approached the indescribable.

Republicans had just launched an effort to push their “positive agenda” and to repair their battered post-impeachment image. They wanted nothing to do with the story. Rep. John Kasich (R-Ohio) told an interviewer that he hadn’t paid attention to the charges. Sen. James Jeffords (R-Vt.) asserted on Vermont radio that rape was “a private matter.” Democrats, who stood to look like criminal enablers in the wake of their partisan impeachment defense, remained mute. Only Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) allowed that perhaps the president should address the charges, and he did so in a subordinate clause.

A single periodical made a concerted effort to squeeze reaction from the Hill. Human Events, the right-wing weekly, published an account of senatorial reaction that is a portrait in cowardice. While a few senators thought Broaddrick was “credible,” and her story “troubling,” none of them could think of anything that could or should happen as a result.

Other responses deserve to be etched in the capital’s marble. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) told the weekly that “I’ve heard smatterings” about the charges, but “I really haven’t paid attention” to them. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said, “I guess Starr didn’t think she was [credible]....I tend to be guided by Starr’s judgment.” Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) offered only, “I have no comment.” Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.) confessed that “I just haven’t paid attention to it. There are certain things I just shut out.”

Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R.-Ill.) said, “I don’t see it as anything that is relevant at this moment to my job in the United States Senate.” Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.) said, “I haven’t looked at that....I’m working on Social Security and health care.” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) said, “I’m beyond that, we’ve been through that.”

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was asked about Broaddrick’s charges while on a Washington escalator. Kennedy “made no verbal response after the question was posed to him directly,” according to Human Events. “He stared forward impassively until the escalator he was riding carried him beyond the questions of Human Events.” It is picture of determined avoidance, comic despite the circumstances; disturbing because of them. Does Washington have something significant to avoid? It may. David Gergen, the U.S. News editor who worked for Clinton (as well as for Nixon and Reagan), has termed it the “nausea factor.” Brit Hume, who covered Clinton for ABC and is now with the Fox News Channel, has been asking for some time, “What kind of man is the president?” Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist who long defended Clinton, now wants to know, “Who is this guy?”

The question haunts Washington, though the city’s press corps has evolved an ideal of objectivity that appears to stymie any effort to answer it. The way that the press’s fairness mechanism operates, somebody has to tell it the answer before it can find a way to print it.

That may in fact be happening. The president’s own former associates are, one by one, addressing the question of who Bill Clinton is. Thus far, former press secretary Mike McCurry and former advisers Dick Morris and George Stephanopolous have all questioned the president’s fitness and character. While this has led to a momentary debate about “loyalty,” the historical record is nonetheless being clarified by the very people who succeeded in obfuscating the journalistic record. Think of it as a kind of talking cure. After all, one Washington community is waiting to do its work after the lawyers and spinners and reporters are done: its historians.

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