The rape allegation against Bill Clinton, explainedOn Wednesday, Juanita Broaddrick tweeted a reminder of her allegation that Bill Clinton raped her during his campaign for governor of Arkansas in 1978:
Over the phone, Broaddrick confirmed to me that the account is hers, and said she was moved to tweet because she was sickened by seeing the Clintons on the campaign trail again. "I guess it was just seeing them on TV so much now, and her with the Benghazi [hearing]," Broaddrick says. "That was impossible, to watch her during that, and now having to see her on the TV, and on the TV campaigning, it's torture. I have to grab and switch my TV every time I turn around."
Broaddrick's allegation started resurfacing this fall, after Hillary Clinton made a number of statements on the importance of believing rape accusers. On December 3, a couple of weeks after Clinton tweeted, "Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported," a woman at an event in Hooksett, New Hampshire, asked, "Secretary Clinton, you recently came out to say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones be believed as well?" Clinton replied, "Well, I would say that everyone should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence." The audience applauded:
Then, this past Sunday, Hillary Clinton faced a loud and persistent heckler yelling about Broaddrick at a Derry, New Hampshire, campaign event, eventually dismissing the woman in strident fashion. "You are very rude, and I'm not going to ever call on you," Clinton declared, sparking a standing ovation from the crowd.
In statements to reporters and a long Facebook update posted after the rally, the heckler — a Republican state representative named Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien — explained that she wanted Clinton to address allegations that Bill Clinton had sexually assaulted Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. Willey claims that Clinton fondled her breast and forced her hand on his crotch in the Oval Office in 1993, when she was a White House volunteer. Though Prudhomme-O'Brien didn't mention her, Paula Jones — an Arkansas state employee who sued Clinton for allegedly exposing himself to her when he was governor in 1991 — is often included in this list of accusers as well.
So far, this issue has mostly been raised by conservative media and Republican politicians like Prudhomme-O'Brien. But it's a substantive matter worthy of coverage from non-right-wing outlets as well. There really are multiple accusations of sexual assault against Bill Clinton, accusations that have too often been conflated with his much better-established and much less morally concerning history of adultery. Are the women making these accusations survivors who deserve to be believed, to borrow Hillary Clinton's language? Or, as she later insisted, have their accusations all been found to be baseless?
The basic answer is that some of the claims appear more credible than others. There are three main accusers, of whom it seems by far the most credible — based on the publicly available evidence — is Broaddrick. Jones's claim was aired for years and faced several major problems (including the fact that she claimed the president's penis had a "distinguishing mark" that doctors and Monica Lewinsky said it did not have), and Willey repeatedly lied to federal investigators and changed her story dramatically between grand jury testimony and a deposition in the Jones case (among other issues).
But Broaddrick's allegation, while hardly proven, has not been definitively refuted. Only Broaddrick and Bill Clinton know what the truth of the matter in the case is. But if one generally believes it's important to believe the victim, it's hard to argue that this case should be an exception.
What Juanita Broaddrick says Bill Clinton did
Juanita Broaddrick gave a lengthy account of her alleged rape in a 1999 Dateline NBC interview (which has been posted in its entirety by the right-wing Media Research Center; the anti-Clinton site Shadowgov.com has a transcript that aligns with the NBC recording):
The interview was conducted on January 20, 1999, before the Senate on February 12 ultimately acquitted Clinton on charges related to his affair with Monica Lewinsky. NBC delayed airing until February 24, and Broaddrick, frustrated, gave accounts to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in the meantime.
In 1978, Broaddrick was volunteering for Clinton's gubernatorial campaign, and claims she met him when he visited his campaign office in her hometown of Van Buren, Arkansas, that April. She says he then invited her to visit his office in Little Rock, which Broaddrick agreed to do a week later, when she was in the state capitol for a conference of nursing home administrators. Once she was at a hotel in Little Rock, she claims Clinton told her that he wasn't going to the campaign headquarters and offered to meet her in her hotel lobby coffee shop instead. Once he arrived, she says he called her room and suggested that they have coffee there, since the lobby had too many reporters. Broaddrick says she agreed. Then, per the Post story:
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.
Several friends of Broaddrick's backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was the director of nursing at Broaddrick's nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place and "found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in 'a state of shock.' Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit." Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, "She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse."
In the Dateline show, Broaddrick's friends Louise Ma, Susan Lewis, and Jean Darden (Norma Rogers's sister) all told NBC News that Broaddrick told them Bill Clinton raped her at the time. David Broaddrick — with whom Broaddrick was having an affair at the time; they both eventually left their spouses to marry each other — also told NBC that Broaddrick's top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him "that she had been raped by Bill Clinton."
Broaddrick claims she was traumatized by the incident and scared of Clinton's influence, and so didn't report the rape or tell her then-husband, Gary Hickey. Three weeks later, Broaddrick would attend a Clinton fundraiser with Hickey. She told NBC News reporter Lisa Myers, "I think I was still in denial that time exactly what had happened to me. I still felt very guilty at that time that it was my fault." She further claimed that Clinton called her nursing home a half-dozen times that year, getting through once and asking when she was going to be back in Little Rock; she told him she wasn't.
In 1979, Broaddrick was appointed by Clinton to a non-paid advisory board position, which she told Myers she accepted before she knew it was a gubernatorial appointment. In 1984, she claims she got a letter from Clinton after her nursing home was recognized as one of the top facilities in the state, with a handwritten note saying, "I admire you very much." She interpreted that as a thank you for her silence. Then in 1991, she says she saw Clinton outside a meeting on nursing home standards in Little Rock, and that he said he wanted to apologize to her and asked what he could do to make things right. She recalls saying, "Nothing," and walking away.
About six months after her initial interviews in 1999, Broaddrick told the Drudge Report that mere weeks after the alleged assault, Hillary Clinton had tried to thank her for her silence on the matter at a political rally:
"[Hillary] came directly to me as soon as she hit the door. I had been there only a few minutes, I only wanted to make an appearance and leave. She caught me and took my hand and said 'I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill.' I started to turn away and she held onto my hand and reiterated her phrase -- looking less friendly and repeated her statement — 'Everything you do for Bill'. I said nothing. She wasn't letting me get away until she made her point. She talked low, the smile faded on the second thank you. I just released her hand from mine and left the gathering."
This wasn't included in the initial reports on Broaddrick's story by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News. But after this article's initial publication, Lisa Myers, who conducted NBC News' initial report on Broaddrick, wrote Vox to clarify that Broaddrick did tell NBC that Hillary Clinton had an encounter with her after the alleged assault, though this did not make the final cut of the Dateline segment. So this was not an new addition to or change in Broaddrick's story, even though it became public months later. Broaddrick repeated the claim in 2003 in an interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity:
Before going public, Broaddrick had been courted to come forward about the allegations by Clinton enemies for years. She told reporters that an anti-Clinton businessman in Arkansas named Philip Yoakum urged her to come forward in 1992, during Clinton's presidential campaign. When Paula Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment in 1994, Jones’s lawyers also approached Broaddrick, who declined to cooperate. She only came forward after she was interviewed by independent counsel Kenneth Starr's office and her allegation leaked. Broaddrick told the Journal that Myers pursued her for nearly a year before she agreed to an interview, and that she came forward because she wanted to rebut false rumors circulating after her statements to prosecutors (like that David Broaddrick had accepted hush money from the Clintons in exchange for silence).
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/6/10722580/bill-clinton-juanita-broaddrick
