The rape allegation against Bill Clinton, explained...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.
...
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 didJuanita 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.
...
As Goldberg notes, some of the conservatives resurfacing the Broaddrick case are clearly doing so in bad faith to attack the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who certainly did not personally assault Broaddrick (Broaddrick's allegations of intimidation aside). But the Clinton critics have a point. There is a crucial tension between "believe survivors" and the "Juanita Broaddrick is lying" position of some Clinton defenders, lacking further information.
One answer might be giving up the former position. Many, including
Harvard Law's Jeannie Suk, have argued that defaulting to believing every accusation of rape "harms the overall credibility of sexual assault claims," given that false claims
do happen,
albeit quite rarely. But whatever the merits of that view, adopting it would be a big pivot for Hillary Clinton, given that just a couple of months ago she was tweeting, "Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported." There's no easy way to reconcile that view with her allies' dismissal of Broaddrick's allegations.
uh yeah... I know... that's what I was responding to..
