Juanita Broaddrick’s Rape Allegation Is A Story About Bill Clinton, Not Hillary

Huffington Post

Republican nominee Donald Trump told the world he would make former President Bill Clinton’s sexual history an issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. On Sunday, he did it.

Less than two hours before his debate with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, Trump held a press conference with several women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of various forms of sexual misconduct.

The most famous of these women is Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment lawsuit led eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. But the most serious allegation against Clinton comes from another woman who was at Trump’s side on Sunday.

That woman is Juanita Broaddrick, a retired Arkansas nursing home operator who says Clinton raped her nearly 40 years ago ― a charge that the former president has said is untrue. On Sunday night, Broaddrick and the other accusers sat in the debate hall in St. Louis, the cameras repeatedly panning to them.

“If you look at Bill Clinton ― far worse ― mine are words and his was action,” Trump said at one point during the debate. “His was what he’s done to women. There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women.”

Trump claims that these women’s stories are especially relevant now because Hillary Clinton has at various times tried to bully or silence them. It’s a shaky assertion that looks a lot like an effort to distract attention from Trump’s own record of misconduct, which includes not just lewd behavior but instances where Trump has been specifically, credibly accused of sexual assault. Trump has denied those accusations, but they dovetail with his very public history of misogyny.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean Broaddrick’s rape allegation is untrue. Like so many allegations of sexual assault, Broaddrick’s story is both unproven and plausible. But its relevance to the 2016 election is a separate question.

Broaddrick’s tale ― which NBC’s “Dateline” first publicized in 1999 and BuzzFeed re-examined in August of this year ― begins in 1978, in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill Clinton was the state’s attorney general and running for governor. As Broaddrick tells it, she was volunteering for Clinton’s campaign and was supposed to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, she says, Clinton called her and suggested they meet upstairs, in a hotel room, because reporters were in the lobby. She agreed. When Clinton got to the room, she says, he raped her ― at one point biting her lip, causing it to bleed.

Two women have since said they saw Broaddrick in the hotel room, right after the alleged incident ― disheveled and, yes, with a blue, swollen lip. The women said Broaddrick told them she’d been raped by Clinton, but that she was afraid to say anything about it. She would remain silent until the late 1990s, when federal prosecutors were investigating Clinton’s personal history as part of the inquiry that exposed his now-infamous affair with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

It was not the first time lawyers had asked Broaddrick about the incident. Previously, when lawyers in the Paula Jones lawsuit approached Broaddrick directly, she had signed an affidavit in which she described being “hounded” by reporters about rumors of the rape.

“I repeatedly denied the allegations and requested that my family’s privacy be respected,” she said in that affidavit. “These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family.” But in response to the federal inquiry, Broaddrick said Clinton had raped her.

Clinton, who was by then president, denied the allegation, unambiguously and strongly, through his lawyer. Ken Starr, the lead federal prosecutor, ultimately deemed Broaddrick’s story “inconclusive.” When the tale came out in the media, and Broaddrick gave that 1999 interview to “Dateline,” the controversy got lost in the aftermath of Clinton’s impeachment and near-removal from office. And at that point the story faded ― until about a year ago, when Broaddrick began speaking out about it.

Broaddrick later told BuzzFeed’s Katie Baker that she was moved to speak out after hearing a series of comments that Hillary Clinton made about sexual assault ― specifically, about the importance of believing victims. Broaddrick has long claimed that Hillary tried to intimidate her, citing as proof a brief conversation the two women had during an Arkansas encounter shortly after the alleged rape. Here’s how Broaddrick remembers that conversation, as the BuzzFeed article described it:

Soon after, Broaddrick says, she ran into Hillary Clinton at a political rally Broaddrick had promised friends she would attend. Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for Bill. To Broaddrick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. As attorney general and later governor, Bill Clinton was “the main person that regulated my business and my income,” Broaddrick said. “After she said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet.”

Broaddrick says that she went “ballistic” when she heard Hillary’s statements about sexual assault, and eventually sent out the following message on Twitter: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73....it never goes away.”[...]

Trump and his supporters insist they aren’t simply trying to distract attention from Trump’s problems, or to disparage Hillary by reminding everybody of Bill’s history of unfaithfulness. The issue, they say, is how the former first lady behaved.[...]

Whether any of this is relevant to Hillary’s campaign is another question entirely. Broaddrick’s claim that Hillary Clinton meant to intimidate her is based on a conversation the two women had ― and how Broaddrick perceived it. “I have to go by what I felt then and the look that she gave me,” she told Breitbart News in a recent interview. “I felt like she knew, and she was telling me to keep quiet.”

To think that Hillary was trying to bully Broaddrick into keeping quiet about a rape, you have to believe that Hillary knew Bill had committed the rape. But that would mean, presumably, Bill had told her ― something he was unlikely to have done. Cheaters and rapists don’t tend to tell their wives about their deeds in real time. (And sometimes rapists convince themselves their encounters were consensual.)

Meanwhile, to think this part of Broaddrick’s story is wrong, you don’t have to believe she is trying to deceive anybody, or that she’s wrong about the other charge she makes. You simply have to believe she misinterpreted visual and tonal cues during a quick conversation with a relative stranger ― which is something that happens all the time, in all kinds of circumstances. It would be even easier to understand in the circumstances Broaddrick was under.

As for the relevance to the 2016 election, the most telling aspect is that Trump ― cornered politically, struggling to keep his candidacy alive ― has chosen to compare his behavior to the husband of his opponent. But he’s not running against him. He’s running against her.