The Clintons' War on Women (5 page)

“He made you feel for those few short moments that you were the only woman in the world and he’d never met anyone as interesting or as lovely as you.”
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Clinton charmed and influenced people, opined
Forbes
writer Mark Hughes, “because he made them feel special, he made them feel that he understood them and cared deeply about what they felt and wanted, and he made them feel that what he wanted and what they wanted were the same thing. This last aspect of his personality is the most amazing—he can convince you to go along with what he wants, while making you feel it was really what you wanted all along.”

Clinton has long used his intelligence and personal charm for political power and control. He has also used these same gifts to intimidate, trick, or force women into having sex with him.

For Clinton, sex is an undying need.

Author Daniel Halper recently met with a close Clinton friend and quizzed him on just exactly how promiscuous Bill has been. “Everybody you think he fucked, he did—and the more dangerous the better…. All genius is flawed,” the Clinton comrade said. “The great artists are addicted, whether to alcohol or they’re drug addicts or whatever. His addiction is pussy.”
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Former president Gerald Ford thought Clinton should have been admitted to a sex addiction clinic. “He’s sick—he’s got an addiction. He needs treatment,” Ford told
Daily News
Washington bureau chief Thomas M. DeFrank. “I’ll tell you one thing: He didn’t miss one good looking skirt at any of the social occasions.”
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In 1999, the political news website
Capitol Hill Blue
published an important exposé, “Juanita isn’t the only one: Bill Clinton’s long history of sexual violence against women dates back some 30 years.” “Juanita” was Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator who alleged that Clinton raped her in an Arkansas hotel room in the 1970s. The authors of this historically significant piece, Daniel J. Harris and Theresa Hampton, dug further back—to the behavior of Clinton at the University of Oxford.

Indeed, Clinton is one of the few Rhodes Scholars
without
a degree from Oxford. That is because at age twenty-three, Clinton was expelled from the oldest university in the English-speaking world
for sexually assaulting a nineteen-year-old coed named Eileen Wellstone. Harris and Hampton discovered that Wellstone was assaulted after she “met [Clinton] at a pub near Oxford where the future President was a student in 1969. A retired State Department employee, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that he spoke with the family of the girl and filed a report with his superiors. Clinton admitted having sex with the girl, but claimed it was consensual. The victim’s family declined to pursue the case.”
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A recollection from Cliff Jackson, a lawyer who attended nearby St. John’s College, provides a glimpse into Clinton’s growth during his Oxford years. Clinton recounted a story to Jackson regarding President Lyndon B. Johnson, who escalated and presided over the Vietnam War, having sex with an antiwar hippie on the floor of the Oval Office. A secretary had walked in on the president and his paramour.

Clinton’s reactions gave great insight into his cavalier attitude toward sexual conduct

“Sure, it’s a funny little story and we can all laugh,” Jackson remembered. “But the impression I got was that Bill thought it was so neat that Lyndon Johnson could get away with something like that. It was just his reaction to it that made it stand out in my mind. It was like—it’s just the power, the idea that Lyndon had the audacity to do something like that right in the Oval Office at the height of the war. It was something above locker-room snickering. More like, ‘How slick, how neat that Lyndon could get away with this.’”
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The University of Oxford and the State Department, in fear of a scandal, covered up the Wellstone assault, and Clinton promptly disappeared from the prestigious institution. Even though he had an opportunity that many Americans would have killed for, he squandered it. The sexual assaults were his most damning offense, but also, according to
Capitol Hill Blue
, he was far from a good student: “The State Department official who investigated the incident said Clinton’s interests appeared to be drinking, drugs and sex, not studies. ‘I
came away from the incident with the clear impression that this was a young man who was there to party, not study,’ he said.”

In his book
Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House,
FBI agent Gary Aldrich stated that his investigation of Clinton “reveals that after the winter of 1969, Mr. Clinton embarked on a tour of Europe, and there are suggestions that [University of Oxford] school officials told Mr. Clinton that he was no longer welcome on campus, but that could not be confirmed.”
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A 1999 exposé of Clinton’s long history of rape and sexual assault, which ran in
Capitol Hill Blue,
included some damning stories. First, the article mentioned Juanita Broaddrick, the Arkansas nursing home operator who told NBC’s Lisa Myers she was raped by Clinton. NBC shelved the interview, saying it was confirming all parts of the story, but finally aired it. Broaddrick also took her story to the
Wall Street Journal
, and soon the
Washington Post
and other publications published her story of brutal rape at the hands of the future president. White House attorney David Kendall issued a public denial of the Broaddrick rape.

According to that
Capitol Hill Blue
article, Eileen Wellstone was the first of many women to be targeted by a young Bill Clinton.

In 1972, a twenty-two-year-old woman told Yale University’s campus police that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton, and although no charges were filed, a retired policeman confirmed the incident to
Capitol Hill Blue.
The woman herself was also tracked down and confirmed it, though she elected to stay anonymous.

Next, in 1974, a female student at the University of Arkansas complained that then law school instructor Bill Clinton tried to prevent her from leaving his office during a conference, groping her and forcing his hand inside her blouse. Although she complained to her faculty advisor, who confronted Clinton, the complaint again failed to go anywhere, as Clinton claimed the student ‘’came on’’ to him. The student left the school shortly after the incident, and recently—like the Yale student—confirmed the incident but declined to
go on record. According to the article, several former students at the university confirmed the incident in confidential interviews and also said there were other reports of Clinton attempting to force himself on female students.

Along with Broaddrick’s claim of rape in 1978, the volunteer in Clinton’s gubernatorial campaign said she suffered a bruised and torn lip when Clinton bit her during the incident. For the following two years, during Clinton’s first term as Arkansas governor, the article says that state troopers assigned to protect him knew about at least seven other complaints from women who said Clinton forced himself on them sexually or attempted to do so.

One retired state trooper said in an interview that the common joke among those assigned to protect Clinton was, “Who’s next?” Another former state trooper said his coworkers would often escort women to the governor’s hotel room after political events, often more than one at a time.

The stories kept coming. A Little Rock legal secretary named Carolyn Moffet claimed that in 1979, she met the governor at a political fundraiser and shortly afterward received an invitation to meet him in a hotel room. She was escorted there by a state trooper. When she arrived, she said, he was sitting on a couch wearing an undershirt and nothing else. He pointed at his penis and told her to suck it. She said she didn’t even do that for her boyfriend, but the governor reportedly got angry and grabbed her head, which he shoved into his lap—before she pulled away and ran out of the room.

And there were more stories, so similar and so damning that they paint a shocking picture of the future president’s sexual proclivities.

Elizabeth Ward, a former Miss Arkansas who won the Miss America crown in 1982, apparently told friends she was forced by Clinton to have sex with him shortly after she won her state crown. In the late 1990s, Ward, who is now married with the last name of
Gracen (from her first marriage), told an interviewer she had had consensual sex with Clinton.

But close friends say that in private she describes it as a sexual assault. Perhaps she was intimidated into silence.

An Arkansas state employee named Paula Corbin filed a sexual harassment case against Clinton after she said the then governor exposed himself and demanded oral sex in a Little Rock hotel room. Clinton settled the case with Paula Corbin in 1998 with an $850,000 cash payment.

Sandra Allen James, a former Washington, DC, political fundraiser, told
Capitol Hill Blue
that presidential candidate-to-be Clinton invited her to his hotel room during a political trip to the nation’s capital in 1991, pinned her against the wall and stuck his hand up her dress. She says she screamed loud enough for the Arkansas state trooper stationed outside the hotel suite to bang on the door and ask if everything was alright. Then, she said, Clinton released her and she fled the room.

When she reported the incident to her boss, he advised her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to keep working. She has since married and left Washington. She later said that she since learned that other women had similar stories during Clinton’s presidential run.

Christy Zercher, a flight attendant on Clinton’s campaign plane in 1992, reported that he exposed himself to her, grabbed her breasts, and made explicit remarks about oral sex. A video filmed on board the plane by ABC News showed an obviously inebriated Clinton with his hand between another young flight attendant’s legs. Troublingly, Zercher said later in an interview that White House attorney Bruce Lindsey tried to pressure her into not going public about the assault.

Kathleen Willey was a volunteer at the White House when Clinton grabbed her, fondled her breast, and pressed her hand against his genitals during an Oval Office meeting in November, 1993. Willey, who told her story in a
60 Minutes
interview, became
a target of a White House–directed smear campaign after she went public.

It is incredibly disturbing to think about the pain and suffering caused by Bill Clinton’s assaults on women throughout his political career.

And it is also disturbing to ponder the cover-ups and intimidation that often followed the sexual assault. According to that
Capitol Hill Blue
article:

On November 21, 2014, columnist Joan Vennochi of the
Boston Globe
wrote, “Rape allegations hurt Bill Cosby but sail past Bill Clinton.” Vennochi commented on how Bill Cosby’s career had just been obliterated after the rape charges against him reached critical mass, yet Bill Clinton, in 2014, had apparently skated past accusations of rape and sexual assault.

“Bill Cosby’s career as a beloved comedian is in shambles in the wake of decades-old accusations of rape and sexual assault,” Vennochi wrote. “In the past week alone—as more and more women come forward with allegations—NBC has called off a proposed new Cosby comedy, Netflix has canceled a 77th Cosby birthday celebration, and the cable network TV Land has pulled reruns of ‘The Cosby Show.’ Yet, amid media uproar, Clinton’s career as revered statesman soars.
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“Power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how it can for years insulate the holder of it—is the common thread between Cosby, Clinton, and their accusers,” Vennochi wrote. “Asked why she didn’t go to police, one of Cosby’s accusers said she didn’t think anyone would take the word of a nineteen-year-old woman over a celebrity father figure like Cosby. As she put it, ‘Mr. America: Mr. Jello, as I called him.’”
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The Clinton legacy is left unblemished, cleansed with the classic defense that his public policies were more important than his private failings.

“
Meanwhile, the Clinton spin machine did its best to portray his accusers as ‘nuts or sluts,’ employing the classic defense lawyer strategy against women who dare to hold men accountable for their actions,” Vennochi wrote.
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