The Clintons' War on Women (6 page)

CHAPTER 2

THE MANY ASSAULTS ON JUANITA BROADDRICK

O
n April 25, 1978, Arkansas attorney general Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick without a condom and savagely bit her top lip to subdue her.

Broaddrick was a county coordinator for Bill and a volunteer in his ’78 gubernatorial campaign. She had come to Little Rock to attend a nursing conference and she was lodged at the Camelot Hotel. A week prior, Clinton, on a campaign stop, had visited the nursing home where Broaddrick worked and invited her to tour his headquarters upon arrival in the capital city. She called Clinton and asked to meet him at his office. Clinton offered the downstairs coffee shop in her hotel as an alternative. Broaddrick agreed. Clinton again called and suggested Broaddrick’s hotel room as a meeting spot.

“I
was a little bit uneasy,” Broaddrick recalled. “But, I felt, ah, a real friendship toward this man and I didn’t really feel any, um, any danger in him coming to my room.”
20

After all, Clinton at the time was the state’s top law enforcement official with a bid in place to become the de facto head of Arkansas.

Once he arrived, though, it did not take Clinton long to drop any pretenses and make a hard, forceful advance.

In what would become a trademark of his sexual assaults, Clinton violently bit Juanita’s upper lip and threw her on the bed. “I was just very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘no,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me,” Broaddrick recalled. Clinton “was such a different person at the moment, he was just a vicious awful person…. It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip.”
21

Clinton raped Broaddrick twice within a span of thirty minutes. The first time, Bill bit her lip so hard he almost severed it. Clinton raped Broaddrick a second time after he detected a new erection. “Then he said, ‘My god, I can do it again,’ and he did,” Broaddrick recalled. After Clinton raped her, Broaddrick said she “felt paralyzed and started to cry.”

Broaddrick said she will never forget how Clinton calmly donned his sunglasses shortly after ejaculating. He then offered a suggestion for her mangled lips. “You better get some ice on that,” Clinton said.”
22
He told Juanita not to worry about getting pregnant because he had the mumps as a kid and was sterile. Incredibly, a few months earlier, Clinton had impregnated his mistress, Gennifer Flowers, and given her $200 to get an abortion.

Broaddrick’s friend Norma Rogers-Kelsay found Juanita shaken in her hotel room. “I was sitting there crying and so upset at the time…. I felt like the next person coming through the door [was coming] to get rid of [my] body,” Broaddrick said. “I absolutely could not believe what had happened to me.”
23

Award-winning investigative journalist John Doughtery said Rogers-Kelsay “found Broaddrick in a state of shock, her lip swollen, mouth bruised, and her pantyhose torn at the crotch.” Kelsay said Juanita “told me they had intercourse against her will.” Kelsay told NBC News that Broaddrick was in “quite bad shape” and her “lips were swollen, at least double in size.”

Broaddrick confided in Norma Rogers-Kelsay, her then boyfriend (later husband), David, and few others. Witness Phillip Yoakum said that Rogers-Kelsay drove Broaddrick home and had to stop at regular intervals to put ice on her swollen mouth. Yoakum says that her lip was “damaged to the point of nearly being torn into two pieces.”
24

David remembered that “her top lip was black.”

Broaddrick, burdened with shock, shame, and denial, put the incident behind her. In 1984, when her nursing home won an award, she received a letter from then Governor Clinton. “I admire you very much,” Clinton had handwritten.
25
Broaddrick believed this meant that the Governor was grateful for her silence.

Thirteen years after the assault, in March of 1991, Clinton pulled Broaddrick out of a health-care conference. “Can you ever forgive me? That was the old me. I’m not the same now. I’m a new man,” Clinton told her.
26
Candice Jackson reported that a stunned Broaddrick told Clinton to go to hell and walked away.
27
Later that year, Clinton announced his run and Broaddrick deemed his surprising apology to be a purely political gesture.

Hillary Clinton, or Hillary Rodham as she demanded to be called back then, found out very soon after the assault of Broaddrick that her husband had raped the young volunteer. Larry Nichols, a Clinton insider at that time, said Hillary rushed into a campaign office and screamed, “You will never believe what the motherfucker did now, he tried to rape some bitch!”

Instead of calling the police, she immediately began covering for her political partner. Hillary had experience with this. In 1975, as
a young lawyer, she had successfully defended an accused rapist. Hillary said she was doing her “professional duty.”

The victim said Clinton intentionally lied about her in court documents, and Hillary also acknowledged the attacker’s guilt, laughing about it on an unearthed audio recording.

“Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” the victim said. “I would say [to Clinton], ‘You took a case of mine in ’75, you lied on me … I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing.’”
28

In Hillary’s estimation, she was just doing her job.

“When you’re a lawyer you often don’t have the choice to choose who you will represent, and by the very nature of criminal law there will be those who you represent that you won’t approve of,” Hillary said. “But at least in our system you have an obligation, and once I was appointed, I fulfilled that obligation.”
29

Following physical assault at the hands of Bill, Broaddrick was psychologically assaulted by Hillary, again fulfilling her “obligation.”
30

Decades later, in 2013, with her eyes on the presidency, Hillary would declare that the fight for women’s rights was “unfinished business” and that “women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights once and for all.” Hillary now stumps around the country fighting for the unheard voice of women, but years ago, she fought to silence those same voices. They were victims of her husband’s sexual deviance, and she fought to keep their stories suppressed.

This was perfectly illustrated at a campaign event for Bill that Broaddrick attended. Hillary made a beeline toward Broaddrick, coldly but firmly grasped her hand, and said, “We want to thank you for everything that you do for Bill.” Hillary clung to and squeezed Broaddrick’s hand for emphasis.
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Broaddrick was unnerved.

When Broaddrick finally did go public about the assault in 1999, her nursing home business, in operation for decades, was audited by the IRS for the first time, and her home was broken into.
32

In mid-January 1999, Lisa Myers of NBC’s
Dateline
interviewed Broaddrick. NBC taped the interview, but it sat intentionally unaired until after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and vote in the U.S. Senate on February 12, 1999. If the NBC interview had run before the Senate vote on impeachment, there is a chance that Clinton could have been convicted and removed from office. The interview ran a healthy two weeks after Clinton was acquitted of his impeachment charges.

In the segment, Broaddrick painfully recounted the assault and admitted she only told very few friends and her husband, David. Like many victims of rape, she thought no one would believe her and felt embarrassed that she allowed Clinton into her room. She was afraid her first husband and many others would think that she invited Clinton to her room because they were having an affair. Ashamed and worried, she even attended a Clinton fundraiser just three weeks later. Broaddrick was later appointed by then governor Clinton to a state board, but said she had promised her nursing association that she would accept it before she knew it was an appointment from him.

She also admitted lying under oath in 1997 by denying any sexual assault by Clinton, under subpoena in the Paula Jones case, for fear of drudging up the ordeal again. She told NBC that she thought about coming forward daily but was too frightened of the consequences, especially after perjuring herself to keep a lid on her story.

But after more and more stories about Clinton’s serial rape of women came out, Broaddrick felt she needed to finally come forward. She was encouraged when Ken Starr, who was investigating obstruction of justice charges against Clinton, gave her immunity from prosecution for perjury. That enabled Broaddrick to speak the truth and defend the numerous other women who had been victimized and marginalized by the Clinton machine. Bill and Hillary destroyed people’s
lives when they got in their way and Broaddrick was reluctant to cross them for many years.

Even after coming forward, Broaddrick never filed a lawsuit against Bill Clinton, made a book deal, or financially benefitted from coming forward in any way.

It took twenty-two years for Broaddrick to finally tell Hillary what she thought of her. On October 15, 2000, during the last year of the Clinton presidency, Broaddrick wrote the following “Open Letter to Hillary Clinton.” It was widely published online and began, “Do You Remember?”:

Although she told Lisa Myers that she had no intention to, Broaddrick
did
eventually file a lawsuit against Clinton. The purpose of the suit was to obtain documents the White House may have gathered on her.

“We want to find out what information they have on her in violation of the Privacy Act and how she’s been damaged by that information,” Broaddrick’s lawyer Larry Klayman told CNN.
i

In the midst of the lawsuit, Broaddrick’s nursing home business was audited by the IRS.

Broaddrick made it clear to the
New York Post
that she did not think the audit was a coincidence.

“I do not think our number just came up,” Broaddrick told the
Post.
“We’ve had no changes in our business, no changes in ownership, no changes in income. There have been no changes whatsoever that would trigger an IRS audit.”
ii

i
Barrett, Ted. “Juanita Broaddrick Sues Clinton Administration over Alleged ‘Smear Campaign.’” CNN. December 20, 1999.

ii
Blomquist, Brian. “Juanita Latest Bill Foe to be Audited.”
New York Post.
May 31, 2000.

CHAPTER 3

BY FORCE IF NECESSARY

G
overnor Bill Clinton used a short list of Arkansas state troopers to act as bodyguards, for transportation, and in other, more unpleasant capacities.