The Clintons' War on Women

by Roger Stone

  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.”12

  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.”13

  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.’”14

  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.”15

  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 Clinto
n’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:

  Miss James, the Washington fundraiser who confirmed the encounter with Clinton at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, but first said she would not appear publicly because anyone who does so is destroyed by the Clinton White House.

  ‘’My husband and children deserve better than that,’’ she said when first contacted two weeks ago. After reading the Broaddrick story Friday, however, she called back and gave permission to use her maiden name, but said she had no intention of pursuing the matter.

  “I wasn’t raped, but I was trapped in a hotel room for a brief moment by a boorish man,” she said. “I got away. He tried calling me several times after that, but I didn’t take his phone calls. Then he stopped. I guess he moved on.”

  But Miss James also retreated from public view this week after other news organizations contacted her.

  The former Miss Moffet, the legal secretary who says Clinton tried to force her into oral sex in 1979, has since married and left the state. She says that when she told her boyfriend, who was a lawyer and supporter of Clinton, about the incident, he told her to keep her mouth shut.

  “He said that people who crossed the governor usually regretted it and that if I knew what was good for me I’d forget that it ever happened,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten it. You don’t forget crude men like that.”

  Like two other women, the former Miss Moffet declined further interviews. A neighbor said she had received threatening phone calls.

  The other encounters were confirmed with more than 30 interviews with retired Arkansas state employees, former state troopers and former Yale and University of Arkansas students. Like others, they refused to go public because of fears of retaliation from the Clinton White House.16

  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.17

  “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.’”18

  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.19

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MANY ASSAULTS ON JUANITA BROADDRICK

  “You will never believe what the motherfucker did now, he tried to rape some bitch!”

  —Hillary Clinton on Bill, as told by Larry Nichols to Robert Morrow on June 1, 2015

  On 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