I’m also reminded of the feminists and more broadly progressive and Democratic activists who know at bottom that Bill is a serial abuser. They know Hillary is his co-conspirator. Still, they act like nothing has been really proven. I’m sure the Democrats said some of the same things in the 1830s. “The abolitionists and the Republicans are all lying. None of those things are true.”
Then we have the wife, who is disgraced by the husband but endures his atrocities. On the surface that’s Hillary, the longsuffering spouse. But only on the surface. When we probe deeper we see that plantation wives had to suffer their husbands’ atrocities but they didn’t enable them. They didn’t cover up for their husbands. They didn’t launch public campaigns against the slave women who were defiled.
Not that the plantation wives deserve our complete sympathy. Douglass interestingly points out that the wrath of the plantation wife, instead of being directed against the wayward husband, could sometimes be directed against the child. Douglass is not the only observer to note this; it’s a fairly common theme in slave narratives collected by abolitionists in the nineteenth century and by the Slave Narrative Project that interviewed former slaves in the early twentieth century.
In one account, the slave Moses Roper recalled, “I was born in North Carolina, in Caswell County; I am not able to tell in what month or year. What I shall now relate is what was told me by my mother and grandmother. A few months before I was born, my father married my mother’s young mistress. As soon as my father’s wife heard about my birth, she sent one of my mother’s sisters to see whether I was white or black, and when she had seen me, she returned and told her mistress that I was white and resembled Mr. Roper very much.
“Mr. Roper’s wife not being pleased with this report, she got a large club stick and knife, and went into my mother’s room with a full intention to murder me with her knife and club. But as she was going to stick the knife into me, my grandmother happening to come in, caught the knife and saved my life.”
This incident is probably not typical. Most plantation wives, of course, were not murderers. Probably Douglass’s account of women instructing that their husband’s slave offspring be beaten, punished, or sold is more typical. In any case, this is a very degraded human response: I don’t want to confront my husband, so instead I’ll take it out on the kid.
Hillary’s modus operandi of course is different. She doesn’t blame the children, because as far as we know there are no children to blame. But she does blame the women whom her husband has victimized. She hires detectives to threaten them and publicly expose them. She ridicules them, suggesting that they are low-life trash. Rather than admit her husband abused them, she claims that the women are abusing him!
It may seem that in trying to punish or sell illegitimate children, the Democratic plantation wife is far worse than Hillary, who merely sought to discredit, humiliate, and chase off Bill’s various women. But in her choice of target, Hillary’s behavior is even worse than that of the plantation wife. While the plantation wife lashes out at the child who had nothing to do with the offense, Hillary actually faults the victims of the offense.
DEFENDING A RAPIST
What is the character of a person who becomes a sexual enabler? We get an early glimpse into this question from 1975, when Hillary Clinton defended a man, Thomas Alfred Taylor, who was accused of beating and raping a twelve-year-old girl. A virgin prior to the attack, she spent five days in a coma, several months recovering from her injuries, and years in therapy.
Even people who are accused of heinous crimes deserve criminal representation. Hillary’s strategy in defending Taylor, however, was to blame the teenage victim. According to an affidavit filed by Hillary, children who come from “disorganized families such as the complainant” sometimes “exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences.” Hillary suggested the girl was “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.”
Here Hillary seems to be echoing what Bernie Sanders wrote in his rape fantasy essay. In this case, however, the girl certainly didn’t dream up the assault and rape. There was physical evidence that showed she had been violated, and she was beaten so badly she was in a coma. Prosecutors had in their possession a bloodied pair of Taylor’s underwear.
But fortunately for Hillary and her client, the forensic lab mishandled the way that evidence was preserved. At the time of trial, the state merely had a pair of Taylor’s underwear with a hole cut in it. Hillary plea bargained on behalf of Taylor and got him released without having to do any additional time. A tape unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon has Hillary celebrating the outcome. “Got him off with time served in the county jail,” she says.
Did Hillary believe that, in this case, justice was done? Certainly not. On the tape, Hillary admits she never trusted her client. “Course he claimed he didn’t, and all this stuff.” So she decided to verify his story. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
Clearly Hillary knows her client is guilty, and this fact doesn’t bother her. The most chilling aspect of Hillary’s voice is her indifference—even bemusement—at getting a man off after he raped a twelve-year-old. The episode is a revealing look into the soul of an enabler. In fact, it reminds me of Alinsky protesting to Frank Nitti about the wasted expense of importing an out-of-town-killer. Hillary, like Alinsky, seems to be a woman without a conscience.9
Yet this is the same Hillary who was honored in September 2013 by the Children’s Defense Fund for being a “tireless voice for children.” One begins to see here what such awards actually mean. Hillary’s actual prize should have been for the facilitation of adult abuse of women and young girls. Her rape case turned out to be excellent preparation for her lifelong advocacy of a single sex offender—Bill.
A KIND OF PIMP
The puzzle of the enabler is what would cause someone to become one. At first glance, we may be tempted to consider Hillary to be a kind of pimp, similar perhaps to the Mayflower Madam. The Mayflower Madam, Sydney Biddle Barrows, ran a prostitution agency with expensive girls and high-paying clients. She boasted that she used modern marketing techniques to win clients and procure “talent.” But we know what she got out of the deal: money.
If Hillary were a pimp, she would be a special kind of pimp, renting out a single gigolo who happens to be her husband. Yet Bill is not a gigolo: he doesn’t charge for his services. Moreover, Hillary neither procures Bill’s sexual partners nor does she directly profit from them. So the pimp analogy, tempting though it is, doesn’t really work. We still have to figure out why Hillary has devoted her life to enabling Bill’s sex crimes and offenses.
What does it mean to be an enabler? The conventional wisdom is that enablers are indulgent people who make it possible for others to act upon their weaknesses or addictions. Think of the mother who knows her son is an alcoholic and feels sorry for him. Even though she knows that it’s bad for him to drink, she lets him, and this of course sustains his addiction and makes his condition worse.
In the psychological literature, this is known as a passive or indulgent enabler. But there is another type of enabler, one that actually creates addictions. This is the active or initiating enabler. Think of a mother who doesn’t want her son to leave home. She knows that in the ordinary course of things, he is likely to get a job, meet a woman, and move out of the house.
She knows he likes to drink, so she regularly has alcohol in the house. She encourages him to have one, and then another, and then another. Her goal is to make him into an alcoholic. Why? Because then she knows he cannot move out. He is unlikely to be able to find a woman and hold a job. He becomes forever dependent on her, and this is the way she wants it.
Now which type of enabler is Hillary Clinton? Again, the progressive answer is: the first kind, the indulgent enabler. In this scenario Bill is the bad guy. He has a problem, and Hillary, because she married him, has to endure that problem. So Hillary makes the bes
t of it, trying to curb Bill’s excesses while still holding together their marriage.
In this view Hillary is the devoted wife, fiercely protective of her flawed husband. Even if she is guilty of some sort of complicity, Hillary is, at worst, a passive enabler. “Tolerating Bill’s weakness,” says Hillary’s pal Susan Thomases, “has always been part of her relationship with him.”10
Thomases knows that passive enabling does not imply inaction; it sometimes requires the enablers to play a theatrical role. When Bill’s abuse of another woman is publicly discovered, for example, Hillary must pretend to be outraged, though in reality she always knew about Bill’s conduct.
She must also refuse to be seen with him, showing her “normal reaction” to his supposed betrayal. Even Chelsea and the family dog must be photographed practicing Bill avoidance. Hillary, Chelsea, and the dog are seen together, and Bill is seen all by himself, with a very forlorn expression. This may be called the “leaving Bill in the doghouse” or “taking Bill to the woodshed” phase.
Finally, the two of them must walk hand-in-hand on the beach, signifying reconciliation. They may even dance a few steps together, the loving couple somehow getting through it all. The press goes along with it, in the sycophantic manner reminiscent of courtiers before the French Dauphin. But no one actually believes it; most people know they are witnessing the pathetic, hypocritical performance of the passive enabler.
But a second possibility—never considered—is that Hillary is an active enabler. She doesn’t just endure Bill’s abuse; she abets it. Of course she didn’t create Bill’s problem, but she sees from the outset how she can benefit from it. She needs Bill not as a husband but as a lifelong partner in crime. And Bill profits from the arrangement because Hillary has agreed to become his collaborator and cover-up artist. His addiction is safe with her.
So Bill has, over time, become dependent on Hillary. That’s why he’s still out there in his dotage, campaigning for her. Otherwise Bill would be long gone at this point. By making Bill reliant on her—emotionally and politically—Hillary has over decades secured a marriage that was never really a marriage. She got Bill for life in exchange for facilitating his behavior and, whenever it became necessary, going after the victims of that behavior.
This theory of Hillary’s active enabling may strike some as outrageous, so let’s test it by looking more closely at some of those sex crimes. I’ll start with the ones that seem minor because they involve consensual sex, but they’re not, because they all involve abuses of power. In this category I would list Bill’s relationships with Gennifer Flowers, Sally Miller, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, and Monica Lewinsky. In every case Bill was the powerful political figure and these women were vulnerable to his power.
Lewinsky, in her early twenties, was the lowliest employee for the most powerful man in the world when he began his “relationship” with her—essentially a routine in which she was smuggled through White House security to give him oral sex and then exit without being observed. The consequence of Bill using his power over her in this way was to make Lewinsky, in her own words, “the most humiliated person in the world.” That’s a lot to endure in your early twenties.
Sure, women like Lewinsky went along; in this respect they consented. But this consent is similar to the young actress who submits to the producer’s couch, or the student who succumbs to the lecherous teacher, or the twenty-something political aide who is fondled by her middle-aged congressman. There is, at the least, a seediness about this that should make everyone, most of all feminists, very uncomfortable.
In the private sector, such behavior gets one reprimanded or even fired. In academia, professors are absolutely forbidden from having even consensual relationships with students enrolled in their classes. Several Harvard professors, for instance, have been reprimanded, demoted, or fired because of sexual relationships with students.
I remember discussing the issue with Harvard’s longtime dean Henry Rosovsky when he invited me to campus to guest-lecture in a class he taught. Rosovsky was dealing with one particular case at the time. Even though the professor insisted the student had consented, Rosovsky argued her consent was irrelevant. “My position,” he told me “is that when power is so inequitably distributed between professor and student, consent is not a defense.”
In the political realm, Republicans could never get away with what Bill Clinton did. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was widely castigated within his party for having a love affair with a woman from Argentina. Sanford, unlike Clinton, wasn’t just exercising his sex organs; he was genuinely smitten by the woman. The affair was consensual, and the two of them got engaged, although they subsequently parted ways and never married. Republicans, however, promptly initiated impeachment proceedings against Sanford.
Contrast Republican intolerance for sexual harassment with Democratic approval for it. Democrats ferociously resisted Republican attempts to impeach Bill Clinton. Not only did Democrats pooh-pooh Bill’s conduct but they even excused his lying under oath, insisting that lying about sex should not be counted in this category. Throughout Bill’s career, Democrats have turned a blind eye to his history of sordid behavior toward women.
THEY ALL SAID NO
Consensual affairs, however distasteful, are one thing. But now I turn to the more serious of Bill’s sex offenses. Carolyn Moffet, a legal secretary in Little Rock in 1979, said she met Governor Clinton at a political fundraiser. He asked her to his room. “When I went in,” she said, “he was sitting on a couch, wearing only an undershirt. He pointed at his penis and told me to suck it.” When Moffet refused, “he got mad, grabbed my head, and shoved it into his lap. I pulled away from him and ran out of the room.”
Bill met Paula Jones, a low-level state employee, at an Arkansas trade convention. He summoned Jones to meet him at the Excelsior Hotel, where he was staying. There, according to Jones, he dropped his pants in front of her, and asked her to suck his penis. “And the next thing you know he pulls down his pants. He sat on the couch and he was fondling himself and he asked me to kiss it.”
Jones said, “I jumped up and said, ‘No, I’m not that kind of girl. And I need to be leaving immediately.’ So of course he was embarrassed. He turned red. He pulled his pants up. And I went up to the door and was trying to get out.”
Then, Jones added, “He momentarily put his hand on the door so I couldn’t completely get it opened. And he said, ‘You’re smart. Let’s keep this between ourselves.’” Jones saw a state trooper with a smirk on his face as she dashed out of the room.11
A former flight attendant on Bill Clinton’s campaign plane, Christy Zercher, said that Clinton harassed her on an overnight flight from New York to California in early 1992. According to Zercher, Clinton tried to pull her into the campaign jet bathroom while his pants were unzipped. Then he tried grabbing her breast from his seat, while Hillary slept nearby.12
On November 29, 1993, when Bill was president, Kathleen Willey came to him looking for a job. She was in a very awkward situation. Her husband Ed, a prominent lawyer and Democratic fundraiser, had stolen from his clients and was facing prosecution and financial ruin. Willey came seeking full-time employment to relieve her family’s desperate plight.
According to Willey, Clinton said to her, “I’ve wanted to do this since the first time I laid eyes on you.” Then, in her words, “President Clinton put my hand on his genitals, on his erect penis. He then proceeded to overpower me and rub his hands up my skirt, over my blouse and my breasts.” Utterly shocked, Willey was trying to decide whether to slap him or yell for help.
Fortunately for her, at that moment there was a knock on the door. Clinton was late for a meeting with his economic advisors. “I made a dive for the door, yanked it open and burst into the Oval Office,” Willey said.13 Her family situation, however, only got worse. The very day that Clinton assaulted her, Willey found out that her husband went into the woods, inserted a gun into his mouth, and killed himself.
In 1999, Juanita
Broaddrick told Lisa Myers of NBC Dateline that Bill raped her. The two had met at an industry convention in 1978. Bill proposed a business meeting, and when Broaddrick suggested they have coffee in the lobby of the Camelot hotel where she was staying, Bill said it was too noisy and insisted they meet instead in Broaddrick’s room.
As Broaddrick tells it, Clinton grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She drew back. “Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was 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.
“It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, yelling to ‘please stop.’ When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And he turned and went out the door.”14
So here we have five women, unconnected with each other, making these allegations. One of them, Jones, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill. None of these women have a political ax to grind. Moffet, Zercher, Jones, and Broaddrick were not, as far as we know, political people. Willey was a longtime Clinton supporter. All were in a vulnerable position, yet each came forward, taking a big risk in taking on the Clinton machine.
We can see, from the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, that Hillary has said women who allege sexual harassment have a right to be heard and believed. Hillary herself has articulated this position throughout her career. During the Anita Hill hearings, for instance, she insisted that Hill’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas should be presumed true, even though Thomas vehemently denied them.
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