This is the orthodox feminist position. Obviously we can use it to expose Hillary’s hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy of her feminist allies. But is the position valid? I don’t think so. Women have a right to be heard, but not necessarily to be believed. Women sometimes have a motive to lie, and women sometimes do lie. We have to decide each case on its merits.
But look at the merits of the situation here. It’s conceivable that one accuser may be lying, but all five? We know that Paula Jones was not lying. Initially Bill said she was, but we know Bill is a liar. (He lied on national TV about his affair with Gennifer Flowers and he lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”)
In what will surely go down as one of the most bizarre footnotes in presidential history, Jones gave a description of what she termed a “distinguishing mark” on Bill’s penis. Eventually Bill and Hillary gave up: they paid Jones an $850,000 settlement to go away. We can be sure they would not have paid her if they could have exposed her allegations in court as lies.
BLAMING THE VICTIMS
Hillary’s role with each of these women—indeed with all Bill’s women—has been to deride, discredit, and intimidate them. In the White House, Hillary led a kind of war-room strategy which has been described as, “Go after specific things about the story—dates and times. Attack the motives and details.” This seems chillingly reminiscent of how Hillary got her rapist client exonerated on a technicality.
Hillary led the team to handle the Paula Jones case. Here the attack focused on attacking Jones’s motives. Hillary and her team portrayed Jones as a low-class woman who would say anything to get money. The Clintons’ flunky James Carville disparaged Jones. “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Another flunky, Betsey Wright, dismissed the allegations of women like Jones as “bimbo eruptions” on the part of “gold diggers.”
After the Broaddrick incident, Hillary personally accosted Broaddrick and whispered in her ear, “I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things you do for him.” Broaddrick recalls, “I just stood there. I was sort of you might say shell-shocked.” Hillary repeated, “Do you understand. Everything you do.” Broaddrick adds, “She tried to take a hold of my hand and I left.”
Broaddrick said she was terrified because she knew the power of the Clintons. She interpreted Hillary’s remarks to her as something between a plea and a threat. Hillary was saying, in effect, we expect you to keep quiet about this. And Broaddrick did, for many years, until she felt compelled to speak out.
According to Willey, “My children were threatened by detectives hired by Hillary. They took one of my cats and killed another. They left a skull on my porch. They told me I was in danger. They followed me. They vandalized my car. They hid under my deck in the middle of the night. They subjected me to a campaign of fear and intimidation, trying to silence me.”15
Hillary has never directly addressed the accusations that Bill is a sex abuser and a rapist. She pretends she doesn’t have to. She is supported in this by a compliant media which—with the exception of Lisa Myers of Dateline—has generally buried the accounts of these women.
Even in the Myers case, NBC deliberately sat on the interview until after Clinton survived the impeachment vote. Myers interviewed Broaddrick in mid-January 1999. Clinton’s impeachment vote in the Senate was February 12. NBC ran the interview two weeks after Clinton was acquitted. Had the interview run earlier, who knows how it might have affected the outcome?
Progressive journalists have from the beginning tried to protect Bill Clinton from the women he exploits. After the Gennifer Flowers scandal threatened to derail Bill’s presidential bid, CBS producer Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes staged an appearance by the Clintons. Questions were fed to them in advance. The episode was carefully edited.
Hewitt admitted later that his goal was to save Bill Clinton’s 1992 candidacy for president. He said the Clintons “came to us because they were in big trouble. They were about to lose right there and they needed some first aid. They needed some bandaging. What they needed was a paramedic. So they came to us and we did it.”16
They did it by creating a false tableau of the Clinton marriage. They created a false picture of Bill as the flawed but repentant husband, Hillary as the wronged wife determined to save their relationship. The message was that this decent couple was working out its marital issues by themselves, and the American people should leave them alone.
ACCESSORIES OF ABUSE
The progressive media is in the same camp on this as the feminists. These people are utterly shameless. Listen to how feminists, the soidisant allies of women, talk about Bill. Erica Jong says she wants a president who’s “alive from the waist down.” What are women complaining about? “Oh,” says Jong, “Imagine swallowing the presidential come.”17 I apologize for quoting this type of language but this is how these feminists talk.
Tina Brown went to a White House dinner and found Bill the hottest man in the room. “Forget the dog-in-the-manger, down-in-the-mouth neo-puritanism of the oped tumbrel drivers,” she wrote in the New Yorker, “and see him instead as his guests do: a man in a dinner jacket with more heat than any star in the room.” If this is how Brown responds to a rapist, think of how orgasmic she’d feel if Bill had been a serial rapist.
Gloria Steinem suggests that women who have a problem with Bill’s behavior and Hillary’s covering for Bill are insecure about their own marriages. “I began to understand that Hillary represented the very public, in-your-face opposite of the precarious and unequal lives that some women were living.”18 In sum, women who criticize Hillary secretly wish that they had husbands who were more like Bill.
Hillary can count on these shameless people to protect her husband. They are, in a quite conscious sense, her criminal accessories. For these people, Hillary identified the real enemy, “this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband.”19 In this never-never land, the Clintons bear no responsibility; the real culprits are those who speak out against their abusive behavior and lies.
The response of the feminists and the media clearly show that they are willing to go along with this narrative, even when they know it is false. These are people who don’t very much care whether Bill Clinton rapes his grandmother, as long as he’s a political ally. Bill votes for feminist policy positions, and that’s all that matters.
The worst example of this attitude comes from writer Nina Burleigh, who infamously said several years ago that she’d be happy to give Bill Clinton a blowjob herself in gratitude for his efforts to keep abortion legal.20 Burleigh seems to think that for Clinton, abortion is a matter of high principle.
In reality, of course, sex abusers love abortion because it facilitates their abuse. Imagine if they had to contend with the risk of their victims having their babies! Poor, dumb Burleigh is willing to become a convenient sex object herself out of appreciation for Bill Clinton supporting measures to make all his victims into convenient sex objects.
At one time feminists like Steinem, Jong, and Burleigh held that “the personal is political.” In other words, your personal behavior is indicative of your political commitment. Now that seems to have gone out the window. Today’s feminists take the view that if you’re on their team, they’ll go to bat for you no matter what you do. No wonder that young women are staying away from this cynical, morally bankrupt ideology.
AN ACTIVE ENABLER
Hillary’s behavior, however, is what we have to watch most closely. This is how we can discover if she’s a passive or an active enabler. A passive enabler might accommodate her husband’s behavior, but she would also do what she could to prevent it. Hillary, however, has never shown the slightest interest in thwarting the sexual schemes of Bill. On the contrary, she seems utterly indifferent to them.
The active enabler has no desire to stop the behavior, because she benefits from it. She knows, however, that other wom
en may attempt to stop Bill—his victims may speak out against him. Thus the active enabler goes into assault mode against those victims. Her behavior is predictable; she has to uphold her part of the deal, which is to protect the criminal and vilify his targets. This Hillary has done with a vengeance.
She recruited Craig Livingston, a former barroom bouncer and Democratic operative, to get dirt on Bill’s women. Livingston, who was accustomed to getting dirt on political candidates, proved outstanding at his job. He delivered files on women to Hillary and she assembled them into a database that could be used if any of the women became a political problem.
In 1981, Hillary hired Ivan Duda, an Arkansas detective, to produce a list of women Bill had slept with. Again, Hillary had no interest in preventing Bill’s liaisons. Rather, her goal was to be prepared for any charges that might come up from any of these women during a political campaign. Duda’s practice was to confront the women and warn them that if they spoke out against Bill they would be completely ruined. Most of them, consequently, did not.
In 1992, according to Dick Morris, Hillary had a team of detectives building dossiers on Bill’s women. One of those detectives was Anthony Pellicano, a hard-nosed operative who was later convicted of illegal firearms possession, wiretapping, and racketeering. Pellicano, known for tactics such as placing a dead fish with a red rose in its mouth on the windshield of a targeted reporter’s car, was specifically assigned to discredit and intimidate Gennifer Flowers.
The Clintons also hired Jack Palladino, who was paid around $100,000 for his services by the Clinton campaign. Palladino had previously represented a San Francisco developer accused of having sex with under-age prostitutes. According to the developer, “I needed somebody to go down and talk to the women who were the accusers. They were the kind of witnesses that if you talked to them long enough, they’d give four or five different accounts of what happened. It was important to gain their confidence, and Jack’s operatives did that.”21
What did Hillary’s goons do for her? According to Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who had an affair with Bill Clinton, they fired a shotgun blast at her Jeep, shattering the rear windshield. Perdue was so freaked out by this that she left the country for a while.
Gennifer Flowers said they broke into her apartment seeking incriminating evidence of her affair with Bill. They were looking for tapes of their conversations, sex tapes, anything they could find. Flowers, however, had already removed tapes of her conversations with Bill. She came home to see her house ransacked, her mattress overturned, boxes on the floor, clothes tossed everywhere.
She realized then that they were not just searching for stuff; they were also sending her a message that they were deadly serious. This message was reinforced for Flowers when Palladino approached a former roommate of hers, Loren Kirk, and asked her, “Is Gennifer Flowers the sort of person who would commit suicide?” At this point Flowers—I think legitimately—came to believe her life might be in danger.
For a presidential candidate to use private investigators with this shady background to do surveillance and then seek to intimidate women who might come forward against him is unprecedented in American politics. Who can deny that it is a big story in itself? Yet with the exception of a single article in the Washington Post, it went unreported by the entire press contingent covering the Clinton campaign.
The media knew—but didn’t report the fact—that Hillary was the self-appointed public prosecutor of other women. The White House team also recognized that the wife was in charge of the cover-up operation for the husband. It was, one might say, all in the family. Bill seems to have known throughout that he could count on Hillary because this is what her role was from the outset.
A VERY SICK ARRANGEMENT
Let’s conclude this chapter by seeing how this bizarre, sick arrangement between Bill and Hillary might have developed in the first place. What follows is less a description than an interpretation. Some of what I say here is unverifiable, but I’m trying to make sense of the freakish relationship of these two, and this is my best effort to do so. You decide how congruent it is with the facts we do know.
Bill and Hillary came to Yale Law School burning with ambition. Bill wanted to be a major figure in Arkansas politics, setting him up to run for president. Hillary may not have known then she wanted to be president, but she too shared Bill’s volcanic ambition. She too wanted influence and power.
Hillary, however, had a problem, which was that no one—male or female—liked her. They considered her ugly, petulant, and bitchy. This was not something she could change; this was her personality. In high school they called her “Sister Frigidaire”—the appellation under her name in her yearbook22—and no one today can say that they are astonished or that she has changed much since then. So how does a woman like this make it to the zenith of power in the United States?
Hillary decided she needed to partner with a man who was ambitious, gregarious, and naturally likeable. Of course he might have no use for her in the bedroom, but she didn’t necessarily want him for that. Rather, she wanted him to be her “pitch man.” His job was to make her attractive, not necessarily to him but to the people whom Hillary needed to gain influence and power.
Of course she might initially have to subordinate her ambitions to his. But only initially; later, she could make her move. At this point, she would have to be sure she could rely on him. In other words, his dependence on her would have to be complete. From the outset, Hillary didn’t need a husband; she needed a partner-in-crime.
At Yale, Hillary met Bill and saw almost immediately that he was a sex addict. She also saw that this was a proclivity that could easily cross the line into sex abuse. This was exactly what seemed to have happened in a case Hillary heard from friends about an incident involving Bill while he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
There, Bill had sex with a nineteen-year-old coed named Eileen Wellstone. Later Wellstone said she was sexually harassed. Bill insisted that what happened was consensual. What exactly happened is not clear, but Bill was asked to leave Oxford over the incident. Obviously, Bill was treading a fine line. This, then, seemed to be Bill’s problem, and here, Hillary understood, was her opportunity.
Hillary knew that Bill’s sex addiction would pose serious problems for him politically. Arkansas voters don’t want their top elected officials to be philanderers, let alone sexual predators. Bill’s abusive conduct—witnessed and experienced by a long train of women—could prevent him from his aspiration to be president someday. Bill understood this as well as Hillary. So Bill had a problem and Hillary offered herself as the solution.
Bill knew that in order for him to continue his sex abuse and yet have a successful life in politics, he needed a special type of wife, one who would accept and even embrace his sex addiction. Hillary offered to do this; even more, she offered to cover for him. No ordinary woman would do this. Very few women would have the skills to pull it off. None of the other women Bill knew would remotely qualify for the job.
Bill needed someone cynical, someone who would be as indifferent to his below-the-belt conduct as she would be ruthless in clearing up the debris. When Bill met sly, owlish Hillary, with her terrible clothes and her peering eyes, he saw she was exactly what he needed. And Hillary knew she needed him at least as much as he needed her. It was, one might say, a match made in hell.
Hillary, however, recognized that Bill’s degeneracy could work to her advantage. She could become his cover-up artist and his blame-the-victim specialist. She could prosecute and go after Bill’s women, discrediting their allegations if they ever surfaced and protecting Bill from the consequences of his actions. In this way Hillary would make herself indispensable to Bill, and Bill would become increasingly dependent on her.
Bill saw the benefits of this deal, and he went for it. Over time he developed a sense of immunity over his crimes, because he never seemed to be held accountable for any of them. No matter what he did, Hillary was there to clean up after him. A
nd just as Hillary expected, Bill became fiercely attached—and hopelessly dependent—on his enabler-in-chief. It was an arrangement that worked.
Of course there were times when things got out of hand. Then Hillary screamed and shouted and threw stuff at Bill, “yellow legal pads, files, briefing books, car key, Styrofoam coffee cups,” in one account. Kate Anderson Brower reports in The Residence, “The couple sometimes got into pitched battles, shocking the staff with their vicious cursing, and sometimes they went through periods of stony silence.”23
These eruptions, dutifully reported to the media by White House staff and Secret Service agents, have been portrayed as evidence of how distraught Hillary must have been at Bill’s shameful conduct. This portrait of the wronged wife has, as Democratic operative Harold Ickes pointed out to her, actually helped Hillary. The Monica Lewinsky scandal, for example, boosted Hillary’s Senate campaign in New York because it converted this highly disliked woman into a victim.
But Hillary is no victim; she is actually his co-conspirator. Her rage at Bill has never been about what he did. She has known about that from the start. Hillary’s disgust, rather, has to do with the fact that Bill is frequently so careless, he keeps getting busted, and once again Hillary has to put on a scene and drag out her goons to clean up the debris. This is what Hillary meant when, on more than one occasion, she slapped him and yelled, “How could you be so stupid?”24
THE BEST CONFIRMATION
The best confirmation of Hillary’s role as an active enabler comes from Bill’s female targets, who all seem to have figured out that Hillary had as much to do with their victimization as Bill did. “Women’s rights? Ha! That’s a joke!” Gennifer Flowers responds, when asked about Hillary’s aspiration to be a spokesperson for American women. Flowers described Hillary as “an enabler that has encouraged him to go out and do whatever he does with women.”25
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