What You Need to Know About the Allegations Against Bill Clinton
It seems like when faced with Donald Trump’s horrible record with women, Trump and his supporters love to bring up Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct, alleged and otherwise.
In fact, you may have heard Trump even invited the four women who have accused the Clintons of wrongdoing to a press conference before the last debate.
It can be difficult to distinguish fact from allegations. So, here’s a quick cheat sheet so you know what the f Trump’s fans are talking about.
Also, I hate that we have to clarify this, but in case you didn’t know: Bill is not the one running for president. Hillary shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions. Hillary has never been publicly accused of sexual misconduct.
Would Hillary be a lot cooler if she had ripped Bill to shreds publicly for cheating on her? Yeah, probably, but she didn’t. And it’s up to you to decide whether that makes her unfit to hold public office.
Anyway, back to Bill. There are three women who accused Bill of sexual assault in the 90s: Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey.
Juanita Broaddrick
Juanita was a volunteer in Arkansas for the Clintons in the 70s, and during a 1999 episode of Dateline NBC, she alleged that Bill Clinton raped her in her hotel room. Despite the allegation, Juanita reportedly kept supporting Bill on the campaign trail and never reported the alleged rape to the authorities, according to NPR. (Which, as we all know, is not proof that it didn’t happen.)
Here is the Dateline Interview where Juanita explains what happened:
Kenneth Starr, who led the infamous misconduct investigation against Bill’s administration in the 90s, offered Juanita immunity to come forward and testify against Bill.
Instead, she signed an affidavit saying that she had not been assaulted, but then later recanted it to do the Dateline interview, she told BuzzFeed earlier this year.
Juanita also alleges that after the rape, Hillary tried to intimidate her into silence back in the day by thanking her for “all she did for Bill,” but this seems like a stretch. It’s unlikely that Bill would have told his wife about an affair ahead of time, let alone a sexual assault. It’s even more unlikely that Hillary would go out of her way to imply to Bill’s victim that she knew about the whole thing.
Paula Jones
Paula Jones also claims Bill sexually assaulted her. She is credited with filing the lawsuit against Bill that led to his eventual impeachment.
Paula alleges that at a conference in Arkansas, Bill wanted to meet her in a hotel room and then proceeded to expose himself to her, suggesting that she should “kiss it.”
When the case went to court, the judge sided with Bill, saying that “that even if the events alleged transpired, they did not amount to sexual assault [editor’s note: LOL R U KIDDING?!] and that Jones had no evidence she’d been punished or emotionally afflicted in the workplace for rebuffing the governor,” according to Vox.
Several people have disputed her allegations, including a coworker of hers at the time, noting that she actually appeared elated after the interaction with Bill. According to an issue of the New Yorker from 1994, “Jones was widely dismissed as a gold-digging political pawn.”
Whether or not you believe Paula, we can all agree that’s sexist as fuck.
Kathleen Willey
Like Juanita, Kathleen took her allegations against Bill to the public in a TV interview on 60 Minutes. They received much less attention than the allegations made by Juanita because they were less severe in nature.
Kathleen claims that while she was volunteering for the Clinton Administration, she and Bill had a meeting in the Oval Office. After the meeting, Clinton allegedly touched her inappropriately. The only public details she’s disclosed are that she went to grab for the door and he stopped her, “groped” her, and forcefully kissed her.
Freaky enough, the encounter happened on the day of Kathleen’s husband’s suicide. No solid correlation between the two has ever been made.
After the incident, Kathleen apparently told a lot of her friends about it, because they remember being told about it at the time. One of Kathleen’s friends, Julie Hiatt Steele, told Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff that Kathleen told her about it on the night of the incident. Julie later said she was lying, claiming that Kathleen had persuaded her to lie to NewsWeek about when she told her of Bill’s alleged wrongdoing.
According to the GOP report, another friend of Julie’s and Kathleen’s, Amy Horan, testified that Julie told her that Kathleen and President Clinton “had an intimate encounter, that they had fondled each other, he had kissed her.” Horan understood that the encounter was consensual, proving that Kathleen had lied.
In the Kenneth Starr investigation, Julie’s statement to Newsweek was investigated throughout, but when it was revealed that she lied, Julie was indicted for lying to the jury and to the FBI about what happened. The initial case against Bill was declared a mistrial, which means that the trial was not successfully completed, terminating the entire case.
Kathleen was also found to be lying about several other things to the FBI, like her sexual relationship with a former boyfriend, but because she was given an unusual immunity agreement, she could not be charged for her lying.
The Rape Case
Aside from using these women who present these allegations against Bill, we’ve also noticed that several of Trump’s supporters claiming Hillary defended Bill against one of his alleged victims, and that’s just not what happened at all. In fact, that’s a blatant lie because Bill wasn’t even involved in this particular case.
Hillary was a public defender in Arkansas while working at the legal aid clinic at the University of Arkansas. In 1975, she was assigned to defend the man accused of raping Kathy Shelton, then 12. Kathy also accompanied the three women with Trump before the last debate.
According to the prosecutor on the case, Hillary had no choice but to defend the 42-year-old man accused of raping the 12 year-old because public defenders are not allowed to turn down assigned cases, even though she voiced her reservations.
She successfully argued for the rapist to get a plea deal of a lesser sentence because Kathy’s emotional state was called into question by Hillary. According to court documents from the case, Hill actually brought in a child psychologist to testify that Kathy might be “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.”
It’s so fucked up, and it’s what makes many believe that she was an advocate for rapists.
Another lie frequently told is that she allegedly laughed after winning the case. That, too, did not happen. She laughed during a 1994 interview about the case because she made the defendant take a polygraph test, and much to her surprise he passed it.
Hillary laughed because she said that it had “forever destroyed her faith” in polygraphs.
