The most prominent man in America to have been credibly accused of a rape and yet escape punishment from the #MeToo movement is former President Bill Clinton.
That might change if Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow gets his way. Farrow, who exposed the sexual crimes of movie tycoon Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker, told Bill Maher on Maher’s Real Time program on Friday that it’s about time to reexamine the claims of Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Clinton of rape.
Clinton didn’t just escape punishment for his lies about his sexual monkeyshines with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He’s never been forced to answer hard questions about Broaddrick’s allegations.
No Gray Areas
Clinton came up tangentially in a discussion about the resignation of bisexual U.S. Representative Katie Hill (D-Calif.), who confessed to an improper relationship with a woman on her campaign staff and an adulterous, three-way relationship with her husband and that employee.
Explicit nude photos of Hill with that woman, as well another of nude Hill holding a bong, also surfaced.
The House Ethics Committee was investigating Hill in connection with an improper romance with her legislative directors.
Asked Maher, “Could Bill Clinton, if he had done what he did in 1998, survive today — or would his own party have thrown him under the bus?”
“I think that it is very important to interject that Bill Clinton is a different conversation,” Farrow replied. “He has been credibly accused of rape. That has nothing to do with gray areas. I think that the Juanita Broaddrick claim has been overdue for revisiting.”
That isn’t likely to happen unless Farrow follows up and writes about it himself, just as he did with Weinstein, and now with his book, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.
Broaddrick’s Response and Story
“All Democrats in Congress refused to read my interview with Ken Starr during the impeachment process,” Broaddrick tweeted about Farrow’s remark. “And of course, NBC’s Andy Lack held my Dateline interview until impeachment was over.”
Clinton cornered her in a hotel room, Broaddrick told the network’s Lisa Myers in 1999:
Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip…. He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and 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…. I told him “Please don’t.” He was such a different person at that moment, he was just a vicious awful person….
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 before he goes out the door he says “You better get some ice on that.” And he turned and went out the door.
Clinton and his handlers, of course, denied Broaddrick’s claim and called it “outrageous,” although that isn’t what Myers and then Washington Post White House reporter Peter Baker thought about the allegation.
“I tested her story every way I could, again and again and again,” Myers later explained for Slate.com. “And no detail ever changed — it never got better, it never got worse. It was always the same. But understand, there were some at NBC headquarters in New York who wanted to just kill the interview without ever looking at the tape.”
Baker told the website that he wrote the following entry in his journal: “My God!”
Lack’s Role
In Catch and Kill, Farrow accused Lack of harassing and exploiting his power over women. Two women spoke about Lack’s harassing them into consensual relationships that eventually soured. One said Lack threatened her career; the other said he retaliated.
Lack also mishandled the allegations against NBC star Matt Lauer, another personality taken down by #MeToo whom Farrow accused in his book of raping a former colleague at NBC.
