The accusation is serious: rape. The accuser is credible: an Arkansas businesswoman named Juanita Broaddrick. The accused, then the attorney general of Arkansas, is now the president of the United States. The question is: Will he get away with what no other American could get away with — not having to answer the accusation directly?
Press scrutiny of the Broaddrick story over the last couple of weeks has strengthened it. NBC had interviewed Broaddrick on camera in January. For whatever reasons, the network was reluctant to broadcast Lisa Myers’s exclusive. But then Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal published the first on-the-record account of the incident in Broaddrick’s words. And the Washington Post advanced the story. Finally last week, NBC aired Myers’s interview and added important corroborating information to Broaddrick’s powerful account of being sexually assaulted. In addition to three contemporaneous witnesses who corroborated Broaddrick’s story, Myers found a document showing Broaddrick attended a convention of nursing home operators in Little Rock on April 25, 1978, a date on which Clinton appears to have been in Little Rock as well. And as for Broaddrick’s claim that Clinton, on the verge of running for president, called her out of another nursing home meeting in Little Rock in March 1991 to apologize for the assault 13 years earlier, Myers found someone who saw Clinton and Broaddrick talking together in a hallway of the Camelot Hotel at that time.
Here’s another interesting detail about this story no one else seems yet to have noticed. In the final “Tripp tape,” a conversation between Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky on January 15, 1998, the two women are discussing what Tripp will say when she is deposed by Paula Jones’s attorneys. All of a sudden, Lewinsky changes the subject and muses over the president’s looming deposition:
Ms. LEWINSKY: I wonder how he’ll explain that 128-minute call to Juanita.
Ms. TRIPP: 158.
Ms. LEWINSKY: 158 to Juanita.
Ms. TRIPP: Say it wasn’t him, I guess.
Ms. LEWINSKY: Or, well, I mean the truth is, is it could have been — “I really don’t remember.”
Ms. TRIPP: (Laughter.)
Where does the story go from here? Neither prosecutors nor members of Congress are pursuing it. The statute of limitations in Arkansas on rape (six years) ran out long ago. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr has no jurisdiction in the case because Broaddrick says Clinton never pressured her to lie under oath or obstruct justice. As for members of Congress, Republicans are suffering impeachment hangover and aren’t interested, and Democrats . . . well, their tolerance for egregious wrongdoing by Clinton is boundless. So who does that leave? Only the press and the public.
For the media to allow the story to die with no response from Clinton and only a curt denial from his lawyer would be a travesty. If there’s a journalistic standard for such cases, it was set in the Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood episodes. In both, the press investigated aggressively, even though the accusations involved incidents that had occurred years before. Nor was the fact that Anita Hill merely accused Thomas of talking dirty an impediment to reportorial zeal. Packwood was charged with groping and kissing, not rape — and again, the media went after him relentlessly.
Clinton, fearful of giving the story oxygen, is hiding behind his lawyer, David Kendall, who declared the rape accusation “absolutely false.” The press shouldn’t accept this as an adequate response. First of all, there’s no legal jeopardy for the president, so why should Clinton trot out his personal attorney? And what does Kendall know about what his client did in 1978, anyway?
Nor should the media settle for the current off-the-record White House spin that, as NBC White House correspondent Claire Shipman put it, “if there was an encounter, it may have been consensual.” No, reporters should insist that Clinton himself address the accusation. And there are many, many questions to ask him. Does he know Broaddrick? Did he go to her hotel room in 1978? Did they have sex? Why did he scribble on a 1984 letter to her, “I admire you very much”? Did he seek her out in 1991? If so, why and what did he say to her? Is there anything he’d like to say to Broaddrick today?
Sad to say, White House reporters don’t seem to be warming to the task. When Broaddrick first accused Clinton in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post reporter who covers the White House, John Harris, said: “This does not fit the pattern or seem to be consistent with [the president’s] behavior in any way.” Perhaps he’d never heard of Paula Jones or Kathleen Willey. Other reporters have resorted to the alibi that the public is weary of Clinton sex stories and just isn’t interested in the Broaddrick case. This lame excuse amounts to an abdication of news judgment.
What’s clear is the press will need prodding to pursue the story. In the Thomas and Packwood cases, that came chiefly from feminists. And with Broaddrick, the accusations certainly fit the feminist template: She was victimized by a powerful man, felt complicit because she’d allowed him to come to her hotel room, was too embarrassed to report the crime for years, was afraid of being destroyed if she did. Indeed, Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, issued a statement saying Broaddrick’s charge was “particularly compelling because, like Kathleen Willey, she has been a reluctant witness with no apparent political or financial motivation.” But the feminist establishment has made a Faustian bargain with its man Clinton. Ireland asked only that Clinton not “launch a broadside” against Broaddrick — she didn’t demand an investigation or insist Clinton come clean about the Broaddrick case. Oh, yes, she did denounce “ultraconservatives” for exploiting the case.
The pressure for a full examination of Broaddrick’s charge will have to come from the rest of us: grass-roots activists, religious leaders, may be a few politicians, indeed anyone with a moral bent and thirst for justice and the truth. Appalled by the media’s minimal interest in the case, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote: “It is one thing to define deviancy down. It’s another thing to obliterate it entirely.” Yet if the Broaddrick case fades without a trace, that’s what we will have permitted Clinton to do. He will reign triumphant, not only acquitted by the Senate, but utterly unaccountable for all of his past behavior, no matter how contemptible or heinous.
Fred Barnes, for the Editors
