You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. And your husband has the right to remain silent.
Hillary Clinton has a message to sexual assault survivors. The above might be the message critics of Bill Clinton’s history with women have for her. Foremost among them is Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who sees an opportunity to deflect charges of sexism by turning attention on the former president instead.
“If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!” Trump memorably tweeted ahead of Bill’s appearances on the campaign trail.
The billionaire isn’t the only one taking to Twitter to say Bill mistreated women and Hillary enabled him. Juanita Broaddrick, who in 1998 accused Clinton of raping her in the 1970s, has also sounded off.
“I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me,” Broaddrick wrote on the social media platform.
Generally liberal columnist Kirsten Powers, who worked in the Clinton administration as a young woman, also opined that these allegations could be a problem. “We are a society that has a blessedly lower tolerance for sexual assault and harassment than in prior years,” she wrote. “This is good news for America, but bad news for the Clintons. History has caught up with them at the worst possible moment.”
Clinton-era Democrats are mostly unconcerned. Maybe they wouldn’t use language like “bimbo eruptions” or speak of dragging “a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park” today, but Republican talk of Bill Clinton’s sex life has never cost them an election before. Why would it start now, especially when the messenger is someone like Trump?
The Clintons and their defenders have a predictable script for dealing with these attacks. Talk about how vengeful Republicans and their allies in the vast right-wing conspiracy, many of them sexually repressed religious fundamentalists who would take away a woman’s right to choose, are keeping the Clintons’ from important work the people elected them to do.
Which are you more interested in — the country’s public business or the Clintons’ private affairs? Even presidents, Clinton said when confessing an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky, have personal lives.
This writer interned in a Republican Party office during the impeachment saga. A man would call every day and inquire into the sex lives of whomever answered the phone, saying if it was appropriate for Ken Starr to ask Bill Clinton, he could ask us.
Not all Republican presidential candidates think this is as promising a line of attack as Trump apparently does. “It wouldn’t be my focus because I think the American people have litigated how they feel about President Clinton and his personal conduct and his personal life,” Chris Christie said. “And I don’t think we get anywhere as Republicans by doing that.”
If anything, the country is more permissive in its attitudes about adult consensual sex than during the 1990s, when conservative complaints about Bill’s libido first backfired. Same-sex marriage is now a constitutional right rather than something most liberal Democrats (including the Clintons) oppose. Most Americans disapprove of adultery but consider it a private matter.
Note the word “consensual.” The confirmed cases of sexual impropriety by Bill Clinton involve consensual relationships, though some might argue the imbalance of power between a sitting president and a White House intern added to the inappropriateness of the Lewinsky affair. But Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paul Jones have all alleged nonconsensual contact.
On college campuses and elsewhere, feminists argue for a strong presumption in favor of women alleging rape or sexual assault. Hillary Clinton has said they have a “right to be believed.”
“We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says,” wrote Zerlina Maxwell. “Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”
In the 1990s, few people outside conservative circles believed Jones, Broaddrick or Willey, least of all feminists. The people who did believe the accusations were mostly the people already inclined to believe the worst about Bill Clinton.
Do the rape charges against Bill Cosby, who had a much more wholesome image than Bill Clinton ever did (however undeservedly), change this?
“Contrary to what conservatives might have you believe, it simply isn’t true that feminists think every allegation of sexual harassment or assault, no matter how unlikely, should be treated like God’s honest truth,” counters the liberal writer Amanda Marcotte.
While this assertion is easy to quibble with, she’s right that the allegations against Cosby are stronger.
Republicans are left to ponder whether Powers is right that history has caught up with the Clintons or Christie is right that the history of past Clinton sex scandals failing to move the public is likely to repeat itself.
