First off, I am an attorney, so I understand an attorney’s obligation to zealously represent a client. So this post is not about the fact that Hillary represented a man whom she knew had raped a 12-year old girl, and not even about the fact that she arguably overzealously represented this man by averring under penalty of law, without support, that she had “been informed” that this sixth-grade girl was “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing” and that she had made unspecified “false accusations in the past.”
This post is about how Hillary talked about this case 10 years later and what that may reveal about her. Please listen to this audio and form your own impressions and come to your own conclusions.
As for me, my initial impression was one of confusion. Who is this woman speaking with such a thick Southern accent? Oh, I guess that’s Hillary, born and raised in a leafy suburb of Chicago. She’s laying it on a little thick, but politicians gonna be politicians, I guess.
And then I was surprised that she voluntarily began to tell the story of representing this child rapist, something that I’d have thought she’d want to stay away from. I would think that it would have been heart-wrenching to have successfully defended a man whom you knew had raped a little girl and to have got him pleaded down to a year in county jail, and this wouldn’t be a story that I would be eager to tell. But well, ok, I thought, she must want to tell this story so that she can emphasize how difficult it was to represent someone like that, or to show compassion for the victim, or to springboard into a discussion of criminal justice and issues with victim blaming, etc.
But I started to get a sickening feeling as soon as she started to talk about it. She first called it a “fascinating case,” a “really interesting case,” not a tragic case. I didn’t like where this was headed. And then she continued by describing and humanizing the perpetrator, nothing about the victim. And then a gut punch: She talks about how she had the perpetrator take a lie detector test, which he passed, and how that forever destroyed her faith in polygraphs. And she’s laughing about it! She’s talking about how she knows how this guy savagely raped a little girl and then fooled the lie detector test, and she’s laughing!
And it just continued from there as she carried on with a boastful story of how, despite the clear physical evidence, she was able to work her way to down a sweetheart plea deal by threatening to get a fancy-pants forensics expert to come down from New York City to “prevent this miscarriage of justice” (said sarcastically with a big laugh). The whole focus of her story was on how she skillfully got the “foremost expert in the world willing to testify so that it came out the way you wanted it to come out,” how she flew up to NYC to meet with him, etc. Not on the victim. Not on the horror of child rape, not on the inner turmoil of representing a known child rapist, not on the problems with the criminal justice system, forensics, and victim-blaming. No, the point of the story was to brag about how skillfully she was able to get this guy off.
And to top it all off, one last bit of braggadocio. When asked how it turned out, she claims, with the kind of nonchalance meant to portray (false) modesty, that, oh, she got him down to time served in the county jail: two months. But she was either casually lying about this or misremembering it since, in actuality, her client was sentenced to a year in jail (to include the two months served), and five years of probation.
Now, I understand that to even raise such an inflammatory issue, one that is so susceptible to demagoguery, may be perceived by some as out-of bounds, or somehow trolling, or disloyal to the potential Democratic nominee. But I have tried to write about it as non-sensationally as I can, for such an emotionally charged issue. The fact is, I’d never heard about this issue at all until last night as I was watching YouTube videos at random, and the above video came up. The video shook me up, and I wanted to write about it last night. But I waited until the emotions had subsided a bit so that I could clarify in my own head if and why I think it’s worth writing this post, despite the angry reaction I am sure it will provoke, and the charges that this is right-wing slander, etc. And I’ve really hesitated about whether to publish this.
But at the end of the day, for me, it comes down to the fact that I think it is critical, in choosing a Commander-in-Chief and President, to make a sincere attempt to catch a glimpse behind a politician’s carefully constructed and maintained image and see what might really be in the core of a person, what might really move and motivate a person, even if that involves some discomfort. And sometimes, particularly with politicians whose image is most carefully guarded, moments like this can be particularly revealing, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
For me, what this audio reveals is a person who values personal ambition over compassion, and a person who displays a measure of callousness to violence and victims, a worrying trait for someone who wants to be in charge of our country’s immense power to wage either war or peace. And so, I felt compelled to share, just like I did when I wrote this post right after first seeing Hillary gleefully celebrate violence, declaring “We came, we saw, he died.”
Look, I know this conversation occurred 30 years ago (although the audio of it only surfaced in 2014), and some may dismiss it for that reason. For me, that just makes it more revealing, to hear what someone was like before the politician’s mask got so firmly and tightly in place. At the very least, I think it’s worthwhile to take five minutes and listen to how the woman who wants us to elect her as the leader of our country talked about defending a child rapist. Maybe you’ll come to the conclusion that I’m reading way too much into this, and you may be right.
But I don’t know. It’s one thing to zealously represent a client, even one whom you know to be guilty. That’s a lawyer’s job. But it’s another thing altogether to take a very aggressive defense of a child rapist you know to be guilty, and turn it into a lighthearted and boastful war story.