The public personas of numerous prominent men are being re-assessed in the wake of revelations about their treatment of women. As we re-evaluate our society in the context of old and new allegations ranging from predation to sexual assault, it was inevitable that questions would be asked about Bill Clinton.
In The Atlantic this week, Caitlin Flanagan writes that a reckoning is due:
Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history; is it finally time to make things right?
The most remarkable thing about the current tide of sexual assault and harassment accusations is not their number. If every woman in America started talking about the things that happen during the course of an ordinary female life, it would never end. Nor is it the power of the men involved: History instructs us that for countless men, the ability to possess women sexually is not a spoil of power; it’s the point of power. What’s remarkable is that these women are being believed. — www.theatlantic.com/...
She argues, forcefully, that by protecting Bill Clinton’s presidency liberals delayed this broader moment of reckoning about power and abuse.
The widespread liberal response to the sex-crime accusations against Bill Clinton found their natural consequence 20 years later in the behavior of Harvey Weinstein: Stay loudly and publicly and extravagantly on the side of signal leftist causes and you can do what you want in the privacy of your offices and hotel rooms. — www.theatlantic.com/...
Writing in Vox, Matthew Yglesias says he now believes “Bill Clinton should have resigned: What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price”:
At the time I, like most Americans, was glad to see Clinton prevail and regarded the whole sordid matter as primarily the fault of congressional Republicans’ excessive scandal-mongering. Now, looking back after the election of Donald Trump, the revelations of massive sexual harassment scandals at Fox News, the stories about Harvey Weinstein and others in the entertainment industry, and the stories about Roy Moore’s pursuit of sexual relationships with teenagers, I think we got it wrong. We argued about perjury and adultery and the meaning of the word “is.” Republicans prosecuted a bad case against a president they’d been investigating for years.
What we should have talked about was men abusing their social and economic power over younger and less powerful women. — www.vox.com/...
He goes on from there, in a thoughtful and honest article. He also has a Twitter thread imagining what might have happened if Bill Clinton had resigned:
If Gore had won in 2000, a whole host of things might have been different. There are ramifications for the 2016 election as well, where Trump effectively used Bill Clinton’s victims as a shield to distract from his own sordid, terrible history of sexual assault and predation.
Yglesias also believes there was a cost to protecting Bill Clinton:
As the current accountability moment grows, we ought to recognize and admit that we had a chance to do this almost 20 years ago — potentially sparing countless young women a wide range of unpleasant and discriminatory experiences, or at a minimum reducing their frequency and severity. And we blew it. — www.vox.com/...
Vox also has an article up about the serious allegation of rape that Juanita Broaddrick made against Bill Clinton. Juanita Broaddrick had met Bill Clinton while volunteering for his gubernatorial campaign. There are independent corroborations of her claim that Bill Clinton assaulted her:
Several friends of Broaddrick's backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was director of nursing at Broaddrick's nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place, and "found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in 'a state of shock.' Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit." Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, "She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse."
In the Dateline show, Broaddrick's friends Louise Ma, Susan Lewis, and Jean Darden (Norma Rogers's sister) all told NBC News that Broaddrick told them Bill Clinton raped her at the time. David Broaddrick — with whom Broaddrick was having an affair at the time; they both eventually left their spouses to marry each other— also told NBC that Broaddrick's top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him, "that she had been raped by Bill Clinton."
Broaddrick claims she was traumatized by the incident and scared of Clinton's influence, and so didn't report the rape, or tell her then-husband, Gary Hickey.
— www.vox.com/...
The Vox explainer has several other details. The NY Times now has a story covering the various articles written in the past week: ‘What About Bill?’ Sexual Misconduct Debate Revives Questions About Clinton. They end with this:
Mr. Clinton has kept publicly quiet amid the flurry of sexual misconduct stories lately, and his office had no comment on Wednesday. But other Democrats were not as willing to come to his defense this week. Of a dozen prominent political activists contacted on Wednesday, none went on the record on Mr. Clinton’s behalf. — www.nytimes.com/...
— @subirgrewal