by Valerie Richardson
The Washington Times
October 16, 2017
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
Photo by: Anonymous
MONICA LEWINSKY - The intern with whom United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "inappropriate relationship" while she worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996. The affair and its repercussions, which included the Clinton impeachment, became known as the Lewinsky scandal.
She didn’t name names, but when Monica Lewinsky joined the viral online campaign against sexual harassment Sunday by retweeting #MeToo, the first person who came to mind was President Bill Clinton.
Therein lies the problem for the Clintons with the Harvey Weinstein sexual-harassment scandal: It hits perilously close to home.
Monica Boo-insky ✔@MonicaLewinsky
#MeToo https://twitter.com/womensmarch/status/ ... 4075216896 …
6:10 PM - Oct 15, 2017
Not only was Mr. Weinstein a political ally and a major donor to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation, but his alleged sexual misconduct has refocused attention on Mr. Clinton’s own checkered past as the tide turns against powerful men who take advantage of women.
“The question is on everyone’s lips: how could we have let Weinstein’s crimes continue for so long? Yet there’s little in the Weinstein story—the years of whispers of impropriety, the past allegations by women, the intimate connection with a party that advertises itself as a defender of women—that doesn’t apply to Bill Clinton,” said Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic.
Another connection emerged Monday with reports that Mr. Weinstein gave the maximum $10,000 to Mr. Clinton while he was in the White House to fund his legal defense during the independent counsel’s perjury investigation related to his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.
She was a 22-year-old White House intern and he was commander-in-chief when they had an affair, which she later described as a “mutual” relationship. Another three women—Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey—have accused him of sexual harassment or assault.
Other Hollywood bigwigs who helped Mr. Clinton cover the costs of his defense include Tom Hanks, Michael Douglas and Barbara Streisand, along with studio executives David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, according to the 1998 article in the Washington Post.
Mr. Katzenberg was among those in Hollywood who has denounced Mr. Weinstein after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual harassment or assault.
“You have done terrible things to a number of women over a period of years,” said Mr. Katzenberg in an email to Mr. Weinstein that he released Friday. “I cannot in any way say this is OK with me … It’s not at all, and I am sickened by it, angry with you and incredibly disappointed in you.”
Other celebrities have since been accused of misconduct in what director Woody Allen—himself no stranger to sexual-abuse allegations—has warned could become a “witch-hunt atmosphere,” but so far Mr. Clinton has largely received a pass from Hollywood and the left.
Even given all the familiar reasons for discretion and concealment by the women themselves, there was no small potential for revelation. There had been far too many cases. As they eventually told their stories after he was elected president, the Arkansas trooper bodyguards and others would testify to Bill Clinton's extramarital relations with literally hundreds of women, "There would hardly be an opportunity he would let slip to have sex," a state police security guard told the London Sunday Times in 1994. Insistent denials by both Clinton and the woman in question would not always be a guarantee of erasing suspicion, even without photos. While one woman employee of an Arkansas utility continued to deny any relationship with the governor, for example, the Los Angeles Times unearthed partial phone records between 1989 and 1991 that showed Clinton telephoning her fifty-nine times at her home and office, placing eleven cellular calls to her residence on July 16, 1989, and, two months later, while on an official trip, making a ninety-four-minute call at 1:23 a.m. and another for eighteen minutes the next morning at 7:45. Clinton had been wrong when he talked about telephone evidence in a tape-recorded conversation with Gennifer Flowers in December 1991. Did she have phone records? he had asked her after she told him someone had broken into her apartment. "Unh unh. I mean why would I? You ... you usually call me, for that matter. And besides, who would know?" Flowers had answered. And Clinton, speaking from the mansion, had seemed to reassure himself: "Isn't that amazing? Well . . . I wouldn't care if they ... you know, I, I ... They may have my phone records on this computer here, but I don't think it.... That doesn't prove anything."
Though most of the eyewitness accounts would appear only after the 1992 election, the list of the future president's illicit affairs would be remarkably detailed, including more than twenty women who stepped forward or were otherwise publicly identified by the spring of 1994. Troopers would describe the wife of a prominent local judge, a Little Rock reporter, a former state employee, a cosmetics clerk at a Little Rock department store, and several others, including Flowers, whom Clinton had seen at intervals of two to three times a week in the course of relationships lasting anywhere from weeks to months to years. According to the British press, there had been a black woman who claimed, after more than a dozen visits by the future president, that Clinton was the father of her child. In the testimony, too, were the settings and circumstances -- the flaunting of girlfriends in public, Clinton's slipping troopers cash to pay for gifts at Victoria's Secret in Little Rock's University Mall, the constant and often vain efforts to conceal movements from Hillary and the periodic scenes between Clinton and her, the numberless one-night stands with strangers in the state and beyond, oral sex in the dark parking lot of Chelsea's elementary school. "Later he told me that he had researched the subject in the Bible," trooper Larry Patterson told the American Spectator, "and oral sex isn't considered adultery." Some thought it all undeniably pathological. "What has emerged," Geordie Greig of the London Sunday Times wrote, "is a man with what would appear to be an almost psychotic inability to control his zipper."
From the first alarm and strategizing after the Hart episode in 1987, the response of the Clinton entourage had been to view the womanizing in an almost prudish way, fearing outright public rejection. "We were thinking how it was going to play in Jonesboro or Paragould," said one aide, "and of course we were thinking of Gary Hart." But the national public response in 1992 would prove apparently more lenient and worldly. When audiences in New Hampshire, New York, or California seemed ready to accept that a presidential candidate's private life -- whatever his extramarital sexual habits and whether they credited his denials or not -- had no bearing on his integrity as a leader, Clinton's aides regarded their strategy of simply stonewalling as vindicated. Neither then nor later did many of those around Clinton reflect on the deeper meaning of the womanizing and what it said about other aspects of the man and leader.
At almost every turn in the history was an abuse of power and trust: the routine employment of the troopers to facilitate, stand guard, and cover up; the use of state cars and time and the sheer good name and prestige of the governor's office.
It was not that Clinton had governed and then made his sexual forays as part of some scrupulously separate private life. In part because of the furtive shadow play with Hillary, in part the product of his own insouciance and sense of entitlement, much of the philandering took place during the workday, on official trips, or around ceremonial or political functions. He had indulged a good deal of his relentless promiscuity as the government. Propositioning young women at county fairs or enticing state employees at conferences, he enjoyed much of his predatory privilege because he was the government.
There was also the issue of how much the illicit practices opened the governor and future president to blackmail or how much the gifts and other expenses, which could not be taken from any legitimate income that Hillary might notice, made him all the more dependent on his own "walking around" cash from backers. Equally telling was what it all revealed about his genuine attitude toward women. The repeated testimony of the troopers would show the undisguised Clinton rating women as objects, "ripe peaches," as he called them, "purely to be graded, purely to be chased, dominated, conquered," according to L.D. Brown. The governor had been predatory even toward one of the trooper's wives and toward another's mother-in-law.
There was a sharp demarcation between his two worlds, the public champion of equal rights naming women to high office and the seducer who preferred his partners without too much rival seriousness, rewarding substance only as part of the seduction. A young staff analyst for the National Governors' Association would remember Clinton's courting her not only by personal charm and flirtation but also by ardent support of her policy proposals. When she firmly rebuffed his advances one night at an NGA dance, however, he instantly lost interest in her ideas -- "cut me and the policies dead the next day," she remembered. When a former Miss Arkansas, Sally Perdue, told of a four-month affair with Clinton that began not long after he returned to power in 1983, reports fixed on her colorful details of the governor parading around her apartment in one of her black nightgowns playing his saxophone, using cocaine. More significant were the circumstances of their breakup. When she told him she was thinking of running for mayor of Pine Bluff, Clinton bristled. "You'd -- you'd better not run for mayor," he warned her, and the relationship ended in an angry argument. He was clearly upset that she had crossed a line, Perdue remembered. A "good ole boy," as she recalled him, he had wanted a "good little girl" as an intimate. "I don't think he really wanted me to be an independent thinker at that point," Perdue would say.
Fear of exposure notwithstanding, the behavior would continue through the election and transition. Among the troopers' stories would be a scene at the Little Rock airport as the president-elect and his wife left for Virginia and their inaugural procession into Washington. Hillary noticed a security guard escorting one of the women to the farewell ceremony and turned on him angrily. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" she asked Larry Patterson, according to his account in the American Spectator. "I know who that whore is. I know what she's doing here. Get her out of here." In a reaction familiar to many aides, Clinton simply shrugged and the trooper took the woman back to the city. At the same juncture, having witnessed during the later days of the campaign and during the transition what some in Arkansas had seen for years, even the legendarily discreet Secret Service was shocked by the new occupants of the White House. According to reliable sources, some of the agents who had been in Little Rock filed an extraordinary warning with headquarters referring in old-fashioned terms to issues of "moral turpitude" involving the president-elect.
Even after the troopers' initial revelations in the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator late in 1993, however, the issue would be all but marginalized by the mainstream media. ''I'm not interested in Bill Clinton's sex life as governor of Arkansas," New York Times Washington bureau chief R.W. Apple told a British reporter. At the same time, longtime Washington Post journalist Mike Isikoff would find himself in a shouting match with editors who were refusing to publish even a portion of his meticulously researched investigative report on Paula Jones, who would later bring a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president. Jones's much-substantiated story of being propositioned by Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock on May 8, 1991, when she was a twenty-four-year-old Arkansas state employee, was typical of the situation in which many young women of her time and class found themselves during the Clinton era. Yet few episodes so starkly expressed the inherent sexism, class discrimination, and willful myopia of the Washington establishment as the Jones case. The media, national women's organizations, leaders throughout the Congress, and organized labor and other ostensibly progressive institutions alternately ignored, dismissed, or even belittled Jones and witnesses like her. The studied hypocrisy and insensitivity to the underlying issues of abuse of power and exploitation of women would be one more vivid example of the capital's culture of complicity.
-- Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, by Roger Morris
Mr. Clinton’s name was notably missing when the feminist publication Jezebel cited “Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, R. Kelly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump” as “not the only men who have allegedly abused women from positions of great power.”
The feminists were the biggest letdown. As a politically active Democrat, I believed in women's rights, though I was never a militant feminist. Still, I thought I was both "liberated" and strong. I stood up for myself and spoke out against injustice. I became appalled at the way the feminists refused to support me. That really disillusioned me. I kept thinking, Of course the conservatives are supporting me, but where are the women?
In the end, even NOW president Patricia Ireland was despicable. She gave Clinton a pass, dismissing his behavior by saying, "All of us knew he was a snake when we voted for him." [25] When Juanita Broaddrick's rape allegation emerged, Ireland said the media should "stop wasting time on unprovable charges." [26]
Ireland actually advocated for me when my story first came out. "If what Kathleen Willey says happened, we have moved from talking about a womanizer or a philanderer to talking about the behavior of a sexual predator," Ireland said to Lisa Myers. [27] She also said, "If it's true, it's sexual assault... Now we're talking about, really, sexual predators and people who, in positions of power, who use that power to take advantage of women." [28] Later, however, she rallied her troops against impeaching the president for perjury and obstruction of justice regarding his assault on me. "No matter how offensive the president's behavior was, it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense," she said. "And the no-holds-barred attack by the ultra-conservatives on women's issues is a far more onerous threat to women and our families." [29] I tried to call her, but she wouldn't take my calls. Of course she wouldn't. What could she possibly say? She calls herself a feminist and this is how she regards a woman who has been sexually assaulted by the most powerful man in the country?
Madeleine Albright echoed Ireland's comment about me. "Yeah," she said, "if it' s true ... "
Singing the same chorus, feminist icon Gloria Steinem "suggested that if the allegations are true, Bill Clinton is a sex addict." [30] Later, she declared that Clinton hadn't committed harassment because he "took no for an answer." Her verdict misses the point. Clinton did not harass me. He assaulted me, which is not just a civil offense but a criminal one. Steinem, however, couldn't care less. In an even more revelatory comment, she added, "The truth of the matter is that [Clinton's] behavior toward women is considerably better than any president I know of." [31] Once again, a free pass.
Then there was Betty Friedan, who said, "She should have slapped him across the face." What kind of feminist blames the victim? And does she really think that when a woman is assaulted by a man, she should slap him across the face and that should be the end of it? Is this really the message she wants to convey to our sisters and our daughters?
"Jesse Jackson, who had been praying with Clinton in the midst of the Lewinsky scandal, chimed in with an excuse for Clinton, rather than a defense," wrote Candice Jackson. [32] "Sex is not the one string on the guitar," Maureen Dowd reported the Reverend Jackson said of the scandal. "There are nine more commandments." [33]
Then James Carville blathered, "He's a good man who did a bad thing." Carville added, "You can't take him to task for his personal behavior." Excuse me? That's personal? The president of the United States, who has to send men off to war, behaves like that in the Oval Office? Seduces young women in the Oval Office? Assaults married women in the Oval Office? This is not personal behavior. At the very least, it is unprofessional. At worst, it is abuse and assault. Obviously, advocating it -- on any level -- is wrong.
Clinton's henchmen trashed me, just as they trashed all of the women. All of us. And they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Many more feminists couldn't even bring themselves to comment. The president of the National Women's Political Caucus said she "wanted to remain circumspect." The president of the National Women's Law Center "declined to pass judgment." So did the president of the Women's Legal Defense Fund. [34] Senator Dianne Feinstein only said that, "The word of the president is a very important thing." [35] Even Anita Hill, whose claims of sexual harassment almost derailed the nomination of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, said that since Clinton advocates for women on the grand scale, nothing I had said should derail his presidency. "I don't think that most women have come to the point where we've said, 'Well, this is so bad that even if he is better on the bigger issues, we can't have him as president.''' [36] Her statement affirms the "feminist" view that women should make or withhold a claim like mine -- and hers! -- based on the ideology of the perpetrator rather than on what the man actually did to a woman, or women!
Nationally syndicated radio host Monica Crowley points out the hypocrisy of these so-called feminists. "If feminist groups such as NOW were really serious about their professed objective about 'female empowerment,' they would have rallied to Bill Clinton's female accusers, supported them in their David and Goliath struggles against this powerful man," Crowley recently railed on her program. "Instead, they rallied to him. They put politics first and looked the other way." [37]
Many people could have intervened in this ugly saga to keep Bill Clinton from harming women. But one woman above all of them was in a position to make Bill behave.
That woman is, of course, Hillary.
When news of the Monica Lewinsky affair broke, Hillary had been married to her wayward husband for more than twenty years. But Hillary charged to Bill's defense. "Certainly," she said publicly of the allegations, "I believe they're false. Absolutely." [38] She went on the Today Show and told Matt Lauer, "Bill and I have been accused of everything, including murder, by some of the very same people who are behind these allegations. So from my perspective this is part of a continuing political campaign against my husband." Thus she invented the vast, right-wing conspiracy.
Just as Hillary did against Monica Lewinsky, Candice Jackson says she "defended her husband publicly and attacked every woman who leveled charges against him or disclosed consensual affairs with him." Hillary condemned all of us, denied our credibility, and expressed only contempt for us. "She is married to a man who mistreats women on a regular basis, and that marriage is the cornerstone of her own political success ... Not only will she excuse Bill's behavior, she will lead the smear team in discrediting and ruining women who come forward against him." [39] And she will do more than that.
The self-anointed queen of the feminists, Hillary smeared and stepped on every one of the women her husband seduced, accosted, and assaulted. Her position on women's empowerment is nothing more than empty hypocrisy.
-- Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Kathleen Willey
One celebrity who did break ranks was chef Anthony Bourdain, who criticized Mrs. Clinton's interview Thursday on CNN as “shameful in its deflection and disingenuousness,” sparking a backlash from Clinton supporters and aides.
The right hasn’t held back. After actor George Clooney condemned Mr. Weinstein’s behavior by citing Mr. Ailes and Mr. Cosby, fellow actor James Woods came out swinging.
“Did you forget President #BillClinton, George? The power imbalance between him and a helpless intern is prima facie sexual harassment,” said Mr. Woods, an outspoken conservative, on Twitter.
Mrs. Clinton has moved to shift attention to President Trump, telling the BBC in a Friday interview that “we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office.”
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski didn’t let the comment slide, noting that Mr. Clinton ended up paying $850,000 to settle the Paula Jones case and resigned from the Supreme Court bar rather than face disbarment for lying under oath.
“There was a sexual assaulter in the White House. He was called Bill Clinton,” Mr. Lewandowski said on Fox News, adding, “That’s the sexual assaulter she should be talking about in the White House.”
David Gergen said in a Frontline interview, "Watching Bill Clinton erupt is like watching Mt. Vesuvius. It is something to behold. He gets very red in the face and it goes very quick and it leaves." [94] A US News and World Report story also said of Clinton, "His rage built on itself, and some of his aides thought he might even get violent..." [95]
It is interesting to consider that Clinton's sexual arousal and aggressiveness appear to be related to his anger response. It certainly seems plausible that Clinton's deep-seated emotional issues would include a significant amount of anger around his mother's abandonment of him at a young age. Compound this with her overt sexuality in his presence and all the other complex dynamics that turned him into a sexual addict, and it is likely that, in his psyche, sexual arousal might well be associated with anger. Further complicating his internal dynamic, Clinton, a sex addict, likely has a few issues with himself over his behavior with women. Of course, I am no psychiatrist or sexual abuse expert. But, taken together, these clues might indicate that Clinton's anger issues are wound together with his sexual abuse mechanism, all of which expresses itself in the aroused man's beet red face. Twisted in his mind, perhaps inappropriate arousal triggers his anger. Alternatively, deep, subconscious anger might result in inappropriate, uncontrolled arousal. Either way, the ugly association of anger with arousal sounds dangerously close to a frightening and violent interpretation of "sex," namely rape.
Despite whatever crazy, psychosexual mechanism is at work in his mind and body, he is very savvy at the psych-out. He is a master predator. And that is precisely the problem with having Bill Clinton anywhere near the White House -- as president or first spouse. He is and always will be a sexual predator. Period. We have no reason to think otherwise, no evidence that he has received treatment, nor any other indication that his behavior has or will change, especially if he has the full powers of the presidency to enable his pursuits -- again.
As the child of an alcoholic, Clinton was predisposed biologically and socially to develop his own addiction, Levin says, adding that an "inappropriate early exposure to sexuality taught him to prematurely associate sex with excitement, secrecy, conflict, and intense arousal." Clinton's highly sexual mother perpetuated this dynamic and later added to it, promoting her smart and competent son to the role of her hero. As a teenager, Levin says, Bill filled his mother's need for a father-figure for Roger, his troubled younger brother, and served as a substitute "husband to his flirtatious [and near-sexual exhibitionist] mother." As a teenaged male, Bill was the man in his mother's life. Levin concludes, "There was something unhealthy in this -- excessive and somehow erotic." Levin explains that feelings of grandiosity and special status combined with Bill's successes, causing him to suffer a condition called "terminal uniqueness" -- the belief that he is special, absolutely different from other people, superior to them, and therefore powerful. [96]
For a brief moment in history, Clinton supposedly participated in "counseling" for his sexual addiction. That moment was fleeting. Though it is obvious that nothing has changed, Hillary's presidential campaign would have us believe that it is resolved. But a man with such a deep problem would require extensive intervention and likely even intensive inpatient treatment before he could overcome his lifelong pattern. What's more, his wife would have to contribute to such a recovery, and we have no evidence of that either.
When Clinton gave his famous "I have sinned" speech admitting that he had lied about Monica, he claimed to have had prayer breakfasts in the White House every week with Jesse Jackson. But Jackson himself seemed to refute the impact of those prayer sessions on Clinton. As Jackson himself put it, "There is nothing that this man won't do." According to Jackson biographer Marshall Frady, Jackson once said of Clinton, "He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there on him, you find absolutely nothing ... nothing but appetite." [97] So while he might have had weekly spiritual moments with Jesse Jackson nearly ten years ago, it is highly unlikely that his confessions changed Clinton's behavior in any way.
-- Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Kathleen Willey
Asked by the BBC about her dismissal of allegations against her husband by multiple women, Mrs. Clinton replied, “That has all been litigated.”
“That was the subject of a huge investigation as you might recall in the late ‘90s and there were conclusions drawn. That was clearly in the past,” she said.
In a Thursday interview, Mrs. Clinton blasted Mr. Weinstein’s alleged behavior as “intolerable in every way,” admitting that she would probably have considered him a friend.
The Clintons had rented a house in the Hamptons next to Mr. Weinstein’s vacation home, and Mrs. Clinton has been frequently photographed with the former head of the Weinstein Company over the years.
“People who never spoke out before having the courage to speak out just clearly demonstrates that this behavior that he engaged in cannot be tolerated,” Mrs. Clinton told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren accused the former First Lady of hypocrisy.
“The funniest thing about her comment there is that she finds this intolerable,” Ms. Lahren said Sunday on Fox’s “Watters’ World.” “Um, you’re still married to Bill. Apparently, you don’t find these things that intolerable.”
Actress Alyssa Milano launched the #MeToo hashtag on Sunday, unleashing a flood of retweets from women who included stars Debra Messing and Anna Paquin, as well as liberal groups like Planned Parenthood and the Women’s March.
Also retweeting was conservative radio host Dana Loesch, who said she spent her weekend “preparing to move due to repeated threats from gun control advocates.”
More than a dozen women have said they were pressured for sex or harassed by Mr. Weinstein over a period spanning nearly two decades, including three who told the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow that he raped them.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Weinstein has denied allegations of “nonconsensual sex” and said that “there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”
“Mr. Weinstein has begun counseling, has listened to the community and is pursuing a better path,” said spokeswoman Sallie Hofmeister in a statement last week.
He was expelled Saturday from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which said in a statement that it hoped to “send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over.”
