Politics Enabler or family defender? How Hillary Clinton responded to husband’s accusers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...dad5d4-6fb1-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html

Hillary Clinton has wrestled with allegations surrounding her husband’s infidelities for much of their 40-year marriage, including a sexual harassment lawsuit, a grand jury investigation and an impeachment vote centered on his untruthfulness about a relationship with a White House intern.

Now, her Republican opponent Donald Trump and his surrogates have signaled that he may bring up the subject in the next presidential debate, treacherous territory, given his own infidelities and treatment of women.

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Her detractors, though, say that Clinton has unfairly lashed out over the years at the women involved in her husband’s indiscretions. Her responses have forced her to walk a fine line during the campaign on sexual assault issues, even as she builds strong political support among female voters.

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Clinton’s Little Rock pastor, the Rev. Ed Matthews, recalled a conversation with her in 1992 after he noticed explicit drawings of Bill Clinton in the parking lot just outside the church that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton attended.

The pastor said he asked her in a phone call how she was dealing with it.

She responded bluntly, the Methodist minister said in an interview, telling him that her family had dealt with such rumors for years and would get through it.

The Trump campaign has argued that the issue facing Hillary Clinton as a candidate is not the behavior of her husband but the role she played in shaping responses to accusers. She discredited claims later revealed to be true and worked behind the scenes to help manage the allegations, according to former aides.

In November, the issue surfaced again after the Democratic candidate sent out a tweet saying that assault victims deserve to be believed. At a public forum in December, a questioner confronted Clinton and asked whether her comment also applied to her husband’s accusers.

“I would say that everybody should be believed at first,” she said, “until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”

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“I think, by then, Hillary had a very good notion of Bill’s behavior,” said her longtime friend Nancy Pietrafesa. “Maybe she endured it, but I don’t think she condoned it.”

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.

Former White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos recalled in his memoir discussing a woman’s allegation published in Penthouse Magazine. He said that after her husband dismissed it as untrue during a meeting, Hillary Clinton said, “We have to destroy her story.”

 

The issue they're raising is not Bill's infidelities, but how his wife viciously attacked his accusers and many of those accusations later proven to be true.

She's pro woman except when that woman was raped by her husband.

 

There is irrefutable proof. That is the point.

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.

 

Ok... so she was pissed at the woman her husband had an affair with. Not clear to me how that's some sort of smoking gun, unless your intent is to prove she has normal human feelings.

barfo

 

The most recent was Democrats with 60 votes in the senate, control of the house, and president - they blew Bush's deficits and debt sky high. The current president also started wars in several countries and surrendered Iraq to ISIS.

 

She's the one running on the woman card. Her abuse of these women who were assaulted by her husband doesn't square with that.

 

The Bimbo Squad. It wasn't about being angry, it was proactive destroy the women as soon as they came forward.

It's exactly the kind of thing that a pro woman candidate would not do and would fight against. That women might not come forward if they're afraid to be smeared in the press, harassed, or weight of campaign war chest brought to bear against them, shouldn't be tolerated.

 

This. So what she was angry, she actively despised the women her husband had affairs with. What woman wouldn't. Denial is a part of grief, she didn't want accept that her husband was with these bimbos...

To who cares about Bill Clinton's sex life. He got some. All presidents have. I don't care because it didn't impede his duties as president...he was a damned good president. There are other presidents who have done far worse...I don't care to hear about a 70 year olds sex life. Not appropriate for the campaign trail or the debates. It's not

 

It's not about him having affairs. That's between him and his wife.

It's about using political power to destroy the women who came forward to complain. She built an organization of people to discredit and destroy the reputations of these women.

Or having the campaign manager say stuff like "drag a $5 bill through a trailer park..."

Stay classy, Clintons.

 

The right wing New York Times has a take on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/u...illary-clintons-strength-with-women.html?_r=0

But at an Upper East Side dinner party a few months back, Ms. Dunham expressed more conflicted feelings. She told the guests at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, that she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies discredited women who said they had had sexual encounters with or been sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton.

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But the resurfacing of the scandals of the 1990s has brought about a rethinking among some feminists about how prominent women stood by Mr. Clinton and disparaged his accusers after the “bimbo eruptions,” as a close aide to the Clintons, Betsey Wright, famously called the claims of affairs and sexual assault against Mr. Clinton in his 1992 campaign.

Even some Democrats who participated in the effort to discredit the women acknowledge privately that today, when Mrs. Clinton and other women have pleaded with the authorities on college campuses and in workplaces to take any allegation of sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously, such a campaign to attack the women’s character would be unacceptable.

Back then, Mr. Clinton’s aides, having watched Gary Hart’s presidential hopes unravel over his relationship with Donna Rice in the 1988 Democratic primary race, were determined to quash any accusations against Mr. Clinton early and aggressively, former campaign aides said. Mrs. Clinton had supported the effort to push back against the women’s stories.

Much of her involvement played out behind the scenes and was driven in part by her sense that right-wing forces were using the women and salacious stories to damage her husband’s political ambitions.

Her reflex was to protect him and his future, and early on, she turned to a longtime Clinton loyalist, Ms. Wright, to defend him against the allegations, according to multiple accounts at the time, documented in books and oral histories.

“We have to destroy her story,” Mrs. Clinton said in 1991 of Connie Hamzy, one of the first women to come forward during her husband’s first presidential campaign, according to George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton administration aide who described the events in his memoir, “All Too Human.” (Three people signed sworn affidavits saying Ms. Hamzy’s story was false.)

When Gennifer Flowers later surfaced, saying that she had had a long affair with Mr. Clinton, Mrs. Clinton undertook an “aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit” Ms. Flowers, according to anexhaustive biography of Mrs. Clinton, “A Woman in Charge,” by Carl Bernstein.

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Over the years, the Clinton effort to cast doubt on the women included using words like “floozy,” “bimbo” and “stalker,” and raising questions about their motives. James Carville, a longtime strategist for Mr. Clinton, was especially cutting in attacking Ms. Flowers. “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” Mr. Carville said of Ms. Flowers. (Mr. Carville has maintained that earlier reports indicating that he had made the remark about Paula Jones, another Clinton accuser, were incorrect.)