The events of the late 1990s are burned into many brains. However, there are many who either weren’t around for them or who learned the wrong things — and those are the people Donald Trump will try to bamboozle on tonight’s debate.
Let’s start with the nastiest attack, the alleged rape that the alleged victim, Juanita Hickey Broaddrick, had categorically denied, under oath, ever happened.
The story had been swirling around right-wing cesspool circles for years, yet no legitimate news organization had found any evidence to justify deeply investigating it. The only reason it got any news coverage, even in the anti-Clinton feeding frenzy that gripped the U.S. media during those years, was because Alan Murray, the Washington bureau chief of the (pre-Murdoch-purchase) Wall Street Journal had gone on vacation, which allowed the rabid-assed right-winger editorial folk led by Robert Bartley to smuggle into the editorial pages a factually-challenged Dorothy Rabinowitz hit piece that would otherwise not have seen print. (Murray said he first found out about the piece from visiting Matt Drudge’s website.) This piece was done to force NBC to air an embarrasingly bad Lisa Myers piece on the story, one that NBC news executives shelved because it stank to high heaven. David Neiwert filleted it in 2003 in a series of comments at the Amptoons blog.
(By the way, Rabinowitz recently endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. I rather doubt she would have done so if she really believed Hillary’s husband really was the vile person depicted in her 1999 WSJ editorial hit piece.)
J.H.-B., who Neiwert suspects was carefully coached, claimed to have been bitten so severely on her lower lip that it turned “black” and almost came off, and that she explained it all away to her husband as an accident. Yet her husband at the time, Gary Hickey (who she was cheating on with her soon-to-be next husband David Broaddrick), says he never saw her with any sort of lip injury, much less heard it explained as a “accident”.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, she herself said, under oath, that it never happened when she was giving a deposition in the Paula Jones nuisance lawsuit. (Ironically, Fred Barnes, one of the Republican commentators who most strenuously promoted this story, was a few years earlier loudly denouncing very similar accusations made by Selene Walters against Ronald Reagan.)
[UPDATE: Norma Rogers, Hickey-Broaddrick’s nurse friend and employee at the nursing home she ran, hated Governor Clinton for giving a pardon to the person convicted of killing her father. This was one of the things that made NBC’s news room — which at the time was still dominated by Roger “FOX News” Ailes’ hires and was not known for its friendliness towards Democrats — put aside the Myers video.]
Speaking of the Jones lawsuit: That’s the suit where Jones — whose then-spouse Steven Jones was a big wheel in the Arkansas GOP — first sued Bill Clinton because of a story (which Bill had nothing to do with) in the American Spectator that was claiming she was Bill’s girlfriend. When it was pointed out that Bill was also a victim of that libel and thus her real grievance was with the magazine and/or the author and his sources, she bizarrely decided to change the focus, but not the target, of the suit several times, finally settling on sexual harassment.
Paula’s marriage to Steven started to fall apart once it was clear that the legal costs would eat up any of the go-away money they got for settling the case out of court; he left her almost before the ink dried on the settlement, leaving her so destitute she posed nude for Penthouse in order to put food on the table. (This was not the first time she appeared nude in that magazine; photos she’d posed for in a private session in 1987 wound up there seven years later when the photographer apparently decided to cash in on her fame.)
A good precis of many of the VRWC players, including Kathleen Willey, can be found here. Here’s the entry for Paula Jones:
Steven Jones was the mastermind behind Paula's lawsuit. If you remember, it was originally about the alleged loss of her good name, due to David Brock's "Troopergate" story in American Spectator, the Scaife-propped-up conservative mag that for most of the 1990s existed mainly to further the aims of the "Arkansas Project", the giant smear operation launched against Clinton by the conservative movement. Brock's article had alleged that a woman named "Paula" had met Clinton at an Arkansas hotel in May of 1991. When asked about this, Clinton denied that this had ever happened. When intelligent people started asking her why she was suing Clinton instead of Brock, the troopers or the American Spectator, she suddenly changed her lawsuit to claim sexual harrassment on Clinton's part. However, her story was so shaky -- and kept changing so often -- that the case never made it to trial.
One key problem: Clinton was not in the hotel when Jones said he was -- in fact, he was standing on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion, in the midst of a well-attended public function. Oooops!
Eventually, Clinton paid Jones' lawyers (who by then were themselves sick of Jones and her husband) a sizable sum just to make sure it would be settled for good. Steven Jones divorced Paula soon thereafter. As for David Brock, he has repented of his deceitful ways. He is now on record, in his book Blinded by the Right, as saying that the Jones case was bogus from the get-go.
Now, armored with at least some of the facts, you can head off the gibes of your right-wing relations at the pass.