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

[Ubiquitous]

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.

Clinton’s friends say they have seen her deal with Bill Clinton’s
conduct before, bristling at threats and countering them with steely
determination. Her reaction, said longtime Arkansas friend Jim
Blair, is to face accusers and respond thusly: “These people are not
going to run over us.”

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.

Donald Trump told supporters in Spokane, Washington on Saturday, May
7 that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was an
"enabler" for what he said was her husband, President Bill
Clinton's, mistreatment of women. (Reuters)

Trump and his backers have kept the subject alive with taunting
social-media messages, and this week, Trump congratulated himself
for taking the high road Monday in the first debate by not saying
something “extremely rough” about the Clinton family. He added that
he might not show the same restraint at the next public forum on
Oct. 9.

Eric Trump said Tuesday that his father had displayed “courage” by
not waging the attack, even as Trump’s surrogates began to do so on
national television. Clinton’s allies say she is well-equipped to
fend off the attacks.

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.”

On Wednesday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in a
statement: “After his disastrous debate performance and his sexist
attack on a former Miss Universe over her weight, Donald Trump is
now trying to deflect by going after Hillary Clinton about her
marriage.

“While Trump and lieutenants like Roger Stone and David Bossie may
want to dredge up failed attacks from the 1990s, as many Republicans
have warned, this is a mistake that is going to backfire. He can try
to distract from his demeaning comments against women, but if Donald
Trump thinks these attacks against Hillary Clinton are going to
throw her off her game and what matters to move this country
forward, he is wrong.”

‘She knew he liked attention’

Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas in 1974, and Blair said rumors of
Bill’s womanizing were not a dealbreaker for Hillary before she
agreed to marry him in 1975.

“She knew he liked attention, and he liked attention from anyone,”
Blair said. “From the barber, the shoeshine boy, the homeless man.
It didn’t matter.”

Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978 and served as
attitudes were shifting about the relevance of politicians’ sex
lives. Presidential candidate Gary Hart’s overnight cruise with a
young woman doomed his hopes in 1987. Not long after, Bill Clinton’s
then-chief of staff Betsey Wright confronted him and told him to
come clean with his wife, Wright wrote in emails now archived at the
University of Arkansas.

“Some day I hope Hillary will understand why Bill and I developed
such a tense relationship,” Wright wrote in 1998. Wright declined
interview requests.

A marital crisis erupted while Bill Clinton was governor, and
Hillary Clinton’s biographer Carl Bernstein wrote in “A Woman In
Charge” that it involved his lengthy affair with a Little Rock
woman.

Hillary Clinton may have become aware of her husband’s straying,
“but she never accepted it,” said her longtime friend Ann Henry.

Hillary Clinton has been forthcoming about these painful early
times. She told Talk Magazine in 1998 that the couple confronted his
cheating in the late 1980s. “I thought he understood it, but he
didn’t go deep enough or work hard enough,” she said.

Blair said Hillary Clinton realized that the infidelities threatened
more than their marriage. “Her idea, I think, was, if he’s going to
be politically successful they have to become more conventional
people who are more in tune with values of generations other than
theirs,” Blair said.

When Bill Clinton launched a presidential run in 1991, his wife and
senior staff considered how to deal with what came to be known as
“bimbo eruptions.”

“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.”

Hillary Clinton’s support for her husband was crucial, and she sat
by his side during a crucial “60 Minutes” interview, saying she was
not like the victim in Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” Campaign
pollster Stan Greenberg said at the time that the public would
disregard the allegations if they believed he had been truthful to
his wife.

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

As other women emerged, Hillary Clinton helped forge aggressive de­
fenses.

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.”

By July 1992, the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to
investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations.

In 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones alleged in a
lawsuit that Bill Clinton groped her in a hotel room three years
earlier. Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography, “Living
History,” that she erred in opposing an early settlement.

Eventually, Bill Clinton settled for $850,000. During discovery,
Jones’s attorneys found out about White House intern Monica
Lewinsky.

Her husband denied the relationship, and Hillary Clinton blamed the
allegations on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Asked on “Good Morning America” if her husband had been truthful,
she said, “I know he has.”

A former White House aide who spoke on the conditions of anonymity
to talk about private discussions said Hillary Clinton blamed the
scandal on political enemies and insisted that privacy was sacred.

Bill Clinton admitted his untruthfulness in August 1998.

First lady Hillary Clinton talks with "The Today Show" host Matt
Lauer in a 1998 interview. Clinton responded to questions about her
husband's alleged affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
(Agence France-Presse)

Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography that her husband claimed
Lewinsky had misinterpreted his attention. “It was such a familiar
scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were
groundless,” she wrote.

A chill fell over the White House as the truth about Lewinsky
emerged, former staffers and friends said.

“She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts,
stand by her man and savage his enemies,” Stephanopoulos wrote,
describing Hillary Clinton’s reaction.

“I think it was obvious she was more than mad, more than upset,”
said Mary Mel French, a White House aide during the Clinton years.
“She wasn’t speaking to him. .?.?. It took a long time for that to
settle down.”

Hillary Clinton did not speak publicly about Lewinsky and confided
in few people. Matthews, her Little Rock pastor, said he offered to
listen, but she warned him that he might be subpoenaed.

“She’s not the type of person who calls friends and cries about it,”
Henry said.

Hillary Clinton opened up to Blair’s wife, Diane, a few weeks later,
according to a diary kept by the now-deceased friend. “She thinks
she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of
her own concerns and struggles,” Diane Blair wrote. “It was a lapse,
but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull
away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony
toon;’ but it was beyond control.”

Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that she found Hillary
Clinton’s “impulse to blame the Woman — not only me, but herself —
troubling.” She declined an interview request.

Accuser Juanita Broaddrick, whose claim of a 1978 sexual assault has
been denied by the Clintons, thinks Hillary Clinton was too passive.
“I always felt if she’d been a stronger person .?.?. she could have
done something about his behavior,” she said.

Questions during Senate run

In 2000, while running for the U.S. Senate seat in New York, Hillary
Clinton was asked whether she misled the public by defending her
husband.

“It is something that I regret deeply that anyone had to go
through,” she said. “And I wish that we all could look at it from
the perspective of history, but we can’t yet.”

In her treatment of the accusers, Trump has called Clinton an
enabler.

Her friends say it’s much more benign.

“I think she felt that she had committed her life to this guy,” Jim
Blair said. “They can debate politics from breakfast until bedtime
and never get tired of it. She wanted to spend the rest of her life
with him. She loved him. It’s as simple as that.”


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In the War on Women, Hillary fought an entire platoon of sexually
abused females on behalf of Bill.