By Caitlin Flanagan, November 17, 2017<\/p>\n
Hillary Clinton once tweeted that \u201cevery survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.\u201d What about Jaunita Broaddrick?<\/p>\n If the ground beneath your feet feels cold, it\u2019s because Hell froze over the other day. It happened at 8:02 p.m. on Monday, when The New York Times<\/em> published an op-ed called \u201cI Believe Juanita.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Written by Michelle Goldberg, it was a piece that, 20 years ago, likely would have inflamed the readership of the paper and scandalized its editors. Reviewing the credibility of Broaddrick\u2019s claim, Goldberg wrote that \u201cfive witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened,\u201d an important standard in reviewing the veracity of claims of past sex crimes.<\/p>\n But Goldberg\u2019s was not a single snowflake of truth; rather it was part of an avalanche of honesty in the elite press, all of it begun by a seemingly innocuous tweet<\/a> by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes.\u00a0 \u201cAs gross and cynical and hypocritical as the right’s \u2018what about Bill Clinton\u2019 stuff is,\u201d he wrote, \u201cit\u2019s also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.\u201d<\/p>\n What happened next can only be compared to the moment when Glinda the Good Witch of the South came to Munchkinland and told the little people that it was finally safe. Come out, come out, where ever you are!<\/em><\/p>\n The tweet galvanized not just the usual Clinton haters of Fox News but also a cadre of the most unexpected players: editors of the kind of prestige publications that have traditionally handled the accusations of Clinton\u2019s accusers with nearly pathological disdain. But not this time. When Hayes\u2019 tweet became a sensation, editors at the best shops gave marquee writers a radioactive assignment, which they gladly accepted. By midday Wednesday there was such a glut of \u201cI Believe Juanita\u201d pieces that Chelsea Clinton couldn\u2019t have sold one.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Peter Baker of The New York Times<\/em> wrote a story<\/a> about this watershed moment that included the testimony of the liberal blogger, Matthew Yglesias, writing<\/a> that \u201cI think we got it wrong;\u201d Jeff Greenfield of Politico<\/em> observing<\/a> that liberals could be having a \u201cmoral awakening;\u201d and David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, saying<\/a> that even Monica Lewinsky\u2014who never claimed she was abused in any way by Clinton\u2014\u201cdeserves an apology from many of us she has never received.\u201d<\/p>\n Enough time has passed that outing Clinton for his alleged sex crimes now has the same retro, \u201cOh grow up\u201d feeling as revealing that JFK had lovers\u2014nobody\u2019s perfect. But let\u2019s not fool ourselves. \u201cI Believe Juanita\u201d doesn\u2019t just mean that you\u2019re generally in favor of believing women when they report sex crimes. It means you believe that for eight years our country was in the hands of a violent rapist.<\/p>\n Broaddrick\u2019s account\u2014now accepted not just by a vast right-wing conspiracy, but also by a gathering number of liberal writers\u2014is of an attack as brutal and unambiguous as the worst of the alleged Weinstein assaults<\/a>. Clinton, she says, manipulated his way into her hotel room, threw her down on the bed, yanked off her pantyhose, and raped her. She says he bit her lip hard enough to leave it bloodied. \u201cYou better put some ice on that,\u201d she remembers him telling her as he walked out the door, headed off to his important work of feeling other people\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n When I have talked about these matters to progressives over the past week, I have encountered a fairly consistent response. It is no longer a frank denial of the weight and gravity of Broaddrick\u2019s testimony. \u00a0Rather it is a frustrated, and dismissive statement of fact, one that can be reduced to the following formulation: I feel sorry for Juanita Broaddrick, but Bill Clinton was an excellent president. <\/em>It\u2019s a sentiment that encompasses the bitter and irreducible truth about being female in this world. There is sympathy for a rape victim\u2014but she shouldn\u2019t go around destroying a man\u2019s reputation or family or career. Rape, unlike murder, is accepted as such an unremarkable fact of the human experience that a woman who spends years seeking redress for the crime comes to be viewed as some kind of lunatic, rejected lover, or tool of a vast conspiracy.<\/p>\n When three of Clinton\u2019s principal accusers<\/a> accepted Donald Trump\u2019s invitation to sit front-row at a presidential debate, they were largely regarded by the left as a gallery of ghouls and liars. But that was politics, and an election was stake. Now\u2014when all is lost\u2014there\u2019s been a change. The truth bats last.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Liberals seem almost giddy with relief, admitting what they believe\u2014which is how it always feels when you finally decide that you\u2019re going to say what you really think and to Hell with the consequences. The truth does set you free, but it usually comes at a price, which is why it will probably take another 20 years to open The New York Times<\/em> and read an editorial called, \u201cHillary Knew.\u201d<\/p>\n How could she not have known? \u00a0She\u2019s a hugely intelligent woman, a visionary and a political street fighter; someone who knows her way through a difficult thicket of legal explanations as well as someone who understands as well as anyone the insane tactics of the fringe right and the surprising number of people who are gullible enough to fall prey to them. She didn\u2019t kill her friend<\/a>Vince Foster; she wasn\u2019t running a child trafficking operation<\/a> at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria; and the Whitewater land deal<\/a> was not the product of a white-collar crime on the scale of Enron\u2019s pension thefts. Nor was she merely a machine politician lost in the wonkery of policy and unable to effect meaningful change.<\/p>\n As first lady, Hillary Clinton created a children\u2019s health insurance program that continues to provide health care to millions of American children; as a U.S. senator she secured<\/a> the billions of federal dollars necessary to right the great damage done to the New York City and its residents after 9\/11. \u00a0But in addition to these great and good works, she must have looked at the facts about Juanita Broaddrick and decided to put them in the same locked box where she kept the truth of Bill\u2019s consensual affairs. As a wife, she had every right to do that. But as a Democratic candidate for president\u2014one whose historic campaign was largely centered on the glass ceiling and the rise of women\u2014she had a Grand Canyon-sized vulnerability, as she learned a year before the general election when she blithely tweeted out<\/a> this corker: \u201cEvery survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s our Hillary\u2014and that\u2019s the woman that even some of her staunchest supporters have been gritting their teeth over for decades. (At least O.J. Simpson had the grace to spend a few months looking for \u201cthe real killer.\u201d) \u00a0Hillary had put the many women who\u2019d credibly accused her husband of sexual misconduct into the forgetting hole and forgotten that women\u2014progressive women and conservative women alike\u2014have a very different view of rape and assault than they did 20 years ago. We don\u2019t send victims who lack a police report or a photograph of their bruises to the back of the line. We understand that rape is so violent and so scarring that it can take years for a woman to come forward to describe it. We understand that\u2014as with the women now accusing the U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore<\/a> of sex crimes\u2014it can take an abuser\u2019s rise to greater fame and power that prompts them to stand up for themselves and tell the painful truth.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, posed the greatest existential threat to progressive goals and values of the past half-century. He also had a long string of women come forward with very credible accounts of sexual harassment and misconduct. A different Democratic candidate would have cut him off at the knees for that, but Hillary had to be careful<\/a> because of her husband\u2019s past and because of her own widely believed complicity in helping to marginalize and silence his accusers.<\/p>\n So maybe, in the end, she\u2019s one more casualty of the truly vast conspiracy: the one that swings into action every time a woman stands up\u2014usually alone, and almost always afraid\u2014and says, \u201cHe raped me.\u201d<\/p>\n