Did Bill Clinton Rape Juanita Broaddrick? Reviewing the Evidence

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Bill Clinton on a visit to Juanita Broaddrick’s (right) nursing home in 1978 in Van Buren, Arkansas. (Getty)

For years, a former nursing administrator named Juanita Broaddrick has claimed that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978 when he was the attorney general of Arkansas.

Donald Trump – reeling from his own lewd comments in a videotaped conversation with a former Access Hollywood host, which he apologized for – raised the allegations by retweeting Broaddrick’s claims during the presidential campaign, even tweeting out a video interview in which Broaddrick details the allegations against Bill Clinton.

Broaddrick herself has continued to publicly raise the claims on social media, especially in recent months. She also accuses Hillary Clinton of trying to silence her. She wrote this tweet after actress Alyssa Milano urged women who have been sexually assaulted or harassed to write “me too” on social media in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations in October 2017.

Clinton’s lawyer denies the claims, and charges were never filed. What’s the evidence? What follows is an outline of what we know about the case.


Broaddrick Says Clinton Raped Her in a Little Rock Hotel but Did Not Report the Allegations at the Time

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Juanita Broaddrick. (Twitter)

According to the Wall Street Journal, in 1978, Broaddrick was a nursing home owner and Clinton campaign worker when Clinton, then attorney general of Arkansas, visited one of her nursing homes while running for governor. He invited the married Broaddrick to visit his campaign headquarters in Little Rock. She soon went there for a seminar, and so she called him, and was told to meet him at a coffee shop in the Camelot Hotel, says the Wall Street Journal, recounting Broaddrick’s allegations.

Broaddrick alleges that Clinton then suggested that they have the coffee in her room because it was noisy in the shop, and he raped her there.

Three weeks after she says the rape occurred, Broaddrick attended a Clinton fundraiser, according to Slate Magazine.

The Washington Post reported that Clinton’s enemies wanted Broaddrick to speak out in 1992 when he was running for president but “she refused.” She did not publicly discuss the allegations until 1999.


There Is Corroboration for Some of the Surrounding Details in Her Story, but No Direct Physical Evidence

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Dolly Kyle says she had a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton for nearly two decades. (Facebook/Dolly Kyle)

The Weekly Standard says that Broaddrick claimed that Clinton said she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant because he was sterile due to mumps, and two women who say they had consensual affairs with him, Gennifer Flowers and Dolly Kyle Browning, have also said he told them he had infertility problems. There are allegations that Clinton bit other women’s lips during sexual encounters; the Daily Caller says there are multiple other reports of women making non-consensual sexual allegations against Bill Clinton, demonstrating a pattern. Again, though, Clinton has never been arrested or charged with sexual assault.

National Review says there is documentation to corroborate the claim that Broaddrick was at the Little Rock seminar that day.

Slate reports that, although Broaddrick did not remember the date she says the rape occurred when she finally publicly discussed it, she did provide the hotel name and the name of the seminar that drew her to Little Rock. According to Slate, “She also says that Clinton pointed to a ramshackle prison outside the hotel room window before he raped her…NBC News found a date when a nursing home seminar was held in the Camelot Hotel and records show that Broaddrick attended. Newspaper reports suggest that Clinton was in the area and had no official commitments in the early morning…There was a prison outside the hotel window.”

These details do not prove the rape happened, of course. But they do corroborate pieces of Broaddrick’s story or at least they don’t refute it.


Broaddrick Has Graphically Described the Alleged Assault in TV Interviews, Including Claims Clinton Forcefully Bit Her Lip

Trump tweeted out a video interview Broaddrick gave to the conservative site Breitbart. You can watch that video interview above. In it, Broaddrick says:

I kept telling him no. I don’t want this at all. You must have had the wrong idea. And he wouldn’t listen… and he grabbed me again very forcefully and started biting on my top lip. And this was extremely painful. I thought he was going to bite my lip off. And that’s when he pushed me back on the bed…

After stopping for a moment, an emotional and crying Broaddrick, who is now retired, then said, “I’m afraid of him… I’m still afraid. Especially if she becomes president.”

She then said Bill Clinton “tore the waist of my skirt, and then he ripped my pantyhose, and then he raped me. It was very vicious. I was just pinned down.”

Broaddrick has given televised interviews imparting the same details in the past. In 1999, she went on the NBC News Dateline television program and shared her allegations for the first time publicly to Lisa Myers in the wake of the Ken Starr investigation into allegations that Clinton sexually harassed Paula Jones (he later settled the Jones case for $850,000). Watch the Dateline interview here:

Broaddrick also previously granted a televised interview to Sean Hannity. Watch it here:

You can read a full transcript of Broaddrick’s Lisa Myers’ interview here.


There Were 5 Contemporaneous Witnesses at the Time, Reports Say

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Juanita Broaddrick. (Twitter)

Slate Magazine reported of Broaddrick’s allegations: “Five people say she told them about the assault right after it allegedly happened.”

One of those witnesses was Norma Rogers. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rogers was a fellow nurse along for the seminar who said in an interview that she found Broaddrick on the bed “in a state of shock–lips swollen to double their size, mouth discolored from the biting, her pantyhose torn in the crotch. She just stayed on the bed and kept repeating, ‘I can’t believe what happened.'” Rogers says she applied ice to Juanita’s mouth.

Rogers repeated the account, which she first gave years ago, to “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” in 2016, according to The UK Daily Mail, saying of Broaddrick, “She was crying. And the thing I think I remember most is that her mouth was all swollen up. It was cut. … Her pantyhose were all ripped.”

The conservative site Breitbart has also posted audio of Rogers discussing the Broaddrick allegations. You can listen to it here. Rogers said Broaddrick didn’t want to come forward years ago at the time in part because she was married and didn’t know how to tell her husband, said UK Daily Mail.

National Review says Rogers alleges “Broaddrick told her that Bill Clinton had ‘forced himself on her'” at the time.

According to National Review, four other people say that Broaddrick contemporaneously told them that Clinton had raped her: David Broaddrick, her second husband, was having an affair with her at the time. He alleges he “remembers Juanita’s arriving home with a swollen lip and telling him that she had been assaulted by Bill Clinton,” says National Review. Broaddrick’s friends Susan Lewis, Louis Ma, and Rogers’ sister Jean Darden also say that Broaddrick told them about the allegations at the time, says National Review. However, complicating matters, as governor, Clinton commuted the sentence of their father’s killer, says the news site.


Clinton Himself Has Never Specifically Addressed the Allegations

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Bill Clinton address a crowd in Little Rock, Arkansas in April, 2000. (Getty)

The National Review writes of the Broaddrick allegations, “It remains not only the most credible accusation against Clinton and the most serious. It is also the one about which the Clintons have said the least.”

Back in 1999, when the allegations first came to light publicly in a big way, Bill Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, denied the allegations.

“Any allegation that the president assaulted Ms. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false,” Clinton’s personal attorney, David E. Kendall, said in a statement, according to The Washington Post. “Beyond that we are not going to comment.”

However, Bill Clinton himself has never addressed them despite being heckled at multiple campaign appearances by people crying out “rapist.” Slate says Clinton “refuses” to comment beyond his lawyer’s statement.

National Review says the “entire record of the Clintons’ response to Broaddrick’s allegations amounts to one line,” Kendall’s old comment.


Broaddrick Denied the Allegations in a Sworn Affidavit

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Paula Jones. (Getty)

According to Slate, Broaddrick “denied the rape in a 1997 affidavit filed with Paula Jones’ lawyers but changed her story the next year, when she was interviewed by the FBI in the course of Kenneth Starr’s investigation.”

In part, Broaddrick said in the affidavit, according to The Washington Post, which has run it in full:

During the 1992 Presidential campaign there were unfounded rumors and stories circulated that Mr. Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward me in the late seventies. Newspaper and tabloid reporters hounded me and my family, seeking corroboration of these tales. I repeatedly denied the allegations and requested that my family’s privacy be respected. These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family.

Starr, of course, was looking into sexual harassment allegations by Paula Jones, as well as Clinton’s consensual affair with the much younger Monica Lewinsky, who, as an intern, was his subordinate.

According to The Post, Broaddrick later said she lied in the affidavit because she didn’t want to be drawn into the Jones case, and she later recanted the above affidavit after Starr gave her immunity.

Also in 2007, Broaddrick was approached by private investigators for Paula Jones. They recorded the conversation. You can read the transcript here.

In it, she says she does not want to talk to them because “It’s very private. We’re talking about something 20 years ago” and “Yeah. It’s not pleasant, and I won’t even go into it.” She also said she believed Paula Jones was telling the truth, saying, “Yeah, she’s telling the truth. Anything she would say bad about him, she’s telling the truth.”

She said, “But you can’t get to him, and I’m not going to ruin my good name to do it” and “Well, there’s just absolutely no way that anyone can get to him, he’s just too vicious,” according to the transcript.


Broaddrick Claims That Hillary Clinton Encouraged Her to Remain Silent

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A 1992 photo shows then Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton (L) and his wife Hillary (R) embracing. (Getty)

Of course, Bill Clinton wasn’t running for president – Hillary Clinton was. Broaddrick has claimed that Hillary tried to silence her, according to The Hill.

Specifically, according to McClatchy DC, she alleges that Hillary approached her at an event after the alleged rape and: “She grabs my arm, very deliberatively, and looks at me very angrily” and Broaddrick then claims, paraphrases McClatchy, that Hillary “reminded Broaddrick that everything she did could have an impact on the campaign.”

The New Orleans Times Picayune says Broaddrick says “that just weeks after the incident, Hillary Clinton approached her at a political rally and appeared to thank her for her silence.”

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Broaddrick has said she is upset that Hillary Clinton tweeted the following in November 2015: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported.”


Broaddrick Has Repeatedly Tweeted About the Rape Allegations in Recent Years

On Twitter, Broaddrick defines herself as “Retired RN and business owner. I love working outside, playing tennis and family time with my son and grandson.” Since Hillary started running for president, she has tweeted repeatedly about the rape allegations.

Broaddrick’s above tweet renewed interest in her old allegations.

She has also recently tweeted comments such as:

Broaddrick often makes overt political commentary in her tweets, backing the Donald Trump and Mike Pence ticket and criticizing Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. She frequently retweets articles criticizing Clinton/Kaine and has raised questions about Hillary’s health. She has also said she was cyber bullied by Clinton supporters on Twitter. You can read more here: