Juanita Broaddrick Interview Broadcasts Details
of Clinton Rape Charge
By Patrick Riley     (edited by B.C. Chrysostom)
FOX News & NBC News - February 24, 1999
 
An Arkansas woman who accuses Bill Clinton of raping her 21 years ago told her story to the nation Wednesday night, calling the president "a vicious, awful person."

Broaddrick being interviewed on NBC's 'Dateline'		 NBC News aired the much-anticipated interview with the woman, Juanita Broaddrick, during the first half hour of Dateline NBC.

Speaking in soft, sometimes hushed tones, and in the accent of her native state, Broaddrick said Clinton forced himself on her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978 while he was state attorney general. Clinton has denied the charges.
Broaddrick, 55, owns and operates a successful nursing home in Van Buren, Arkansas. She told Dateline in the interview, taped Jan. 20, details which have recently been published in several newspapers.

She first met Clinton in April 1978 when he was making his first run for governor of Arkansas and she was a volunteer in his campaign. Clinton, she said, talked to her on a campaign stop and invited her to visit him at his campaign headquarters in Little Rock. She said she called him a week later when she was in the state capital for a nursing home seminar.

She said they had at first planned to meet at a coffee shop, but that he said he wanted to avoid some reporters, so they agreed to meet in her hotel room. In the room, Clinton kissed her, violently biting her lip and forced her to have sex, Broaddrick said on the televised interview, covering her face with her hands as she broke down sobbing.

“I had coffee sitting on a little table over there by the window and it was a real pretty window view that looked down at the river,” Broaddrick said. “And he came around me and sort of put his arm over my shoulder to point to this little building and he said he was real interested if he became governor to restore that little building and then all of a sudden, he turned me around and started kissing me. And that was a real shock. I first pushed him away and just told him ‘No, please don’t do that.’ ”
When Clinton persisted in kissing her, she said, he bit her top lip. “And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me,” Broaddrick said.

Broaddrick said her skirt and pantyhose were torn during the attack. “When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that (lip).’ And he turned and went out the door.”
"He was a different person at that moment," she said. "He was just a vicious awful person."

Lisa Myers (of NBC News) reported that three friends of Broaddrick’s said she told them of the alleged assault and that all told consistent stories.

Myers said NBC conducted its own investigation about unanswered questions and found:

  • There was a nursing home meeting at the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock on April 25, 1978, and Broaddrick got work credit for a nursing home seminar that was held that day.
  • The White House refused to look through records and say what Clinton was doing that day. A check of 45 Arkansas newspapers and talks with a dozen former Clinton staffers indicated Clinton was in Little Rock that day but had no public appearances in the morning, when the alleged incident occurred.

    Asked why she did not seek police or medical assistance, she replied, "I felt very responsible that I had allowed him to come into my room.... I didn't think anyone would believe me in the world."

    Broaddrick told NBC she has gone public with the story to clear up misinformation. "All these stories are floating around, different stories of what really happened and what people think happened," she said. "I was tired of people putting their own spin on it."

    When asked to describe her current feelings towards the president, she said her words were not suitable for television. "My hatred for him is overwhelming," she added.

    NBC was under pressure to air the interview since it took place last month. Internet site the Drudge Report began hammering the network early on. Calls and e-mail flooded the news organization and protesters even demonstrated outside the Today show windows.

    		•

    Broaddrick poses in 1978 at a nursing home with Bill Clinton, then attorney general and gubernatorial candidate    		 The final straw may have come Friday when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal published Broaddrick's allegations and questioned NBC's decision not to air the interview with her. Other papers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times followed suit.

    NBC has insisted that it had not been sitting on the story but had only just now finished reporting it. "I kept asking for more information and more cross-checking and more digging, and that takes time," NBC News President Andrew Lack told the Washington Post.

    President Clinton's personal lawyer David Kendall has denied the charge. "Any allegation that the president assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false," he said in a statement released on Friday. "Beyond that, we're not going to comment."
    Clinton, when asked about the allegation at a White House press conference Wednesday, replied, "My counsel has made a statement about the ... issue and I have nothing to add to it."

    Broaddrick's name came up in March of last year when it was reported that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who investigated Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, had subpeonaed information about her and three other women from the Jones' lawyers and reports that sealed "Jane Doe No. 5" documents were being considered by members of Congress in December appeared in several daily newspapers.

    Broaddrick's story also surfaced in the 1992 presidential campaign when a friend in whom she had confided revealed her allegations. But she never came forward publicly.

    Then, five years later, she was subpoenaed in Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Clinton. Jones' legal team had been tipped off about the allegations by a letter from Clinton opponent Philip Yoakum, an acquaintance of Broaddrick's.

    She refused to cooperate, denying the allegations in an affidavit reportedly supplied through her lawyer by White House attorneys Bruce Lindsey and Robert Bennett. "I just didn't want to drag my family through this," she told the New York Times.

    It was only last year, when she was interviewed by FBI agents for Starr and promised immunity, that she decided to change her tune. After talking to her husband, David Broaddrick, and her son, an attorney, she decided not to lie to federal investigators, the New York Times reported.

    Her story was not further pursued by Starr — it is mentioned only briefly in Starr's referral to congress — reportedly because her claim that the White House never pressured her to stay silent did not advance the charge of obstruction of justice against the president.

    She was approached for details of her story by House of Representatives Republican manager Asa Hutchinson around Thanksgiving of last year, the Times reported. Broaddrick's charges, described in an affidavit under the name of Jane Doe No. 5, were shown to wavering House Republicans in December and helped persuade them to vote to impeach Clinton.
    It was gossip on the Internet and a cable talk show about the allegations, as well as a front page story in the national supermarket tabloid the Star charging that she and her husband had been bribed to keep quiet, that reportedly convinced her to tell her story to the media.

    "Maybe the idea that 'Oh, the tabs are after me now,' — I guess that was scary to her," said Star senior editor Richard Gooding, who wrote the story.
    A supermarket tabloid reported that Broaddrick and her husband David had been bribed to keep quiet
    Gooding's impetus for covering the story, he said, was that "I think the public has a right to know what all the press knows and is talking about and all the politicians." On Feb. 12 the Senate acquitted Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Lewinsky case. The implications of these current allegations are unclear. . . .

    As for the near future, however, the allegation of "a rapist in the White House" is something that Goldman said Republicans will likely "take to the bank in the 2000 election."

    Star editor Gooding points out that the president has yet to truly deny the charge, because of the wording of his lawyer Kendall's statement that "any allegation that the president assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false."

    "If you were to take this literally," Gooding notes, "He's denying that Jimmy Carter assaulted David Broaddrick's first wife."

    © 1999 FOX News & NBC News