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T A B L E+T A L K Have we learned anything at all? Discuss the lessons of Impeachment '99 in the Politics area of Table Talk
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THE UGLIEST STORY YET | PAGE 1, 2, 3
As told to Rabinowitz, Broaddrick's story is this: She was a 35-year-old Clinton campaign volunteer who met the Arkansas attorney general when he visited the nursing home she owned during his initial run for governor. Clinton invited her to visit him any time she traveled to Little Rock, and she did, calling his campaign office when she attended a conference there the very next week. Clinton proposed meeting for coffee, Broaddrick told Rabinowitz, and then, when the restaurant proved to be crowded, suggested they have coffee in her hotel room. Once there, Clinton embraced Broaddrick, and when she resisted, according to Rabinowitz, "He got her down onto the bed, held her down forcibly, and bit her lips." Rabinowitz goes on: "The sexual entry itself was not without pain, because of her stiffness and resistance." Afterwards, Clinton allegedly told Broaddrick not to worry about pregnancy, because mumps had left him sterile, and suggested she put ice on her swollen lips. According to Rabinowitz, Broaddrick's story was corroborated by a "friend," Norma Rogers, who found Broaddrick in her room "in a state of shock -- lips swollen to double their size, mouth discolored from the biting, her pantyhose torn in the crotch." "To encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was an event that took place," Rabinowitz concludes -- an astonishingly uncritical acceptance of the most heinous charge ever leveled against the president. Rabinowitz criticizes NBC for sitting on the story for nearly a month even though it had been "exhaustively investigated" and "NBC researchers had combed through the Broaddricks' entire lives, through dusty basement files and court records." The interview took place on Jan. 20, the weeks passed and the NBC feature never ran. Why? Rabinowitz sarcastically quotes NBC News president Lack's "simple, uplifting message": the story needed to be fact-checked to ensure it was "rock-solid" journalism. In fact, many news organizations have tried to confirm Broaddrick's story and failed. It was first revealed by Phillip Yoakum, a gadfly Republican businessman who says the nursing home owner told him about it in 1981. In 1992, he urged Broaddrick to come forward in a letter he later gave to the Paula Jones lawyers. "I was particularly distraught when you told me of your brutal rape by Bill Clinton," he wrote. "What a shock to now realize he will possibly be the president of a free democratic country while carrying the guilt of such an assault on someone as undeserving as you ... I believe that you will continue to be irreparably psychologically damaged by your decision to continue to hold this brutal rape inside." As part of his campaign to get Broaddrick to tell her story, Yoakum admitted in the letter, he had taped her version of it and given the tapes to Sheffield Nelson, a Republican who ran against Clinton for governor in 1990. Yoakum said he told the story to the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press just after Clinton's presidential nomination. But he refused to release the tapes, and both news organizations dropped the matter. It remained dropped until Broaddrick's name appeared in Starr's subpoena of Jones lawsuit materials last March. At that time, Yoakum's letter was released, and the Washington Post ran it, omitting Broaddrick's name. On March 28, Lisa Myers broadcast an interview with Yoakum in which he made his allegations about the rape. She also quoted an unnamed friend of Broaddrick, whom she did not name, who confirmed that Broaddrick had told her the same story. The rape allegation became news again in December when House Republicans began showing sealed materials on Broaddrick, then still known as Jane Doe No. 5, to House members wavering on impeachment. House Whip Tom DeLay was also urging senators to view the files full of unconfirmed allegations against the president, which were stored in the Ford Office Building, prompting Democrats and even some Republicans to object. At the time, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., told Salon the Broaddrick allegations were "unconfirmed hearsay," and called DeLay "totally irresponsible" for urging senators to look at the sealed materials as they prepared for the impeachment trial. Over the past year many reporters have looked into Broaddrick's allegation and come away unconvinced. "This is a story that's been knocked down and discredited so many times, I was shocked to see it in the Journal today," says Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. "Well, not shocked, since it ran on the editorial page. Everyone's taken a slice of it, and after looking at it, everyone's knocked it down. The woman has changed her story about whether it happened. It just wasn't credible. I don't know if NBC will run it, but if they do, they'll do it knowing there are real problems with it." Significantly, the Wall Street Journal's own news department has declined to run the Broaddrick story in its pages. When asked if Journal reporters had pursued it, the paper's Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, replied, "I'm not going to comment on how we devote our resources. But you're right to observe this has not appeared in our news pages, except in brief references." The Journal was the first to report that House managers were showing Starr's sealed "Jane Doe" material, Murray says. Later, in its Washington Wire column, the paper revealed that House Judiciary Committee counsel David Schippers had decided not to include the Broaddrick materials in the impeachment trial, since she had given different versions of the story and there was no evidence of obstruction of justice by the Clinton administration in the changed tales. But Journal editor Robert Bartley told Salon in an e-mail: "We would not have been comfortable with the Broaddrick story if we hadn't had first-hand interviews with her and others. Except for NBC, no one else had the interview. It ran on the editorial page because it was an editorial page project. We often do our own reporting, as in the previous Dorothy Rabinowitz stories on the child-abuse scare, which over the years freed four people from prison." N E X T+P A G E+| Lisa Myers: The story is still alive |
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