The woman at the center of the scandal over Hillary Clinton’s defense of an alleged child rapist speaks out in depth for the first time.
Josh Rogin
The Daily Beast
6/20/2014
Hillary Clinton is known as a champion of women and girls, but one woman who says she was raped as a 12-year-old in Arkansas doesn’t think Hillary deserves that honor. This woman says Hillary smeared her and used dishonest tactics to successfully get her attacker off with a light sentence—even though, she claims, Clinton knew he was guilty.
The victim in the 1975 sexual abuse case that became Clinton’s first criminal defense case as a 27-year-old lawyer has only spoken to the media once since her attack, a contested, short interaction with a reporter in 2008, during Clinton’s last presidential campaign run. Now 52, she wants to speak out after hearing Clinton talk about her case on newly discovered audio recordings from the 1980s, unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon and made public this week.
In a long, emotional interview with The Daily Beast, she accused Clinton of intentionally lying about her in court documents, going to extraordinary lengths to discredit evidence of the rape, and later callously acknowledging and laughing about her attackers’ guilt on the recordings…
…after hearing the newly revealed tapes of Clinton boasting about the case, the victim said she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer and wanted to tell her side of the story to the public.
“When I heard that tape I was pretty upset, I went back to the room and was talking to my two cousins and I cried a little bit. I ain’t gonna lie, some of this has got me pretty down,” she said. “But I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to stand up to her. I’m going to stand up for what I’ve got to stand up for, you know?”
In her interview with The Daily Beast, she recounted the details of her attack in 1975 at age 12 and the consequences it had for both her childhood and adult life. A virgin before the assault, she spent five days afterwards in a coma, months recovering from the beating that accompanied the rape, and over 10 years in therapy. The doctors told her she would probably never be able to have children…
…The victim is concerned that speaking out will make her a target for attacks, but she no longer feels she is able to stay silent.
“I’m a little scared of her… When this all comes about, I’m a little worried she might try to hurt me, I hope not,” she said. “They can lie all they want, say all they want, I know what’s true.”
The complete article is at The Daily Beast.
Related: Hillary’s Rapist and the War on Women
… Needless to say, in none of the interviews about Hillary’s book was she asked about the fact that she once boasted and laughed about helping a child rapist evade justice. Our former COMMENTARY colleague Alana Goodman wrote on Friday in the Washington Free Beacon about how Clinton was caught on tape discussing the case during an interview with Esquire magazine in the 1980s for an article that was never published. In the tapes, which were archived at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Clinton concedes that her client was guilty and that he beat the rap due to prosecutorial incompetence as well as her own attempt to smear the character of the 12-year-old victim in the case. The then-27-year-old Hillary Rodham managed to get the state to agree to a plea bargain in which the rapist, 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor, served less than a year in prison…
