Hillary Clinton laughed at a 12 year old rape victim.
NPR Staff
Transcript
Hillary Clinton looks on during the second presidential debate. In 1975 Clinton was the court appointed lawyer for a man accused of raping Kathy Shelton, who was in the audience that night.
Jim Bourg/AFP/Getty Images
When the presidential candidates debated last month for the second time, Donald Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton once laughed at a victim of rape. The allegation stems from a case that Clinton worked as a young lawyer in 1975 — she defended one of two men accused of raping then-12-year-old Kathy Shelton.
Trump featured Shelton in a press conference that was broadcast on Facebook Live ahead of the debate and then brought her in to sit with the audience. Trump spoke about Shelton onstage, arguing Clinton mistreated her:
"One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old, was raped — at 12. Her client — she represented, got him off," Trump said. "And she's seen laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl who was raped. Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight."
Trump's claim was that Clinton laughed at Shelton in an interview in the 1980s in which she talked about the case. Clinton replied that Trump was just changing the subject from his treatment of women.
Shelton told Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep that on that day in 1975 she was stopped while riding her bike to church and beaten, raped and dumped out of a truck.
Two men were caught. One was underage. The other faced criminal charges. Hear her tell her story to Inskeep (warning, it is disturbing):
Kathy Shelton tells her story
The local prosecutor was Mahlon Gibson, who still remembers that 1975 case.
"This particular defendant was wanting a female attorney," Gibson tells NPR.
Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, was teaching at a nearby law school. The judge deferred to the defendant's wishes for a female attorney and assigned the case to Clinton.
"I didn't know who he had appointed until I got a call from Ms. Rodham," he said. "She was pretty upset. She said, 'I want you to get me off of this case. I just don't want to handle it. It's not my kinda case.' I said, 'Ms. Rodham, I can't help you. I didn't appoint you. The judge appointed you, and you're going to have to contact him.' Usually when you're appointed by a judge to help out in a court system, you do it. You just don't want to get the judge cross with you."
As the prosecutor recalls it, Rodham tried to get out of it.
"She apparently went to the judge, and he refused to let her out," Gibson said. "And at that point, she fired all guns. She mounted an excellent defense, I'll give her credit for that."
Gibson says she challenged the physical evidence, and also raised questions about the victim's story and her credibility. With the case looking doubtful, prosecutors accepted a plea bargain. The attacker received a short prison term and a fine.
This 1975 story would not enter the record again until 1984. That's when Clinton talked about the case on audiotape with a writer hired to write a profile for Esquire that was never published. That audiotape is the basis for Trump's claim that Clinton laughed at a rape victim.
In the tape — which is low quality — Clinton says she had her client take a polygraph test. He passed, she says, and adds with a chuckle, it "forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs": |
