New York Times
2/24/99 FELICITY BARRINGER and DAVID FIRESTONE
By FELICITY BARRINGER and DAVID FIRESTONE
he allegation was passed on to reporters for The Los Angeles Times
and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992
Presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste
traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the
story -- that a nursing-home executive had been sexually assaulted in 1978 by
Bill Clinton, then the Attorney General of Arkansas.
The rumor persisted in the shadowlands of the Internet, even after a sworn
denial by Juanita Broaddrick, the woman involved. Mrs. Broaddrick reversed
herself last spring, during questioning by investigators for the independent
counsel Kenneth W. Starr. Last month, during the impeachment process, she
decided to make the assault charges public in an interview with NBC News.
Then she chafed because the interview was not broadcast.
Now, Mrs. Broaddrick has found a different avenue to tell her story, giving
several news organizations, including The New York Times, an account of an
encounter with Clinton in an Arkansas hotel room. The interviews represent are
the first time she has spoken openly about an allegation first made public last
March. In the interview, she describes a scene in which Clinton invited himself
to her room and then attacked her.
President Clinton's personal lawyer, David A. Kendall, has strenuously 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 Friday.
"Beyond that, we're not going to comment." The White House declined further
comment on Tuesday.
The problems with Mrs. Broaddrick's allegation are obvious. There is no
physical evidence to verify it. No one else was present during the alleged
encounter in Little Rock hotel room nearly 21 years ago. The hotel has since
closed. And Mrs. Broaddrick denied the encounter in an affidavit in January
1998 in the Paula Jones case, in which she was known only as "Jane Doe No.
5." Through all those years, she refused to come forward. When pressed by the
Jones lawyers, she denied the allegation. And now, she has recanted that
denial.
Her allegation has long been fodder for Clinton's legal and political opponents;
lawyers for Ms. Jones earned a stern judicial rebuke last spring when they
made Mrs. Broaddrick's name public in a legal pleading based on
unsubstantiated hearsay accounts.
But despite the problems with the allegation, it became part of the background
noise of the impeachment process in Congress, pushed by conservative House
Republicans even after Starr made only a glancing reference to it in a
supplement to his report.
At least one senior Republican House investigator, pushing hard for the
President's removal, told some undecided Republicans that her story would
probably become public and that they would look bad if they voted against
impeachment, two House Republicans said.
While it appears that the allegation swayed few, if any, votes in the House or
Senate, it hardened opinion against the President among some of the dozen or
so Representatives who were led to materials on the case in a secure room in
the Capitol, Republican officials said. In some cases, reading the Broaddrick
files ended the representatives' qualms and made them feel at peace with their
decisions to support impeachment, the officials said.
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said he was
shaken by the materials and at one point decided to vote for impeachment but
in the end changed his mind.
"The material I saw was, if true, shocking, disgusting and left a big pit in your
stomach," said Shays, who become one of the few Republicans to vote against
impeachment. "But it did not directly relate to the articles of impeachment,
which is why it didn't see the light of day."
The shadowy, subterranean path the allegation traveled also illustrates the
mechanics of the national media after a year of White House sexual scandal.
Never homogenous, the national press is divided in ever-smaller slivers, with
smaller outlets on the Internet and cable television sometimes overwhelming the
slower and more sober judgments of mainstream news organizations.
Giving Her Side Of a Tangled Story
ow some news outlets report on the investigations of other news
organizations even before they are published.
From her home in Van Buren, Ark., Mrs. Broaddrick said in an interview this
week that she had decided to air her charges in the NBC interview because she
was exasperated by erroneous descriptions of the encounter on the Internet
and on a cable television talk show last December.
She was contemptuous of the national tabloid, The Star, which in December
raised the possibility that she and her husband had been paid to keep silent.
"People were talking about my life and they didn't know what they were talking
about," she said. "It was so hurtful, to think anyone would think we would take
money."
Mrs. Broaddrick, who is now 56 and the prosperous owner of a nursing home
and an extended care facility, gave her account to The New York Times over
the telephone. It is the following: When Clinton came through Van Buren on a
campaign stop in April of 1978, she approached him and discussed nursing
homes.
He told her that if she were ever in Little Rock, they could talk further.
She attended a conference in Little Rock a few weeks later with her friend and
employee Norma Rogers, then the director of nursing at Mrs. Broaddrick's
nursing home. She telephoned Clinton, she said, and agreed to meet him in a
coffee shop. But when he phoned back, he said he wanted to avoid some
reporters and suggested meeting in her room.
Shortly after he arrived, she said, Clinton moved close to her and tried to kiss
her, succeeding only in biting her upper lip, hard. Then, she said, he forced her
down on to the bed and had intercourse with her.
"I was so totally surprised, totally shocked," she said.
Afterward, she said, he got up from the bed, put on his sunglasses, and while
walking to the door, said, "You'd better put some ice on that," referring to her
bruised and bitten lip. Then he left.
Two friends, Susan Lewis and Norma Rogers, said she told them of the
incident at the time. Ms.
Rogers, then the director of the Mrs. Broaddrick's nursing home, said she
entered the room and found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in "a state of shock."
Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit. "She
told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse," Mrs. Rogers
said in an interview earlier this week.
Mrs. Broaddrick said she decided not to see a doctor about her lip, because
the swelling was going down.
At the time of the incident, Mrs. Broaddrick said, she was having an affair with
a married man, Dave Broaddrick, who has been her husband for the past 18
years. She told both Broaddrick and Mrs. Rogers not to reveal what she had
told them, because she was convinced no one would believe her. "Even though
I was a respected businesswoman, what was I doing in a hotel room with the
attorney general?" she said. "No, I never even considered coming forward."
A Slow Leak Grows in Strength
rs. Broaddrick had told a few friends her account, but it had not
seemed to leak out until she was approached during the 1992
campaign 1992 by Philip Yoakum, an opponent of Clinton whom
she knew from Arkansas business circles. He insisted that she make her
allegations public. She refused.
Five years later, she said, she was approached by attorneys for Paula Jones, a
former Arkansas state employee whose sexual harassment suit against Clinton
was settled last year. Mrs. Broaddrick rebuffed them. "I just didn't want to
drag my family through this," she said.
On the advice of her attorney, Bill Walters, a Republican state senator, she
agreed to let him call a friend of his, Bruce Lindsey, White House deputy
counsel, she said. After the call, the President's attorney, Robert S. Bennett,
faxed Walters an affidavit another woman had used to deny involvement with
Clinton. She said Walters changed the names and facts and Mrs. Broaddrick
signed it on January 2, 1998. Contacted yesterday, Lindsey and Bennett would
not comment.
The affidavit read, in part, "These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that
they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family."
After the Lewinsky matter surfaced, she said she started to get calls from
reporters, but she refused to comment. Then she heard that prosecutors in the
office of the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr were going to approach
her. She discussed her options with her husband and her son, Kevin Hickey, a
lawyer, and they decided she could not lie to a Federal inquiry.
She recounted most of her story to F.B.I. investigators for
Starr, breaking down when she got to the physical details and going no further.
She made it clear that no one from the White House had ever tried to pressure
her to stay silent.
Around Thanksgiving of last year, Ms. Broaddrick said, she was contacted by
Representative Asa Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican who was one of the
House impeachment managers. He was interested primarily in what happened
after the attack. She told him that there had never been any overtures of bribery
or intimidation from the White House.
The white-hot partisanship surrounding the impeachment debate ensured that
details of Mrs. Broaddrick's charges ricocheted around Capitol Hill, where
about a dozen Representatives went to examine the detailed account that the
woman then known as "Jane Doe No. 5" gave to House investigators. It also
ricocheted around the World Wide Web.
Several organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal, carried brief news accounts of the congressional interest in the
allegations of Jane Doe No. 5, without any details.
In late January, Lisa Myers, an NBC reporter, arrived in Little Rock with her
producers and camera crew. Soon after the Internet gossip Matt Drudge began
putting out taunting reports on his Web site that NBC was having cold feet
about broadcasting the piece. Fox News reported on the NBC interview and
on at least one occasion the anchor Brit Hume wore a "Free Lisa Myers" lapel
button on the air.
On Jan. 30, the CNN show "Reliable Sources" included a discussion of the
status of the NBC interview. Robert Bartley, the editorial page editor of The
Wall Street Journal, saw the show and decided to send Dorothy Rabinowitz,
one of his columnists, to see if she could interview Mrs. Broaddrick. She wrote
a lengthy article, which was published on The Journal's editorial page, one of
the nation's most conservative and a strident critic of Clinton. The Journal's
Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, said he first found out about the
Rabinowitz article when it was mentioned on Drudge's web site.
After her piece was published, Ms. Rabinowitz stayed in touch with Mrs.
Broaddrick, and eventually convinced her to repeat her story to The Times.
News Organizations Face a Tough Call
eople inside NBC who spoke on condition of anonymity said there
were long debates about whether to air the piece but that network
executives believed that the interview needed extensive
corroboration. One thing that gave them pause was the fact that the father of a
corroborating witness, Norma Rogers, had been murdered and that Clinton
pardoned the person convicted of the crime.
In an interview, Ms. Rogers said Clinton's pardon decision, in 1980, had
nothing to do with her corroboration of Mrs. Broaddrick's story.
For months Mrs. Broaddrick had been talking to another reporter, Lois
Romano of The Washington Post, on an off-the-record basis. When Ms.
Rabinowitz's piece appeared on Friday, Mrs. Broaddrick agreed to let Ms.
Romano publish her account as well.
Was publishing an easy call? "No," replied Leonard Downie Jr., the executive
editor of The Washington Post. "We talked it out. Even when we saw the
Rabinowitz column, I wasn't certain we'd be publishing the story."
Downie added, "Our aim was to provide the entire story -- a story about
something that she had said, that she had told some journalists and some
investigators and a number of years ago a friend. And the role that the
knowledge of that story had come to play in various investigations and various
media decisions is the whole story as opposed to a specific allegation by one
person 21 years ago with limited corroboration."
The New York Times also hesitated about publishing the account, because it
had not interviewed Mrs. Broaddrick.
"The first thing we did was assign some reporters to learn as much as we could
-- about the story, about how it emerged, about its consequences," said the
managing editor of The Times, Bill Keller.
He added that, "Even then, we talked long and hard about whether to publish
anything. The merits of the allegations are probably unknowable. Legally, it
doesn't seem to go anywhere. Congress isn't going to impeach him again. And
frankly, we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue.
"But these allegations played at least some small role in the impeachment of a
President," Keller said. "And our readers, who have doubtless encountered the
story in other places, are entitled to read our best take on it."
Late yesterday afternoon, NBC News announced that the Broaddrick
interview would be broadcast on "Dateline NBC" tonight.
"We were never holding it," Andrew Lack, the president of NBC's news
division, said of the interview. "We were working our way through a process
that was not completed until today."
Speaking of the drumbeat of coverage of his network's yet-to-be-broadcast
interview, he added, "It seems that these days so many stories are getting far
too much play before their airing." He added, "There seems to be a party line,
like an old telephone party line, involving everything you're doing" in news
gathering.
"There are 50 people on it," he added. "It's all cross talk."
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