The accusers: Broaddrick, Willey, Flowers and the “bimbo eruptions”

Juanita Broaddrick, then a registered nurse who ran her own nursing home, says Bill Clinton raped her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978, when he was attorney general and running for governor. She told her story on NBC’s Dateline on 24 February 1999, days after the Senate acquittal. Clinton’s lawyer denied it. Clinton has never been charged. [1]

Her account has support and problems. Her friend Norma Rogers told NBC she found Broaddrick that day with a badly swollen lip and torn pantyhose, and that Broaddrick told her Clinton had assaulted her. Other friends said she told them in the years after. But in January 1998 Broaddrick had signed a sworn statement in the Jones case denying any unwanted advances. She said she lied then to avoid going public. NBC sat on the interview for weeks before airing it. [1][2]

Asked by NBC in 1999 whether Clinton or anyone near him had ever threatened her or tried to keep her silent, she said: “No.” Later she described a 1978 encounter with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser as a veiled warning; PolitiFact found no independent confirmation of that exchange. [3]

Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer and Democratic donor, says that on 29 November 1993 she went to Clinton to ask for a paid job and that he kissed and groped her in a hallway near the Oval Office. Clinton testified that he did not. [1]

Independent counsel Robert Ray’s final report (2002) found insufficient evidence to prosecute Clinton for lying about it. It found inconsistencies in Willey’s statements and her friend’s, and did not decide whose account was true. It also found no basis to charge anyone with intimidating her. [1]

Willey has said she was harassed afterwards, including a dead cat on her porch. Sidney Blumenthal said in a 1999 court filing that Hillary Clinton approved releasing friendly letters Willey later wrote to the president, to undermine her. Releasing letters is not threatening a witness; no one has been shown to be behind the incidents she describes. [2]

Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas singer and state employee, went public in January 1992 saying she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton. In 1992 the campaign denied it. [2]

In his August 1998 grand-jury testimony Clinton acknowledged that, under the definition used in the Jones deposition, he “had actually had sexual relations once with Gennifer Flowers,” whom he accused of spreading “exaggerated stories about me for money.” He continued to deny the long affair. [1]

Flowers did not accuse him of assault. Her story belongs to a different category from Broaddrick’s or Willey’s, and lumping them together blurs both. [2]

At the October 2016 debate Trump said Hillary Clinton had “viciously” attacked her husband’s accusers. PolitiFact looked at each woman. It found no evidence that she attacked Broaddrick or Jones, and limited evidence on Willey (she approved releasing Willey’s letters, according to Blumenthal). [1]

The record is harsher on Flowers and others who alleged consensual affairs. In 1992 Hillary Clinton called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer” and reportedly said she would “crucify her” on cross-examination. A detective the campaign hired wrote of impugning Flowers’s “character and veracity.” George Stephanopoulos wrote that she said of another woman, “We have to destroy her story.” In 1998 she blamed the Lewinsky story on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” [1]

Campaign strategist James Carville has said he, not Hillary, ran the response operation. [1]