The Washington Free Beacon has a stunning report on newly-discovered recordings of Hillary Rodham Clinton from the 1980s that challenge her image as a champion for women and children. In the recordings, Arkansas reporter Roy Reed interviewed then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife for an Esquire magazine article that never went to print. In one revealing segment, Hillary described her experience defending Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old accused of raping a 12-year old girl after luring her into a car. Newlywed Hillary Rodham had just moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas and was running a legal aid clinic. She took the case at the request of the prosecutor after Taylor requested a female defense attorney. Alana Goodman at the Free Beacon writes:
And though the former first lady mentioned the ethical difficulties of the case in Living History, her written account some three decades later is short on details and has a far different tone than the tapes.
“It was a fascinating case, it was a very interesting case,” Clinton says in the recording. “This guy was accused of raping a 12-year-old. Course he claimed that he didn’t, and all this stuff.”
Describing the events almost a decade after they had occurred, Clinton’s struck a casual and complacent attitude toward her client and the trial for rape of a minor.
“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she added with a laugh.
Clinton can also be heard laughing at several points when discussing the crime lab’s accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied Taylor to the crime.
Her comment about the polygraph seems to indicate that Clinton (who was still Hillary Rodham back then) knew her client was guilty, but even a dozen years later, the self-proclaimed champion of the world’s women and children seems to show no compassion for the young rape victim, instead discussing the case as if she’s a dispassionate law professor. A Chicago law professor with a sugary-sweet Southern accent, it should be noted.
It gets worse.
Alana Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon reports:
According to court documents, the prosecution’s case was based on testimony from the 12-year-old girl and the two male witnesses as well as on a “pair of men’s undershorts taken from the defendant herein.”
In a July 28, 1975, court affidavit, Clinton wrote that she had been informed the young girl was “emotionally unstable” and had a “tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.”
“I have also been told by an expert in child psychology that children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents in disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even more prone to exaggerate behavior,” Clinton said.
Clinton said the child had “in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body” and that the girl “exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
“It’s not true, I never sought out older men – I was raped,” the woman said in a 2008 interview with Newsday. Glenn Thrush at Newsday said the victim was stunned when a reporter showed her the affidavit. “It kind of shocks me – it’s not true,” she said. “I never said anybody attacked my body before, never in my life.”
Taylor pleaded guilty to unlawful fondling of a child and was sentenced to one year in prison, with two months reduced for time served. He died in 1992.
The victim, now 52, is divorced and living alone. She has served time in prison for forging checks to fund her drug addiction. She blames the attack for her troubled life and though she declined an interview with the Free Beacon, she “expressed deep and abiding hostility … toward her assailant’s defender, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Critics have accused Mrs. Clinton of being a ruthless opponent of anyone who stands in her way, including many of the women who threatened her husband’s power and reputation. This revelation — that she smeared and demonized a 12-year-old victim in order to get a plea deal for a rapist — only furthers that narrative.
Everyone accused of a crime is entitled to a competent — even a vigorous — defense. That includes vile child rapists. But Hillary Rodham-Clinton (who was not working in the public defender’s office at the time) went the extra mile of destroying the life of a young girl from a troubled home — cruelly blaming the victim and saying that she would “exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences” and suggesting that she was only “fantasizing” when she accused Taylor of rape. Any good misogynist lawyer would have done the same thing.
And a dozen years later she was laughing about it.
The Free Beacon has the original court documents.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member