It’s another example of the way powerful people too often protect their own, rather than survivors.
The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted many politicians and public figures to reexamine President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Hillary Clinton, it seems, isn’t one of them.
In a CBS interview on Sunday, correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked Clinton if she thought her husband should have resigned after his affair with Lewinsky, then a White House intern, became public.
“Absolutely not,” Clinton said.
Clinton also said the relationship wasn’t an abuse of power on the former president’s part. Lewinsky was “an adult,” she said, before changing the subject to talk about sexual harassment and assault allegations against President Donald Trump.
Clinton’s history when it comes to sexual misconduct allegations against her husband — and others in her circle — is a complicated one. She’s never had a satisfying response to questions about the accusations against her husband, which include Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation that he raped her in 1978. On the other hand, she allowed an adviser to keep his job with her 2008 campaign despite allegations of sexual harassment — and when she addressed that decision this year, her comments left a lot to be desired.
As a woman married to a powerful man accused of sexual misconduct, Hillary Clinton is in a difficult position, forced to answer for someone else’s alleged misdeeds. But Clinton is also powerful in her own right, and when it comes to preventing and punishing harassment, she may not always have used her power wisely. Her latest interview is another example of a core problem for her legacy: She does not seem to have fully reckoned with the seriousness of sexual harassment and assault, especially when it comes to the men closest to her.
Bill Clinton has faced a number of allegations of sexual harassment, assault, and other misconduct over the course of his long political career. Probably most famous was the revelation that he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky while he was in office. After a now-famous denial — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” — he admitted to the relationship in 1998.
As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has written, the affair, “while consensual in some sense, was nonetheless textbook sexual harassment of a subordinate of a kind that would (or perhaps more accurately, should) get many CEOs fired from their companies.” After all, Clinton was not only Lewinsky’s boss, but also the president of the United States.
If Lewinsky had wanted to refuse an advance from Clinton, or break off their relationship, would she have felt free to do so? Or would she have felt trapped, knowing that the president had all the power over her future career?
Questions like these are the reason that relationships between bosses and subordinates are sometimes banned by employer sexual harassment policies — given the power differential at play, it’s not clear that such a relationship can ever be truly, fully consensual. Since the rise of #MeToo, some high-profile men have lost their jobs as a result of allegations of relationships with subordinates — for instance, such allegations were among those that cost Lorin Stein his position as editor of the Paris Review.
In an essay at Vanity Fair earlier this year, Lewinsky wrote that the question of whether her relationship with Clinton was consensual was “very, very complicated.”
“I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent,” she wrote. “The road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”
For Bill Clinton, the road to the affair with Lewinsky was also dotted with other allegations of sexual misconduct. Paula Jones said that Clinton sexually harassed her when she worked for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission in 1991; Kathleen Willey said he assaulted her when she was a volunteer at the White House in 1993. And Juanita Broaddrick says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room when she was volunteering for his Arkansas gubernatorial campaign in 1978. Clinton has denied all these allegations.
Bill Clinton’s history with women started to get renewed public attention in 2016, during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Before the second presidential debate, Donald Trump recorded a Facebook Live appearance with Willey, Broaddrick, and Jones, all of whom said they were supporting him. The three then sat in the audience for the debate.
Focusing on the allegations against Clinton was a way for the Trump campaign to divert attention from the Access Hollywood tape, on which Trump was heard bragging about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.” But Clinton’s candidacy, and the rise of the #MeToo movement, have also prompted a serious reexamination not just of the allegations against Bill Clinton, but of Hillary Clinton’s responses to them.
As the #MeToo movement gained steam — and especially when Democratic Sen. Al Franken was accused of groping women — some argued that Bill Clinton should have resigned after his relationship with Lewinsky. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said in November 2017, as the allegations against Franken were becoming public, that Clinton should have stepped down. She later walked her comments back to some degree, but they were notable given Gillibrand’s prominence and her close relationship with the Clintons.
Others, too, called for a reexamination of the former president’s past. “Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations” against Clinton, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted in November .
“In this #MeToo moment, when we’re reassessing decades of male misbehavior and turning open secrets into exposes, we should look clearly at the credible evidence that Juanita Broaddrick told the truth when she accused Clinton of raping her,” New York Times op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote the same month. “It’s fair to conclude that because of Broaddrick’s allegations, Bill Clinton no longer has a place in decent society.”
And Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote that Clinton’s failure to resign after his affair with Lewinsky set back the cause of preventing sexual harassment: “Had he resigned in shame, we all might have made a collective cultural and political decision that a person caught leveraging power over women in inappropriate ways ought to be fired. Instead, we lost nearly two decades.”
While many now see the allegations against Bill Clinton as damning, Hillary Clinton’s role is less clear. At the second presidential debate, Trump said that Hillary Clinton had “viciously” attacked Willey, Broaddrick, and Jones after they came forward with allegations against her husband. That’s not really true. At least in public, Clinton mostly kept quiet about the allegations, as PolitiFact notes.
Broaddrick has said that soon after Bill Clinton raped her, she saw Hillary Clinton at a rally. She said Clinton shook her hand and thanked her for what she had done for Bill, in a way that felt like a threat. But beyond that, there’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton ever intimidated or attacked Broaddrick. And Broaddrick admits she’s not completely sure of her interpretation of the encounter: “When you look back over almost 38 years, some of the anger fades, the fear fades, and you think, I hope she didn’t know,” she told BuzzFeed’s Katie J. M. Baker.
Clinton did say that the allegations of an affair between her husband and Lewinsky were part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — but, as PolitiFact notes, at that time Lewinsky was still publicly denying the affair.
In general, Bill Clinton’s history has put Hillary Clinton in a difficult position. She can either call him to account publicly — and possibly leave him — or she can keep silent or defend him, knowing that in doing so, she discounts the experience of women who say he harmed them.
In her 2017 book What Happened, Clinton criticizes Trump for bringing Willey, Broaddrick, and Jones to the debate, saying “he was just using them.” But she doesn’t offer any real insight into what she believes about the allegations against her husband, or how she squares her marriage with her commitment to promoting women’s rights — including the right to have one’s accounts of sexual harassment or assault taken seriously.
Of her relationship with her husband, she only writes that “there were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive.
