American Rhapsody (46 page)

“Playboys, gamblers, and politicians,” Elizabeth Ray said. “I always go for them. I'm spoiled. I'm used to staying in top hotel suites, having limos pick me up and flying to Atlantic City and having a Rolls-Royce pick me up. But I really pay for it.” She wrote a book about the fat old congressman, called
The Washington Fringe Benefit
. She took acting lessons from Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. She appeared for one week as a singer in a bar in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. She got a role in a Chicago dinner-theater production and a job covering the Democratic National Convention for a men's magazine. She posed naked for the magazine, too. She saw her shrink often. “The day that there's no hope, he said he'd tell me.” Elizabeth Ray had a nude portrait of herself stretched out on a white sheet holding a rose, like Marilyn. And she lived alone with her dog.

Then there was Fanne Fox. A stripper called “the Argentinean Firecracker.” With another fat old congressman. Pulled over by the park police in Washington with the congressman and two others. Everybody drunk. Fanne, panicked, jumped out of the congressman's car and dived into the Tidal Basin. A camera crew scanning police radios was there when she got out. She said she was in love with her fat old congressman. He ran for cover, his career over. “I learned not to drink with foreigners,” he said. Humped and dumped.

She tried stripping under a new name—“the Tidal Basin Bombshell.” She wrote a book called
The Stripper and the Congressman
. She did “promotional work” for a men's magazine and posed in the nude for it. She tried to kill herself. She spent time in a psychiatric ward. She made a sex movie called
Posse from Heaven
, which was a double entendre the producers thought would be a gold mine. “What happened happened,” she said. “So that can not be repaired completely. But some things can be mended enough to allow you to live comfortably and not be completely ashamed of yourself.”

Was this going to be Monica's future? Acting lessons? A week at a bar in McKeesport? A book? Posing nude? A sex movie? Seeking hope from a shrink? Suicide attempts? Time in a psychiatric ward? Humped and dumped and humped and dumped over and over again in individual mocking replays of the gang bang that initially violated and ravaged her? Endless sorrow? Not being
completely ashamed
? Tragedy? And talk shows?

Endless self-exposing talk shows? She remembered something Gennifer had said: “I was doing a talk show over the phone at home. I had to go to the bathroom so bad I couldn't wait. But the show was only half-finished and I could hardly excuse myself right in the middle of it to go use the potty. Desperate for relief, I looked around the kitchen and got the brilliant idea to use a bowl. So as I continued to answer questions about Bill Clinton and me, I proceeded to tinkle into the bowl. Luckily it wasn't stainless steel, and so it didn't make any noise.”
Tinkling into a bowl while doing a talk show
?

Only Donna Rice gave her hope. Donna Rice was a party girl when she met Gary Hart, who met her through Don Henley of the Eagles. Donna had even had a blind date with Prince Albert of Monaco. And then Donna Rice did those tacky blue jeans commercials, before Marla Maples, where she said, “I have no excuses. I only wear them.”

But Donna Rice didn't write a book. Donna Rice didn't pose nude. She didn't take acting lessons. She didn't do any cheap movies. She didn't even do the talk shows. Donna Rice got married. She found God. She was the head of an organization called Enough Is Enough, which battled pornography on the Internet. No Atlantic City, no limos, no humped and dumped. A life. Donna Rice had a life and was doing something she believed in.

It's so unfair, Monica thought, as she switched her channels.
Wait! Oh my God! Oh my God!
There she was! On the Fox News channel! The
other
Monica, Nixon's Monica, Crowley.
Holy shit!
The host was introducing her as “Monica Lewinsky,” and the other Monica was saying, “Talk about a Freudian slip!”

It's so unfair, she thought. Here she was, cooped up in her prison of an apartment, and here Nixon's Monica was, trashing her and trashing the Creep and saying, “Nixon would have counseled Clinton to avoid stonewalling and make good on his promise to provide more information rather than less, sooner rather than later.”

Nixon!
Nixon's Monica was saying that
Nixon
, the total liar, would have told the Creep, the almost-total liar, to stop lying? How could they believe her? Or when she said that Nixon “was like a grandfather to me.” Yeah, right. When she'd already told the world that she got “moral support” to write her books from that guy Roger Stone, the freak who advertised with his wife in the swingers' magazines.
“Moral support” and Grandpa Dick, yeah right!
It was
s-o-o-o
unfair.

She switched the channels and felt herself beginning to obsess again—Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!—about all these whores, these other whores . . . speaking to her, getting inside her.
No!
That was it right there. That's where she made her mistake. They were not whores any more than
she
was a whore or Monica Crowley was a whore. It didn't matter what people thought! It didn't matter if that's what the media insinuated! They were women who had either fallen in love with or been used by cynical, deceitful men. Just like her. She had fallen in love with
and
she had been used by a cynical, deceitful man. They were women who had made a mistake just like she had made a mistake. They were human just like she was. They were her sisters.

She felt better now. She felt so much better, she turned off the set and called downstairs to the Watergate Bakery and ordered up another chocolate mousse cake. She remembered the happy endings that some of her sisters, some of her fellow gang-bang victims, experienced.

Vanessa Williams, of Miss America fame, was singing with Pavarotti . . . . Jessica Hahn, of Jim Bakker fame, had her nose, teeth, and breasts redone . . . . Gennifer Flowers was lecturing in colleges . . . . Connie Hamzy, the groupie from Little Rock, was running for Congress and campaigning in a thong bikini . . . . Tai Collins, of Senator Chuck Robb fame, was writing
Baywatch
episodes in L.A . . . . Koo Stark, of Prince Andrew fame, hosted a London TV show . . . . Rita Jenrette, who made love on the Capitol steps, lived in a million-dollar penthouse and sold commercial real estate . . . . Fawn Hall was beating her addiction to heroin and crack . . . . And Fanne Fox, at the age of forty-five, was happily married and had given birth. There was life after the gang bang! As Rita Jenrette said, “Succeeding is the best revenge.” As Judy Exner of JFK fame said, “I was twenty-five years old and in love. Was I supposed to have better sense than the president of the United States?”

Monica was
s-o-o-o
happy she wasn't a whore,
s-o-o-o
happy she wasn't Hitler's whore, a nice Jewish girl like her. She was
s-o-o-o
happy that she'd discovered her sisters. Her doorbell rang. Her chocolate mousse was here. As she sliced into her cake, she saw her future: Everything would be just fine.

Monica would dump her schmucky lawyer and make a deal with Starr. The baseball hat she wore would become a fashion item. People would applaud her as she went into a restaurant. A Gallup poll would find her among the most admired women in the world, tied with Queen Elizabeth.

She would pose in
Vanity Fair
with the stars and stripes. The Creep would say nice things about her. Andy Bleiler would dump his wife, regret what he'd said in his press conference, and try to come crawling back. She'd lose a lot of weight and maybe she'd let him. And if, after Hillary dumped the Creep, sometime down the line, and if she was still skinny, and if the Creep was in town one night . . .

[8]

The Ugliest Story Ever Told

“I think he even horrifies himself in his rational moments,” Linda Tripp said to Monica. “Like ‘Holy shit, what am I doing? If they think that one's bad, what would they ever do to me with this one?' ”

A
fter the midterm November election of 1998, when Republicans had their political future handed to them on a feminine ebony platter, it looked like the impeachment of Bill Clinton by the House of Representatives was as likely as Hillary doing a porn movie.

Yet it was a porn movie in the form of a hard-core FBI interview that was responsible for Bill Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives six weeks later. Without this raw FBI file, seen by more than forty Republican congressmen in the high-security evidence room of the Gerald R. Ford Building, moderate Republicans would have voted against impeachment. At the end, Bill Clinton was impeached not for what he was charged with: perjury and obstruction of justice. He was impeached for an alleged rape.

The FBI interview of Juanita Broaddrick, known as Jane Doe #5 in the
Starr Report,
had been sent to the House Judiciary Committee as a supplement by Kenneth W. Starr. It was never made public. The FBI had been sent to interview Broaddrick because Starr was looking for evidence of obstruction of justice. Starr found none, but he sent the interview itself to the Judiciary Committee, which placed it in the guarded room. Not one Democrat went to read it. But, at majority whip Tom DeLay's encouragement, forty Republicans, most of them wavering moderates, did. They described themselves to their colleagues as “horrified” and “nauseous” after they read it.

Few of them asked what the FBI interview was doing there. If Kenneth W. Starr found no evidence of obstruction of justice pertaining to Jane Doe #5, then why was the interview with her even sent to the House? How was it relevant?

It was the hot, rancid potato that Kenneth W. Starr tossed to Tom DeLay, who tossed it to the congressmen who seemed like they might vote against impeachment. It was a Hail Mary pass that scored a Republican touchdown and got Bill Clinton impeached before Larry Flynt saved him from removal.

The story the congressmen read was ugly: In 1978, Juanita Broaddrick, attractive and well built, was thirty-five years old. She'd graduated from a nursing school and now owned a nursing home of her own in Arkansas. Bill Clinton, running for governor, then the attorney general, visited her nursing home during his campaign. Broaddrick was married to her first husband. Clinton asked her to drop by and see him at his campaign headquarters in Little Rock. She told him she was due there at a nursing seminar the following week. When she got to Little Rock, she called Clinton's office and was told to call him at his apartment. She did, and they agreed to meet for coffee in her hotel's coffee shop. When he got there, Clinton called her from the lobby and said it was too noisy. There were too many reporters there. He asked if he could go up and have coffee in her room. He went upstairs.

He'd been in the room less than five minutes when he moved close to her as they looked out the hotel window at the Arkansas River. He put his arms around her. She tried to resist him. He forced her onto the bed, holding her down. He bit her upper lip and kept her lip in his teeth as he ripped her panty hose open. He raped her. She was crying. She felt paralyzed.

Finished, he got off the bed and put his pants back on. She was in shock, sobbing. He went to the door. He put his sunglasses on. He turned back and looked at her. “You better put some ice on that,” he said, and was gone.

A friend found her on the bed an hour later. She was in shock. Her lips had swollen to double their size. Her mouth was badly bruised. Her panty hose were torn open at her crotch. “I can't believe what happened,” she kept sobbing to her friend.

.  .  .  

After Bill Clinton's impeachment by the House, Tom DeLay tried it again with the Senate. “You never know how those senators are going to vote if they go down to the evidence room,” he said. By then the Internet was full of gossip about Juanita Broaddrick and the story she told.

Bill Clinton was not the first president of the United States to be accused of rape. Selena Walters, a young, hot-looking Hollywood starlet, was sitting in a Hollywood nightclub with her date one night in the early fifties. A strikingly good-looking man hit on her. She knew who he was. “I'd like to call you,” he told her. “How can I get in touch with you?” She gave him her address. Her date took her home and she went to bed.

At three o'clock in the morning, she heard someone beating on her door. It was the good-looking man she'd met at the club. She opened the door.

“He pushed his way inside and said he just had to see me. He forced me on the couch and said, ‘Let's just get to know each other.' Then it was the battle of the couch. It was the most pitched battle I've ever had. I was fighting him. I didn't want him to make love to me. He's a very big man and he just had his way.”

Ronald Reagan was asked about Selena Walters's account in 1991 as he was on his way into church. He didn't deny it. What he said was, “I don't think a church would be the proper place to use the word I would have to use in discussing that.”

It was a story that had been around Arkansas since 1980. Juanita Broaddrick told close friends what had happened and she told her second husband. She and her husband ran into Bill Clinton one day and her husband grabbed him by the hand and said, “Stay away from my wife and stay away from Brownwood Manor [her nursing home].” In 1980, a man running for governor against Clinton went to see her and asked her to go public with her story. She refused. She didn't want trouble, and she'd heard too many nasty stories on the grapevine about what had supposedly happened to those who had somehow crossed Bill Clinton. She was scared.

In 1984, she got a congratulatory note from him when her nursing home was judged the best in the state. “I admire you very much,” he had handwritten on the bottom. In 1991, she was called out of a meeting on state nursing standards. Bill Clinton waited for her in a stairwell. He said he was a “changed man,” took her hands, apologized, and asked if he could do anything to make it up to her. She told him to go to hell and walked away.

Shortly afterward, she read in the newspaper that he was going to run for president. In 1992, a former business associate publicly told the story he had heard from her privately and urged her to come forward. She refused. When the Paula Jones attorneys approached her about the story they had heard, she made out an affidavit saying it was all untrue. Her attorney prepared the affidavit with the help of White House counsel Bruce Lindsey.

But when Kenneth W. Starr's FBI men came around, her twenty-eight-year-old son, a lawyer, told her, “ ‘This is another whole level.' She knew it was one thing to lie in a civil trial so she could get away from all this, but another to lie to federal agents and federal prosecutors and possibly a grand jury.”

Now, as Bill Clinton's Senate trial approached, a tabloid wrote a story about her and said that she and her husband had both been paid off to keep quiet. She and her husband were hardworking, honorable people who lived on a hilly forty acres filled with horses and cows. Juanita Broaddrick was fifty-six years old and looked like the sort of mother or grandmother everyone wanted. She loathed Bill Clinton and loathed what the tabloids had written about her and her husband. She thought, for the first time, about going public.

And what effect would it have on the Senate trial, Tom DeLay and his Clinton-hating fellow Republicans wondered, if Juanita Broaddrick's story became public? What effect would charges of rape have even on Democratic, pro-Clinton senators with strong female constituencies? The American people, as the midterm elections showed, had gotten over the blow jobs and the cigar . . . but could they get over a rape? Could they look the other way? Or would Juanita Broaddrick be the final straw . . . after Jones, after Willey, after Lewinsky . . . that would remove Bill Clinton from office? If only somehow this story could get out there.

Juanita Broaddrick's phone was ringing off the hook with interview requests. A Fox News crew chased her down the highway as she sped away.
Time
magazine sent reporters, who claimed they were there to cover a tennis benefit. ABC wanted to fly her to New York to talk to Barbara Walters.

She had read about Kathleen Willey and liked her on television. She found Willey's story to be believable. She called Willey in Virginia and asked her for advice: “It just helped me to be able to talk to her, someone who had been through an interview that was so uncomfortable. She told me that, yes, she would do it again.” Willey told her to “be calm and tell the truth.” Willey even offered to fly to Arkansas to help her.

Juanita Broaddrick decided she was ready to go public. She agreed to speak to Lisa Myers of NBC News. Myers was there the next day, January 20, right in the middle of Bill Clinton's Senate trial. Broaddrick was videotaped from midmorning until evening. She told Lisa Myers
everything.

She was told NBC would run the interview on January 29 on
Dateline,
during the Senate trial. It didn't run on the twenty-ninth. The Senate vote on impeachment was quickly approaching. It was scheduled to take place on February 12.

News of the Myers interview with Broaddrick was all over the Internet. Drudge not only had Lisa Myers's details; he hammered away at NBC for not airing the story as the Senate clock ran down. He said NBC News president Andy Lack “stood by as the White House manipulated NBC owner General Electric.” He quoted an unnamed NBC source as saying “Andy Lack should resign. Resign now. We have to save our face.”

He wrote, “It's not clear if White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart has been in touch with NBC news.” No one knew what that meant. Either Lockhart was or wasn't in touch with NBC News. If Drudge didn't know that Lockhart had been in touch, he had no business throwing it onto the Internet as a possibility.

An NBC spokesman said the Broaddrick interview was still “a work in progress.” The network said it had to cross-check dates and speak to others to make it, as Lack said, “a rock-solid report.”

Broaddrick said she felt “so betrayed” by NBC for not running the story. “I honestly don't know why they haven't run it,” Broaddrick said. “But one has to wonder, considering that I gave the interview as the Senate trial was going on.”

The Reverend Jerry Falwell asked his followers to “inundate” the producer of NBC's nightly news for not running the story, and NBC was bombarded with phone calls and E-mail. Republican trial manager, Representative Chris Cannon of Utah, told MSNBC: “Everybody knows in Washington that your colleague Lisa Myers has Jane Doe #5 on videotape and you haven't broken the story.” Rupert Murdoch's Fox News anchor Brit Hume wore a button on the air that said
FREE LISA MYERS
! The
Washington Post
reported that Myers and Washington Bureau chief Tim Russert were “frustrated by their inability to get the story on the air. They and other advocates believe that each time they come up with further corroboration, NBC management raises the evidentiary bar a little higher.”

An NBC source said that one of the reasons the network was hesitating was that the father of the chief corroborative witness, the woman who'd found Broaddrick after Clinton allegedly raped her, was murdered and Clinton had pardoned the murderer. The rape had taken place in 1978 and the pardon in 1980. The witness hadn't said anything corroborating Broaddrick until
after
1980, the year her father's murderer was pardoned.

Sure, many countered, but Broaddrick didn't say anything publicly until
after
1980, either—so how could the witness's corroboration be suspect?

As hard as Drudge tried, hammering away at NBC, this one didn't work like Lewinsky had. With Lewinsky, he broke the story and the media felt forced to follow him. But this was an old story and the same ploy was ineffective: The major news media did not feel compelled to write about Broaddrick just because Drudge had stolen Lisa Myers's details. They were waiting for NBC.

They were still waiting on February 12 when the Senate voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office. NBC was still researching the story and a lot of people were saying the story would never run. The impeachment crisis was over. America was finally free of its blow job and cigar noose. Would Americans now want to contemplate ripped panty hose and a bitten lip?

Dorothy Rabinowitz was known among her friends in the media as “a right-wing ideologue.” Her employer, the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal,
as opposed to its news section, was known as a right-wing sheet that, according to Vince Foster's note, had driven him to suicide.

The editorial page had treated seriously not only allegations that Bill Clinton was a big-time coke dealer involved with the Colombian cartel but that he had been involved with the murder of dozens of people. The editorial page was a journalistic haunted house—while the rest of the paper was well balanced. For the editorial page, every day was Halloween.

Now, with the Senate trial over, Dorothy Rabinowitz went to see Juanita Broaddrick at her small-town Arkansas home . . . in a limousine. And Juanita Broaddrick told her
everything.
And the
Wall Street Journal
published a very long news story about her allegations, not in the news pages, where it belonged, but on its right-wing editorial page. And, now that it was out and everybody was talking about it and this was, after all, the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
published their own stories.

It was the Drudge ploy all over again, as executed by Rabinowitz. And now that the
Post
and the
Times
had provided the details of Juanita Broaddrick's story, NBC aired Lisa Myers's interview . . . now that the Senate trial was over and Bill Clinton hadn't been removed from office.