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American folklore
A round Christmas, it gets cold in Crawford County. One day near the end of 1998, it was both wet and cold. The dull morning sky was almost pink. A slight bite in the wind was a sudden reminder to Juanita Broaddrick that she wasn't wearing a coat. As she stepped back inside, the telephone rang. It was probably Lisa Myers again. Persistence could easily be Lisa's middle name.
"Take a message David," she told her husband, as she headed out the door again. "Tell her I'll call her back in a couple of hours." The phone continued to ring. "How do you know it's her?" David yelled, instinctively knowing that she meant Lisa. "It is!" Juanita yelled back as the double storm door slammed behind her.
Juanita had just gotten up and wasn't fully alert yet. She wanted to avoid talking to Lisa until she was clear-headed. She had forgotten to bring in yesterday's mail, and the walk down to the main road in the brisk air would give her a chance to think. Over the months, a bond of trust began to form between the two women. Lisa was as determined as any reporter, but not rude and arrogant, like the rest of them. Juanita wasn't kidding herself. Lisa wanted the same thing they all did - every dirty detail. Dredging all that up would be painful. Juanita was still avoiding going 'on the record'. She wasn't ready for that, not yet and maybe never.
For twenty-one years she had kept the whole thing bottled up inside, except for confiding in a very few close associates. She did not report the assault because who would have believed "little ol' Juanita Hickey" against the chief law enforcement officer of the state? Surely in a trial the defense would have delved into her sex life. Her reputation in the small town of Van Buren, once people knew about her affair with David Broaddrick, would have been ruined. Bill Clinton probably had counted on her silence because of her fear of losing her place in her small southern community. Juanita was "healthy, wealthy and wise," as a friend liked to say. "Wise enough to keep her mouth shut."
It was crucial that her husband was also firmly against her going public. Their hard-won privacy was starting to suffer. If her story came out now, would that give the senators enough spine to remove Bill Clinton from office? She doubted it. And why put herself though the trauma of a nationally televised interview unless she would be believed? It seemed to her that most of her fellow citizens were in no mood to take Bill Clinton to task. She stopped and leaned on a rustic wooden fence by the driveway, looking out at her fields. She mused about how quickly the White House released Kathleen Willey's letters.
Earlier in 1998 Juanita had nearly convinced herself she could go forward. When she first watched Kathleen Willey put her reputation on the line on 60 Minutes, she felt an almost sisterly affinity for her. Willey was credible on TV, and maybe together they could force the sexual crimes of Bill Clinton into the open. But by late that evening her need for self-protection overcame her renewed outrage at the president. She would be trashed like Kathleen and like all the others.
All too often, Juanita thought about telling her story. Then the televised House impeachment hearings began. Those evenings, she would watch Geraldo Rivera who is a master of manipulation. As he worked his spell, she was tempted to speak out in order to dispute him. She despised Geraldo's fawning whilst spinning for Bill Clinton, the man who raped her and later became President of the United States.
She pushed those thoughts aside when she reached the road and realized she hadn't brought the key along. The gate was locked. The mailbox was on the outside of the property, but it was mounted on a post close to the fence. By walking a few feet down the fence line, she retrieved her mail by reaching around from the back. Then she started back towards the house, wondering why some neighbor boys were sitting for so long out at the road in their truck. She didn't know it at the time, but they were there trying to take her picture for $500, offered by a foreign journalist.
Juanita suspected she was not the first to be raped by Bill Clinton. She had heard rumors of incidents, but she wasn't going to be the one to reveal other victims' stories, at least not on purpose. She would need to be careful in this regard if she decided to make her own episode public. Being 'outed' was something Juanita had always dreaded herself.
Several people with political agendas had tried to get her to come forward after hearing of her story through the Arkansas rumor mill. A few contacted the national press about her rape story back in 1991 but had failed to attract major interest. Now the latest set of circumstances involved actual legal jeopardy for her. In late 1997, Juanita did something wrong because she hadn't thought through the consequences. In attempting to avoid becoming entangled in the Paula Jones case, she signed a false but vaguely worded affidavit. Kenneth Starr was alerted by the material he subpoenaed from Paula Jones' investigators. On an audio tape, Juanita was heard admitting a "horrible" experience with Bill Clinton which she did not want to talk about. Starr then sent his own investigators to her doorstep. They wanted the truth.
Where would she be without her son, Kevin, a law graduate and manager of the family nursing home? She had been forced to tell him the whole sordid tale back in 1991. He told her she had no choice but to set the record straight with Starr’s investigators. Lying to a federal prosecutor was far more serious than an ambiguous affidavit filed in a civil lawsuit. So in an immunity agreement with the special prosecutor, Juanita recanted her Jones affidavit and told the truth regarding the rape. Still, she did not implicate Bill Clinton for 'obstruction of justice'. Since this was the only link Starr was pursuing with Juanita's story, he backed off. She became a footnote in the Starr Report. Being a mere footnote did not protect her from the onslaught that followed.
After investigators with the House impeachment inquiry interviewed her, she spoke with Asa Hutchison, a Congressman and an Arkansan. She knew by his expression that he did not think her story would help. Of course, some of the "Jane Doe #5" story had leaked, so the pressure from the media was coming to a head. Converging events were propelling her to make a decision.
The Jones' lawyers, the local politicians, Ken Starr, House investigators: all had pushed or pulled in different directions in order to advance their own agendas. None of these agendas would enhance the comfortable life Juanita had struggled to build. She was virtually a pioneer businesswoman in her town. As Juanita entered her home, she took off her coat and laid yesterday's mail on the counter. She thought of her nieces and granddaughters who looked up to her and realized the high price of her silence.