Epstein Learned from the Master—Bill Clinton

Fake Chelsea Tweet Highlights a Shared MO

Painting of Bill Clinton in famed blue dress, a verified part of the Epstein collection

When something seems too good to be true, it rarely is true. Such is the case with the bogus tweet floated on social media last week that reads as follows:

What caught people’s attention was the cigar reference. Many assumed that “First Daughter” Chelsea Clinton, barely 18 when the Monica Lewinsky affair exploded, was unaware of what infamous use her father put the cigars to.

That sordid detail proved true, as did many others. The media, however, buried many of the sex crimes that could have cost Clinton not only his presidency, but his very freedom. As both Jeffrey Epstein and Clinton have proven, predators that the media find politically useful can get away with just about anything, at least until their utility is exhausted.

Epstein, like Harvey Weinstein before him, eventually embarrassed the media into reporting his sins. No amount of donations or fund raising for righteous causes could assure continued media largesse once those sins became too public—and once Donald Trump could be smeared in the process. Bill Clinton, however, has had no such reckoning. His power in Democratic circles transcends mere money.

Much to the horror of her fellow journalists, females especially, Nina Burleigh revealed how the Clinton “Get out of jail free” card worked. In the 1990s Burleigh had covered the White House for Time magazine. In July 1998, at the peak of the Monica furor, media analyst Howard Kurtz asked Burleigh if she could cover Clinton objectively given her unsubtle gushing about him in Time.

As reported in the New York Observer, Burleigh told Kurtz, “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

Nina Burleigh sans knee pads

Brent Bozell, then director of the conservative Media Research Center, responded, “Nina Burleigh’s comment that she would give [oral sex] to the President to thank him for keeping abortion legal is an apt metaphor for the way the liberal media has treated Clinton.” Said Burleigh in return, “Come on, Brent, it’s our patriotic duty!”

A few incidents from that era suggests how American newsrooms worked. In the way of background, Paula Jones, an unsophisticated working class woman from Arkansas, brought the initial civil suit against Clinton, the one that ultimately led him to commit perjury and get himself impeached.

But Jones had a thick accent and bad hair. Plus, she accused Clinton only of exposing himself. She was easily dismissed. Sneered Clinton adviser James Carville, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Despite this dazzling example of both classism and sexism, Carville suffered not a whit. He later emerged as co-host of CNN’s Crossfire.

Paula Jones

Jones was was hardly alone in being sexually abused by Clinton. In December 1998, NBC got around to interviewing Jane Doe #5, Juanita Broaddrick. So hot was the interview, and so credible was Broaddrick, that NBC sat on the interview until after the Senate voted not to convict Clinton on impeachment charges.

NBC finally aired Lisa Meyers’s interview with Broaddrick in late February 1999. “Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. Just a minute,” said Broaddrick, pausing to regain her composure. “He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Said the gallant Clinton on leaving the distraught Broaddrick to her trauma. “Put some ice on that.” Nor was Broaddrick the only woman raped by Clinton. In his 1999 book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, mainstream journalist Michael Isikoff related how Clinton, then Arkansas governor, had sex with former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen.

“It was rough sex,” Isikoff wrote, “Clinton got so carried away that he bit her lip, Gracen later told friends. But it was consensual.” Despite the fact that Isikoff broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he failed to “uncover” the lip-biting connection, not in his reporting in this book, nor in his commentary in the years ahead.

Elizabeth Ward Gracen

Isikoff also failed to acknowledge that at least one of Gracen’s friends, Judy Stokes, had told the Paula Jones legal team that the sex was not consensual at all. “Do you believe Clinton raped her?” investigator Rick Lambert asked her. “Absolutely,” Stokes replied. “He forced her to have sex. What do you call that?”

After going public with her insights into female journalism, Burleigh was assured she would never get another decent job in the mainstream press. She has worked steadily since and in 2018 wrote The Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women. As to Clinton’s outrages, not a word has passed Burleigh’s unbitten lips.