ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Yes, this year’s presidential election could get worse.

It looks as though Donald Trump may try to litigate the rape of a 12-year-old girl in a presidential debate.

Kathy Shelton was allegedly raped by a 41-year-old factory worker named Thomas Alfred Taylor when she was just a girl. Hillary Clinton was the lawyer who defended Mr. Taylor – who reduced his charges from first-degree rape to “unlawful fondling of a child under 14,” because of a lack of credible evidence.

Mr. Trump invited Ms. Shelton, along with Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey — who for years have accuse Mrs. Clinton’s husband rape or sexual assault – to appear in a pre-debate press conference, signaling where the second presidential debate may be heading.

“I may be Hillary Clinton’s 1st female victim,” Ms. Shelton, 54, tweeted Sunday evening. “She ruined my life; defended my rapist & blamed me. I was 12 yrs old. Then she laughed at me.”

Mr. Trump clearly feels angry that he’s been backed into a corner after a decade-year old audio surfaced with him making lewd remarks. Those remarks have led some Republicans to call on him to pull the plug on his campaign, and has ignited a media firestorm that left Mrs. Clinton’s exposed paid speeches to Wall Street go virtually ignored.

Mr. Trump – without anyone in his corner – looks like he’s going nuclear. If his campaign goes down, it’s going to go down in blaze of glory, and he’s going to do everything he can to bring Mrs. Clinton down too.

Ms. Shelton – whose story has largely gone uncovered – is the first chip in this humongous gamble.

Even though Mrs. Clinton didn’t want to take Mr. Taylor’s case, her “approach, then and now, was to immerse herself in even unpleasant tasks with a will to win,” wrote then Newsday reporter Glenn Thrush in 2008 of the case.

According to the affidavit of the case, Mrs. Clinton tried to undermine the credibility of Ms. Shelton’s allegations against Mr. Taylor, writing Ms. Shelton “is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.”

In an mid-1980s audio interview with Arkansas reporter Roy Reed, Mrs. Clinton spoke about the case.

She is heard laughing along with the reporter.

“Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Mrs. Clinton said, laughing.

According to the Washington Post, Mrs. Clinton was heard laughing or giggling four times in the interview.

So this is where we’re going tonight folks. The entire pre-debate press conference could be a head-fake by Mr. Trump, hoping to play mental games with Mrs. Clinton. For our sake, I hope it is. But after following Mr. Trump throughout the duration of this political campaign, I doubt it is.

It looks like we’re headed to scorched earth territory. Brace yourselves.

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