It’s hard to say which was worse, the appetizer or the main course.

I’m talking, of course, about the second presidential debate and its prelude, that bizarre tableau of Donald Trump flanked by the Clintons’ female accusers. It was meant to distract voters from the killer tape of Trump’s unspeakable misogyny and to distract Hillary Clinton. So far, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Trump was attempting to take advantage of the false equivalencies that have riddled this presidential campaign, almost always to Hillary Clinton’s detriment. Here are some of them: Donald Trump not releasing his tax returns is no worse than Clinton not releasing her Wall Street speeches; the Trump Foundation doesn’t stretch the law as much as the Clinton Foundation; and, on display Sunday night, Hillary’s intimidation of Bill’s accusers from the 90s is just as unspeakable as the assault on women Trump described on that Access Hollywood tape.

These casual and pernicious comparisons have been endlessly recycled and loudly echoed in what my friend, the journalist Robert Parry, has called the mighty wurlitzer of rightwing talk shows and social media.

I’ve previously reported in the Guardian that Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick were cheerleaders for Trump long before their canned, pre-debate endorsements of him, which, watched with bad sound on Facebook Live, resembled a Soviet show trial. (I haven’t reported on the case of Kathy Shelton, whose allegations about Hillary Clinton stem from her legal work on a rape case in which Shelton, then 12, was the victim. They are different from the other three involving Hillary’s supposed attempts to cover up for Bill in what Trump insists – but never proves – is “horrible mistreatment” of her husband’s accusers by Hillary.)

The facts that follow are somewhat tangled, so please be patient (facts are stubborn things). I am not judging the underlying accusations against Bill Clinton by the women, just Trump’s insistence that Hillary Clinton has enabled and covered up her husband’s sexual misconduct.

I’ll begin with Willey, who says Bill Clinton groped her in 1993. Before and after she testified in the Paula Jones case in 1998, she says, the Clintons have carried on a campaign of intimidation against her involving the vandalism of her car, the theft of her recent book manuscript and a cat skull on her porch. No evidence has surfaced linking either Clinton to these nefarious deeds.

Nonetheless, she’s a convenient weapon for Trump because of her ties to the alt-right. She’s been featured on WND.com, headed by Joseph Farah, a radical rightwinger who embraced the birther movement and suggested secession if gay marriage was legalized. WND also published her book, which sells for 99 cents on its website. In January, Willey went on a popular Sunday radio show, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, to demand that Hillary Clinton take a lie detector test to answer questions about whether she’s tried to silence or intimidate her husband’s female accusers. (Klein is also Breitbart News’ Jerusalem bureau chief). Willey’s also been spokesman for Rape Pac, a fundraising group set up by Trump adviser Roger Stone, author of The Clintons’ War Against Women. (The Pac has raised $240.) These activities don’t mean she’s lying, and her supporters complain the leftwing media won’t cover her. But they do show she’s pretty deep in with Trumpworld.

Juanita Broaddrick says Bill Clinton raped her when she was a volunteer in his Arkansas campaign. She interprets a brief encounter with Hillary Clinton 38 years ago at a state political event as an attempt to silence her. Their conversation, which Broaddrick says left her in shock, took place soon after the alleged rape. Here’s what she told the Drudge Report in an interview in 1999:

“She came directly to me as soon as she hit the door … She caught me and took my hand and said: ‘I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we

appreciate everything you do for Bill.’”

Broaddrick says she found these comments “scary”, especially after Hillary repeated them a second time when her “smile faded on the second thank you”. The former nursing home worker said she was “in state of shock ... nausea went all over me”.

It takes a lot of reading between the lines to interpret these words as a threat to stay quiet. It also assumes that Hillary Clinton knew about what her husband allegedly did to Broaddrick, something she has denied about his womanizing generally until he confessed to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Jones has leveled no personal allegations of being threatened by Hillary. Also appearing on the Aaron Klein show, she said, “She don’t care nothing about women. Because if she did she would believe what I had to say. She would believe what the other women had to say.” Jones then said Hillary Clinton “tried to discredit all of these women that her husband abused and sexually harassed”.

Seriously, this is the bill of particulars that prove Hillary Clinton’s “horrible mistreatment” of the three women.

Their sudden appearance just an hour before the debate had to be jarring for Clinton, even though Trump had threatened to invite Jones to the first debate. Whether this, or Trump looming over her onstage like the Incredible Hulk, or something else rattled her, I don’t know, but she was not at the top of her debate game.

Looking back, Clinton herself may have helped lure these women on to the 2016 campaign stage by tweeting last fall that every victim of sexual assault or harassment deserved to be believed.

That tweet represents the prevailing view these days, but not in the 1990s, when this history unfolded. (Think Anita Hill.)

The assumption of truth-telling should extend to Jill Harth, whose allegations of sexual assault against Trump in 1993 were detailed in the Guardian in July. Trump has denied the charges.

It’s possible that Bill Clinton assaulted Willey, Broaddrick and Jones during that same era.

But that isn’t the equivalent of wrongdoing by his wife.