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“Who’s next after Harvey Weinstein?” feminist outlet Jezebel asked after the film producer’s decades of abuse of women came to light. “Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, R. Kelly, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump are not the only men who have allegedly abused women from positions of great power,” the website’s staff wrote. “There are men out there who have sexually harassed and assaulted women and gotten away with it who are now looking over their shoulders, hoping no one will be brave enough to tell the truth about them.” They are right. Weinstein is just one case of an influential man using his clout to abuse vulnerable women, and the number of such cases is likely depressingly high. But there was one powerful figure missing from Jezebel’s list of abusers: former president Bill Clinton. The elements of the Weinstein scandal sound familiar. It was an “open secret” in the film world — so open that seemingly everyone now finds it hard to believe it could have taken so long to come out. At least one of the accusations was well-documented long before these most recent revelations. And then there are Weinstein’s years of involvement in the Democratic Party, which have now led numerous outraged and embarrassed Democrats to condemn the former Miramax executive and even give away his campaign donations. The question is on everyone’s lips: how could we have let Weinstein’s crimes continue for so long? Yet there’s little in the Weinstein story — the years of whispers of impropriety, the past allegations by women, the intimate connection with a party that advertises itself as a defender of women — that doesn’t apply to Bill Clinton. While Weinstein’s decades of abuse have cost him his company, turned him into something of a pariah, and led him to the tried and true PR strategy of claiming sex addiction, Bill Clinton is doing fine. He’s still heading the Clinton Foundation, charging exorbitant prices for speeches, being applauded at public events, and gallivanting around the world, most recently at Northeastern University, where he nearly crossed a picket line.

More Than Whispers Let’s be clear: the “whispers” around Clinton’s abuse of women have been far more specific than anything that appears to have trailed Harvey Weinstein before 2015. The allegations against Clinton even briefly became a campaign issue in 2016, when Trump cynically tried to use them to distract from his own serial assault of women. But it’s worth briefly going over them again. First there was Juanita Broaddrick, who in 1978 was a volunteer on then-Attorney General of Arkansas Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial run. One day, she made the mistake of agreeing to have coffee alone with Clinton in a hotel room. According to her, after a few minutes, the thirty-one-year-old Clinton started kissing her, and when she resisted, he forced her down on the bed and raped her, biting her lip so hard it swelled. “You better get some ice for that,” he told her before putting on sunglasses and leaving. A friend says she found her with her clothes ripped and her lip cut, and corroborated the story. Broaddrick later swore an affidavit claiming it never happened, a fact used by Clinton supporters to throw cold water on her accusations. “I don’t want to relive it,” she explained in 1997, when lawyers for another Clinton accuser tried to get her to testify in their case; “You can’t get to him, and I’m not going to ruin my good name to do it.” That second accuser was Paula Jones. In 1991, Jones, a state government clerk, was escorted by a state trooper to meet then-Governor Clinton in a hotel room. Jones thought she might be receiving a job offer. Instead, Clinton put his hand up her skirt, tried to kiss her, exposed himself to her, and asked her for oral sex. Unlike Broaddrick, Jones acquiesced when Clinton’s political enemies tried to use her against him, and she sued Clinton in 1994 under guidance from Clinton-hating conservatives like David Brock and Ann Coulter. (Coulter allegedly wrote her legal complaint, which Jones didn’t read, a fact that contributed to her public discrediting). After a judge dismissed her original suit — not because it was proven untrue, but because Clinton’s “boorish and offensive” behavior supposedly didn’t constitute sexual harassment — Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000. An earlier deal fell through because Jones had insisted on an apology. The whole gamut of smears has been thrown at Jones over the years to discredit her story: she’s a conservative who now supports Trump; she later used her notoriety to campaign for a Republican; she appeared three times in Penthouse (though only once of her own volition); the magazine published a piece (written by a serial fabulist) painting her as a “small-town vamp.” For some, the most damning evidence against Jones came when she claimed Clinton had two different distinguishing characteristics on his penis, which later accusers denied. But, as today’s experts remind us, such errors are common: as the American Prosecutors Research Institute put it, sexual assault victims “often omit, exaggerate or fabricate parts of their account,” or they simply misremember. Moreover, a combination of legal bills, divorce, and taxes had left Jones broke, leading her to pose in the same magazine she once sued to keep her photos out of its pages. Most recently, former Arkansas news reporter Leslie Millwee claimed that Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, assaulted her three times in her editing room, groping her and rubbing himself against her until he climaxed. The accusations, which first appeared in Breitbart in the midst of the uproar over Trump’s behavior, were supported by three people who told Breitbart that Millwee had recounted the assaults to them in the late 1990s. The story made a brief blip on the public stage before being forgotten almost entirely. These are the most high-profile cases, but far from the only ones. There was also the flight attendant who claimed Clinton groped her in 1991; White House volunteer Kathleen Willey who has been saying for decades that Clinton made a “very forceful” sexual advance toward her in the Oval Office when she came to ask him for a job; and Hillary Clinton’s cousin’s wife, who said Clinton groped her at a wedding, putting “his hand up there where it shouldn’t have been,” as the cousin recounted to journalist Jerry Oppenheimer. In 1999, the DC gossip rag Capitol Hill Blue claimed to have tracked down numerous women who described incidents similar to those of Jones, Broaddrick, and Willey, and a number of them — such as former fundraiser Sandra Allen James — let the publication use their names (the Washington Post took these allegations seriously enough that it included them in a run-down of Clinton’s accusations last year). Then there’s Clinton’s friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, whose plane — disturbingly nicknamed the “Lolita Express” — was used by Clinton on numerous occasions, including more than a dozen times when a woman whom prosecutors believe to have been tasked with wrangling underage girls for Epstein, was on the plane. Perhaps it’s just coincidence. But would we say the same if we found out it had been Harvey Weinstein’s name on those flight logs instead of Clinton’s? It’s true that the details around many of these accusations are murky. Yet at one point the crimes of Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump were also just stories — uncorroborated accounts floating around that many knew about but few dared to utter on the record. As New York Magazine’s Ruth Spencer put it in the wake of the Weinstein scandal: “reminder that if you’ve heard ‘rumors’ about a guy you know being ‘handsy,’ the truth is going to be worse.” True, for some of Clinton’s most high-profile accusers, certain details or allegations have been reported as casting doubt on their stories. But it’s also true that of the many women who’ve come forward about other powerful abusers, few have been subjected to the kind of sustained public grilling and scrutiny that, say, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey received; in fact, such cases likely served as a reminder to women of precisely why they should stay quiet, lest they open themselves up to such relentless hounding and attacks.