Kirsten Powers

Much has changed since Bill and Hillary Clinton were swept into the White House amidst sordid tales about the Arkansas governor’s extra-marital sex life.

Back then, a senior campaign aide (Betsey Wright) on a Democratic campaign could utter the phrase “bimbo eruptions” to demean women claiming to have had an affair with Bill Clinton. Today, such utterances would be rightly deemed unequivocally sexist.

It was a time when a top Democratic loyalist (James Carville) unabashedly sneered at Paula Jones’ allegations of unwanted sexual advances by then-Gov. Clinton with the infamous quip, “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find." Most famously, there was a young intern named Monica Lewinsky smeared by a senior White House aide (Sidney Blumenthal) as a “stalker.” Blumenthal reportedly also told journalists that the 49-year-old president of the United States had been “the victim of a predatory and unstable sexually demanding young woman,” age 22. The president went on to become one of the most respected men in the world. Lewinsky’s life was destroyed.

Until fairly recently, this kind of treatment was par for the course, especially if a woman had the particular misfortune of being victimized by a powerful man. Complaining women were far too often cast as the cause of their own sexual harassment and even sexual assault. They would be caricatured as voracious sex monsters, mentally unstable bimbos or gold diggers. Or all of the above.

Just ask the other Bill.

Bill Cosby clearly understood the world in which he lived. He operated like a man who knew that the decks were stacked in his favor in the court of public opinion, if not the actual courts. His targets likely understood this too. One alleged victim, Barbara Bowman, has accused Cosby of drugging and raping her in 1985 when she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress. She told her agent, who did nothing. She went to a lawyer, who accused her of making the story up. She wrote in The Washington Post, “Their dismissive responses crushed any hope I had of getting help; I was convinced no one would listen to me. That feeling of futility is what ultimately kept me from going to the police.”

Thirty years later, people are finally taking her story seriously.

The pendulum has swung, and we are moving toward a presumption that women are telling the truth regarding claims of unwanted sexual advances. So much so, that Hillary Clinton recently tweeted, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported."

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

If true, then presumably that would apply to Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, who have accused her husband of sexual assault and perhaps even Paula Jones who claims Bill Clinton touched her without her consent. Notably, in today’s paradigm, feminists argue that accusers should be believed even if they have been discredited. Most recently, in the wake of Rolling Stone’s retraction of its University of Virginia rape story, feminists rallied to the defense of the discredited accuser, “Jackie.” Feminist writer Jessica Valenti insisted, “I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong — but at least I will still be able to sleep at night.” Liberal commentator Zerlina Maxwell argued in The Washington Post that,“We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

This is the backdrop for Donald Trump’s recent broadside against Clinton, in which he chided her for her husband’s “terrible record of women abuse.” Whatever Trump’s failings, he understands cultural shifts. We are a society that has a blessedly lower tolerance for sexual assault and harassment than in prior years. This is good news for America, but bad news for the Clintons. History has caught up with them at the worst possible moment.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY and is author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.