HE FORCED ME ON TO THE BED
RETIRED nurse JUANITA BROADDRICK was the only woman to repeat her accusations against Bill Clinton during the bizarre press conference.
The 73-year-old grandmother defiantly defended Donald Trump over his boasts about groping women.
She said: ‘Mr Trump may have said some bad words but Bill Clinton raped me and Hillary Clinton threatened me. I don’t think there’s any comparison.’
She met Mr Clinton in 1978 when she was a nurse and he was the Arkansas attorney general and campaigning to become state governor. She admits she was impressed by him, saying he was ‘very charismatic’ and that she offered to hand out bumper stickers backing his campaign.
He visited a nursing home she had started in her home town of Van Buren and photographs show him in a flared trouser suit and her in a figure-hugging white dress, wearing a Clinton campaign badge.
Mrs Broaddrick, then 35, said the politician asked her to get in contact if she was in Little Rock, where his campaign was based, and she arranged to meet him at a hotel there.
Despite having met him only once, she said she felt ‘a real friendship towards this man’ and agreed he could come to her room, but had been shocked when he began kissing her. She told him she was married, but said he kissed her again and began biting on her lip before forcing her down on to her hotel room bed.
Mrs Broaddrick told NBC: ‘I just was very frightened, I tried to get away from him and I told him no, I didn’t want this to happen, but he didn’t listen to me.
‘He was such a different person at that moment, he was just a vicious awful person.’ Her skirt and tights were ripped, she said, and her lip was swollen and bruised. She said she was crying when he left, adding: ‘The last thing he said to me was, “You better get some ice for that” [her lip]. And he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.’
Mrs Broaddrick did not go to police over the alleged rape, and said she did not think her word would be believed against a man who was running for governor.
Suggestions she was raped by Mr Clinton surfaced in 1992, while he was running for president, but she continued to deny it and even gave a sworn affidavit in 1998 that the rape allegation was untrue. But just a year later she said it was true, and in the run-up to this election she went public with claims that Mrs Clinton had tried to intimidate her.
Weeks after the alleged rape, she met Mrs Clinton at a fundraiser, and said the young lawyer thanked her for ‘everything you are doing in Bill’s campaign’.
Mrs Broaddrick said Mrs Clinton grabbed her arm and asked: ‘Do you understand everything you do?’ She said she took those words as a threat that implied she should keep quiet. She attempted to take legal action against Mr Clinton in 1999 but the case was dismissed, and he has denied her claims.
Now retired, Mrs Broaddrick still lives in the small town of Van Buren.