Bubba come-on to Blaz aide in ’84
WHEN HE WAS governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton scribbled his hotel room number and a question mark on a napkin and slipped it to a 24-year-old blond he had just met.
That woman is now Mayor de Blasio’s press secretary, Karen Hinton, and she turned him down, according to a book that detailed the incident.
The crude come-on 31 years ago in Greenville, Miss., appalled the young Hinton, then a politically active Southern Democrat who was initially enthralled by the charismatic Clinton.
“Here I’d been talking to him for all this time, thinking he was interested in what I had to say and all he’s thinking of is how could he get his hand up my dress,” Hinton told “Uncovering Clinton” author Michael Isikoff.
The book was published in 1999, when Hinton was a little-known aide to Andrew Cuomo, then secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton.
The story resurfaced on Thursday in a profile on the website Capital New York.
Hinton, who started working for the mayor in May, told Isikoff the come-on left her “a bit humiliated.”
She met Clinton in 1984 after a Democratic Party fund-raiser and he didn’t try to hide his interest, according to Hinton.
“It’s hard to describe, but the way he looked at me – nobody could have missed it – it was a direct flirtation,” said Hinton.
“He made direct eye contact, he looked me up and down – it was very clear.”
Although she didn’t appreciate his leering, she got over it when he started talking to her at dinner, when he gave her his “undivided attention” to discuss issues like teen pregnancy and education.
“Here I am, this 24-year-old, and I’m captivated by the fact that he’s sitting there listening to me,” she said in the book.
After dinner, she saw him write something on a napkin, which he folded up and passed to her.
When she saw the visiting Democrat’s room number at the Holiday Inn with a question mark next to it, she said, “It all started to sink in.”
She tried to avoid him, but noticed him “gazing at me like he wants some kind of a response.”
Years after the incident, Hinton was one of the few Democrats to be publicly critical of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal in the late 1990s.
“Why doesn’t it matter that we have a President who walks into a room and sees an attractive woman and proceeds to hit on her without any concern how that woman might feel about it?” she wrote in the book.
She first spoke to Isikoff when she was the spokeswoman for the D.C. public schools system and he was a political reporter, but wouldn’t go on the record until he was writing his book in the late 1990s.
By that time, she was working at HUD for Cuomo.
She told Isikoff that she also knew of another woman that Clinton hit on, who was her friend and “the daughter of a prominent Southern politician.”
Clinton was visiting the father’s house when he asked the woman — who was also in her 20s — if she would sleep with him, according to Hinton in the book.
The woman, according to Hinton, rebuffed the future President.
A spokesman for Clinton declined comment on the allegations, and Hinton would not comment Thursday. Mayoral aide Phil Walzak dismissed the incident as “ancient history.”
I’d been talking to him all this time, thinking he was interested in what I had to say, and all he’s thinking of is how could he get his hand up my dress.