Schwarzenneger molested women, apologizes

[Ned]

Maria Shriver is said to be suffering from all the attacks on her husband.

As well, thousands are cancelling their subscriptions to the LA Times. I agree with this. The Republican party should organize a concerted boycott. This paper is so anti-Republican that it should be targeted for extinction.

[Chemical Ollie]

I met a couple of Californian ladies last week who said they were going to vote on anyone just to stop Arnold. And the ladies were Republicans.

[Dis]

err, why does that women have a penis?

[Ned]

Chemical Ollie, well McClintock has come out strongly on this issue as well. Molesting women is unacceptable. Clearly, Arnie recognizes this and has apologized. Had he not apologized, I think he should be treated in the same manner as Clinton.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

New campaign photo.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

It's been a while since I last spent an evening painting a woman's nipples blue.

[Japher]

It's been a while since I last spent an evening painting a woman's nipples blue.

How come I think when you say "a while" you are refering to a matter of days?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp

Do the black recesses of your heart hold proof that Clinton sexually harassed anyone?

Only the testimony of Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
A nice little sign to hang in his office if he wins.

Just as a reminder.

Sounds like it might come in very handy. Perhaps all women who visit his office should don a smock made of the same material.

[chequita guevara]

You know what the difference was between Clinton and Arnie? Clinton was trying to get it on. Arnie was a bully.

[chequita guevara]

Arnold's New York Times admirer
Columnist Maureen Dowd led the charge to pillory President Clinton. So why is she panting after the serial groper?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joan Walsh



Oct. 7, 2003 | Arnold Schwarzenegger is blaming Gov. Gray Davis and his "puke campaign" for the tsunami of late-breaking stories about the actor's sexual misconduct over the years. But in fact, credit should go to a network of Hollywood women, most but not all Democrats, who've labored in recent weeks to bring the story of Arnold's misogyny -- and I chose that word carefully -- to light. Now that those women are finally getting some attention, I find myself fascinated by another group of female players: the women who've emerged to defend the serial groper even as the ugly charges against him mount.

At least nine women have now come forward, on the record, using their names, to tell the Los Angeles Times about instances when the man who would be governor groped their breasts, grabbed their asses, forced his tongue into their mouths and otherwise molested them when they were powerless to retaliate. (Another six told the Times stories of abuse that others could corroborate, but wouldn't let their names be used, fearing retribution.) As the Hollywood caste system goes, most of these women are somewhere near the bottom: They're secretaries and waitresses and movie extras; some have left the industry; they've got nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling their stories now -- and they're doing it anyway.

Meanwhile, several powerful, successful women have come forward to discredit their less fortunate sisters and defend Schwarzenegger -- even though Arnold himself already admitted to at least some of what he's been accused of. The day the first Times story appeared, he apologized for "behaving badly," telling us, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." That strange admission made me think that the creepy stories about him could merely be "smoke," and that the "fire" -- the truth about what he did -- could be worse than what's been revealed. But what's revealed is bad enough.

Yet none of it seems to trouble the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd, one of the actor's alpha-female defenders. Now I admit that even Dowd's admirers know to ignore her columns about Hollywood -- would that her editors knew to kill them -- because despite her trademark cynicism, she's so starstruck when she comes to California she loses her critical faculties. Palm trees make her stupid. Dowd's Hollywood columns are always vanity affairs, strange goo-gahs you can mostly skim and ignore, but on the California recall, her vapid star-worship makes her dangerous.

Before this weekend she'd already written three valentines to Schwarzenegger, featuring banal banter between them that she seemed to think was politically revealing, but which basically read like flirting. Whatever. I've had bad taste in men, too. I bet it's a thrill to have Arnold return your phone calls. But her column Sunday left the realm of banal. On the heels of the ugly allegations against Schwarzenegger in the Times, Dowd tried at first to be funny. "Well, there goes the Jewish women's vote," the clueless shiksa wrote, a tad too glibly, I'd say, referring to the weekend of revelations about Arnold's admiring Adolf Hitler and harassing women.

Then she got angry, but not at Schwarzenegger. She merely called him a "lunkhead" (the "lovable" before "lunkhead" was silent, but you could feel it) while saving her bile for Sen. Hillary Clinton and other feminists who didn't criticize Bill Clinton for his sexual misbehavior. If there's any topic on which Dowd is more unreadable than she is on Hollywood, it's the hypocrisy that was at the heart of the Clinton impeachment farce, in which a bunch of Republican adulterers hounded a Democratic adulterer while claiming it wasn't about sex -- and actually, just like rape, it wasn't about sex, it was about power. But Clinton-hatred deranges Dowd even more than Arnold-love, and in this combo Clinton-Arnold column, she had a moral and intellectual meltdown.

"Feminism died," Dowd raved, "in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker." Of course there's not a shred of evidence, unless you believe Christopher Hitchens, that Democrats "demonized" Monica as a stalker, let alone that Hillary Clinton "allowed" it. And yet this is the Republican line, peddled here by Dowd but repeated endlessly elsewhere: Democrats are hypocrites for attacking Schwarzenegger's behavior toward women when they didn't criticize Clinton's.

The number of ways in which the Schwarzenegger allegations differ from those against Clinton is almost infinite. Unless you believe the vicious and unproven Juanita Broaddrick rape charge -- and interestingly, outside of Rushlimbaugh.com and other right-wing Web sites, none of Arnold's mainstream defenders mention Broaddrick by name -- Clinton did nothing that compares with how the Terminator apparently assaulted his way through Hollywood. And yet Clinton critics who are Schwarzenegger fans slur the president as though he too had been accused of behavior that could be charged as sexual assault or battery. Yes, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey claimed their contact with Clinton wasn't consensual, but there was plenty of evidence to contradict them. Only the ugly Broaddrick charge, which no one has ever proven, puts Clinton in the same class as Schwarzenegger, who hounded women and wouldn't take no for an answer, exposing their breasts, their buttocks, cornering them in offices and elevators and bathrooms, clearly reveling in the power he had over them, not just the sexual frisson.

It's worth noting that Schwarzenegger's behavior, as detailed by the Times, was brutal and bullying, not erotic. Even if you believe all the stories about Clinton's womanizing, even if you disapprove of it, he sounds like a guy who enjoys having sex with women; Schwarzenegger sounds like a guy who enjoys humiliating them. That's why it looks like misogyny, not just sexual misbehavior. So what's Dowd doing defending him, believing his word against his accusers?

It was probably naive to hope that the Times' star political columnist might have had second thoughts about her and her paper's weird willingness to sign on to Kenneth Starr's partisan, moralistic crusade. But at least she should have had sense enough to avoid returning to the subject.

Then there's Susan Estrich, still doing that freak-show thing that gets you on television: posing as a Democrat who, strangely, hates most other Democrats. Estrich's lowest moment during the recall campaign was when she savaged Arianna Huffington for neglecting her daughters by running for governor, on the word of Huffington's Republican ex-husband. Now she's defending the "rowdy, playful" guy who can't keep his hands off strange women's breasts, and attacking his accusers.

"None of these women ... ever came forward to complain," Estrich harrumphed in an Op-Ed piece published by the Los Angeles Times on Friday. She attacked the paper, and Schwarzenegger's accusers, using her post as a law professor to insist that none of the allegations against him could be construed as assault, battery or sexual harassment. Of course, that was before the next wave of women came forward with their accusations, some of which sound very much like they could result in battery charges if his victims had pressed charges promptly.

It's hard not to add Maria Shriver to the list of alpha females protecting Arnold, but for now I'll give her a pass. I have a thing for these long-suffering Kennedy women -- I was raised to -- with their legacy of defending misbehaving men. Maybe Shriver really doesn't believe the stories about her husband. I have to think she doesn't, at least for now, or else she wouldn't let herself be used to discredit her husband's many female accusers. "You can listen to the people who have never met Arnold, or who met him for five seconds 30 years ago. Or you can listen to me," she told a cheering crowd of Republican women this weekend. I suspect Shriver's going to be doing a lot of thinking about who she's going to listen to in the weeks and months to come.

But clearly, plenty of women are ignoring the stories about Arnold's harassment, and supporting him enthusiastically. "You know what?" Margaret O'Hair told Salon Sunday in Sacramento. "Nobody's perfect." And you can't argue with that.

I confess to having moments of scandal-fatigue myself. I opposed impeachment; I thought Clinton's private life should have stayed private; I think "the politics of personal destruction" really is turning off voters. But the pattern of coercion and cruelty in the tales about Schwarzenegger make them qualitatively different from run-of-the-mill stories about his womanizing (and note that while plenty of those stories are out there, too, that's not what the Los Angeles Times included). There's no hypocrisy in having opposed impeachment but believing now that Schwarzenegger's behavior should disqualify him from becoming governor. The hypocrites are Republicans who impeached a president over his sex life, but now try to argue that Schwarzenegger's shouldn't matter -- and supposed feminists like Dowd and Estrich, who defend the whole charade at the expense of the women who've risked their careers to complain about the actor's harassment.

Of course, Hillary Clinton isn't powerful enough to "kill" feminism, and Dowd isn't either, but Sunday was a bad day for sisterhood.

[Saint Marcus]

This paper is so anti-Republican that it should be targeted for extinction.

should Fox (or which ever other right wing media outlet) be targeted for extinction for being anti-Democrat?

[Saint Marcus]

oh Ned...

interestingly, outside of Rushlimbaugh.com and other right-wing Web sites, none of Arnold's mainstream defenders mention Broaddrick by name

Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey claimed their contact with Clinton wasn't consensual, but there was plenty of evidence to contradict them.

the ugly Broaddrick charge, which no one has ever proven

The hypocrites are Republicans who impeached a president over his sex life, but now try to argue that Schwarzenegger's shouldn't matter

CG
Ned

[chequita guevara]

Heidi Fleiss . . . , once again, deflected questions about the actor being a client. When pressed, she sounds frightened. "Look. Warren Buffett is the second-richest man in the world and he's working on Schwarzenegger's campaign," she said. "That's a lot of power and money coming down on me. I don't need that."

[Ned]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You know what the difference was between Clinton and Arnie? Clinton was trying to get it on. Arnie was a bully.

Che, "try" is not the right word, is it?

Also, and this is news to me, the LA Times had the Broaddrick story before the 1992 election and sat on it. Also, despite their denials, the NY Times wilfully delayed publication of the story to just after the impeachment vote.

Yes, the LA Times deserves to be destroyed as anti-Republican. The NY Times, as we all know, is destroying itself by publishing fiction as news.

"By FELICITY BARRINGER and DAVID FIRESTONE

The allegation was passed on to reporters for The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992 Presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the story -- that a nursing-home executive had been sexually assaulted in 1978 by Bill Clinton, then the Attorney General of Arkansas.

The rumor persisted in the shadowlands of the Internet, even after a sworn denial by Juanita Broaddrick, the woman involved. Mrs. Broaddrick reversed herself last spring, during questioning by investigators for the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr. Last month, during the impeachment process, she decided to make the assault charges public in an interview with NBC News. Then she chafed because the interview was not broadcast.

Now, Mrs. Broaddrick has found a different avenue to tell her story, giving several news organizations, including The New York Times, an account of an encounter with Clinton in an Arkansas hotel room. The interviews represent the first time she has spoken openly about an accusation first made public last March. In the interview, she describes a scene in which Clinton invited himself to her room and then attacked her.

President Clinton's personal lawyer, David A. Kendall, has strenuously denied the charge. "Any allegation that the President assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false," he said in a statement released on Friday in response to reporters' inquiries. "Beyond that, we're not going to comment." The White House declined further comment Tuesday.

The problems with Mrs. Broaddrick's allegation are obvious. There is no physical evidence to verify it. No one else was present during the alleged encounter in a Little Rock, Ark., hotel room nearly 21 years ago. The hotel has since closed. And Mrs. Broaddrick denied the encounter in an affidavit in January 1998 in the Paula Jones case, in which she was known only as "Jane Doe No. 5." Through all those years, she refused to come forward. When pressed by the Jones lawyers, she denied the allegation. And now, she has recanted that denial.

Her accusation has long been fodder for Clinton's legal and political opponents; lawyers for Ms. Jones earned a stern judicial rebuke last spring when they made Mrs. Broaddrick's name public in a legal pleading based on unsubstantiated hearsay accounts.

But despite the problems with the accusation, it became part of the background noise of the impeachment process in Congress, pushed by conservative House Republicans even after Starr made only a glancing reference to it in a supplement to his report.

At least one senior Republican House investigator, pushing hard for the President's removal, told some undecided Republicans that Mrs. Broaddrick's story would probably become public and that they would look bad if they voted against impeachment, two House Republicans said.

While it appears that the allegation swayed few, if any, votes in the House or Senate, it hardened opinion against the President among some of the dozen or so representatives who were led to materials on the case in a secure room in the Capitol, Republican officials said. In some cases, reading the Broaddrick files ended the representatives' qualms and made them feel at peace with their decisions to support impeachment, the officials said.

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said he was shaken by the materials and at one point decided to vote for impeachment but in the end changed his mind.

"The material I saw was, if true, shocking, disgusting and left a big pit in your stomach," said Shays, who become one of the few Republicans to vote against impeachment. "But it did not directly relate to the articles of impeachment, which is why it didn't see the light of day."

A Story Illustrates How the Press Works

The shadowy, subterranean path the allegation traveled also illustrates the mechanics of national news organizations after a year of White House sexual scandal.

Never homogenous, the national press is divided in ever-smaller slivers, with smaller outlets on the Internet and cable television sometimes overwhelming the slower and more sober judgments of mainstream news organizations.

Now some news outlets report on the investigations of other news organizations even before they are published.

From her home in Van Buren, Ark., Mrs. Broaddrick said in an interview this week that she had decided to air her charges in the NBC interview because she was exasperated by erroneous descriptions of the encounter on the Internet and on a cable television talk show last December.

She was contemptuous of the national tabloid Star, which in December raised the possibility that she and her husband had been paid to keep silent.

"People were talking about my life and they didn't know what they were talking about," she said. "It was so hurtful, to think anyone would think we would take money."

Mrs. Broaddrick, who is now 56 and the prosperous owner of a nursing home and an extended care facility, gave her account to The New York Times over the telephone. It is the following: When Clinton came through Van Buren on a campaign stop in April of 1978, she approached him and discussed nursing homes.

He told her that if she were ever in Little Rock, they could talk further.

She attended a conference in Little Rock a few weeks later with her friend and employee Norma Rogers, then the director of nursing at Mrs. Broaddrick's nursing home. She telephoned Clinton, she said, and agreed to meet him in a coffee shop. But when he phoned back, he said he wanted to avoid some reporters and suggested meeting in her room.

Shortly after he arrived, she said, Clinton moved close to her and tried to kiss her, succeeding only in biting her upper lip, hard. Then, she said, he forced her down on to the bed and had intercourse with her.

"I was so totally surprised, totally shocked," she said.

Afterward, she said, he got up from the bed, put on his sunglasses, and while walking to the door, said, "You'd better put some ice on that," referring to her bruised and bitten lip. Then he left.

Two friends, Susan Lewis and Norma Rogers, said she told them of the incident at the time. Ms.

Rogers, then the director of Mrs. Broaddrick's nursing home, said she entered the room and found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in "a state of shock." Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit. "She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse," Mrs. Rogers said in an interview earlier this week.

Mrs. Broaddrick said she decided not to see a doctor about her lip, because the swelling had gone down.

At the time of the incident, Mrs. Broaddrick said, she was having an affair with a married man, Dave Broaddrick, who has been her husband for the past 18 years. She told both Dave Broaddrick and Mrs. Rogers not to reveal what she had told them, because she was convinced no one would believe her.

"Even though I was a respected businesswoman, what was I doing in a hotel room with the Attorney General?" she said. "No, I never even considered coming forward."

A Slow Leak Grows in Strength

Mrs. Broaddrick had told a few friends her account, but it had not seemed to leak out until she was approached during the 1992 campaign by Philip Yoakum, an opponent of Clinton whom she knew from Arkansas business circles. He insisted that she make her accusations public. She refused.

Five years later, she said, she was approached by lawyers for Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee whose sexual harassment suit against Clinton was settled last year. Mrs. Broaddrick rebuffed them. "I just didn't want to drag my family through this," she said.

On the advice of her lawyer, Bill Walters, a Republican state senator, she agreed to let him call a friend of his, Bruce Lindsey, White House deputy counsel, she said. After the call, the President's lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, faxed Walters an affidavit another woman had used to deny involvement with Clinton. She said Walters changed the names and facts and Mrs. Broaddrick signed it on January 2, 1998. Contacted Tuesday, Lindsey and Bennett would not comment.

The affidavit read, in part, "These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family."

After the Lewinsky matter surfaced, she said, she started to get calls from reporters, but she refused to comment. Then she heard that prosecutors in the office of Starr were going to approach her. She discussed her options with her husband and her son, Kevin Hickey, a lawyer, and they decided she could not lie to Federal investigators.

She recounted most of her story to F.B.I. investigators for

Starr, breaking down when she got to the physical details and going no further. She made it clear that no one from the White House had ever tried to pressure her to stay silent.

Around Thanksgiving of last year, Ms. Broaddrick said, she was contacted by Representative Asa Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican who was one of the House impeachment managers. He was interested primarily in what happened after the attack. She told him that there had never been any overtures of bribery or intimidation from the White House.

The white-hot partisanship surrounding the impeachment debate insured that details of Mrs. Broaddrick's charges ricocheted around Capitol Hill, where about a dozen Representatives went to examine the detailed account that Mrs. Broaddrick, then known as "Jane Doe No. 5," gave to House investigators. It also ricocheted around the World Wide Web.

Several organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, carried brief news accounts of the Congressional interest in the allegations of Jane Doe No. 5, without any details.

In late January, Lisa Myers, an NBC reporter, arrived in Little Rock with her producers and camera crew. Soon after the Internet gossip Matt Drudge began putting out taunting reports on his Web site that NBC was having cold feet about broadcasting the piece. Fox News reported on the NBC interview and on at least one occasion the anchor Brit Hume wore a "Free Lisa Myers" lapel button on the air.

On Jan. 30, the CNN show "Reliable Sources" included a discussion of the status of the NBC interview. Robert Bartley, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, saw the show and decided to send Dorothy Rabinowitz, one of his columnists, to see if she could interview Mrs. Broaddrick. She wrote a lengthy article, which was published on The Journal's editorial page, one of the nation's most conservative and a strident critic of Clinton. The Journal's Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, said he first found out about the Rabinowitz article when it was mentioned on Drudge's web site.

After her piece was published, Ms. Rabinowitz stayed in touch with Mrs. Broaddrick, and eventually persuaded her to repeat her story to The Times.

People inside NBC who spoke on condition of anonymity said that there were long debates about whether to use the piece but that network executives believed that the interview needed extensive corroboration. One thing that gave them pause was the fact that the father of a corroborating witness, Norma Rogers, had been murdered and that Clinton pardoned the person convicted of the crime.

In an interview, Ms. Rogers said Clinton's pardon decision, in 1980, had nothing to do with her corroboration of Mrs. Broaddrick's story.

For months Mrs. Broaddrick had been talking to another reporter, Lois Romano of The Washington Post, off the record. When Ms. Rabinowitz's piece appeared on Friday, Mrs. Broaddrick agreed to let Ms. Romano publish her account as well.

News Organizations Face a Tough Call

Was publishing an easy call? "No," replied Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post. "We talked it out. Even when we saw the Rabinowitz column, I wasn't certain we'd be publishing the story."

Downie added, "Our aim was to provide the entire story -- a story about something that she had said, that she had told some journalists and some investigators and, a number of years ago, a friend. And the role that the knowledge of that story had come to play in various investigations and various media decisions is the whole story as opposed to a specific accusation by one person 21 years ago with limited corroboration."

The New York Times also hesitated about publishing the account, because it had not interviewed Mrs. Broaddrick.

"The first thing we did was assign some reporters to learn as much as we could -- about the story, about how it emerged, about its consequences," said the managing editor of The Times, Bill Keller.

He added: "Even then, we talked long and hard about whether to publish anything. The merits of the allegations are probably unknowable. Legally, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Congress isn't going to impeach him again. And frankly, we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue.

"But these allegations played at least some small role in the impeachment of a President," Keller said. "And our readers, who have doubtless encountered the story in other places, are entitled to read our best take on it."

Late Tuesday afternoon, NBC News announced that the Broaddrick interview would be broadcast on "Dateline NBC" tonight.

"We were never holding it," Andrew Lack, the president of NBC's news division, said of the interview. "We were working our way through a process that was not completed until today."

Speaking of the drumbeat of coverage of his network's yet-to-be-broadcast interview, he added, "It seems that these days so many stories are getting far too much play before their airing." He added, "There seems to be a party line, like an old telephone party line, involving everything you're doing" in news gathering.

"There are 50 people on it," he added. "It's all cross talk."

http://www.shamema.com/nytbroad.htm