Newsday.com carries a deeply troubling story about a twelve year old girl who was raped, but when the case went to trial the defense attorney badgered the young girl, damaging the credibility of her testimony to the point where the rapist, an adult against whom there was considerable evidence, got off on a reduced charge.
This is outrageous enough but the story takes on a surreal aspect when we learn that the lawyer, despite her aggressiveness toward the young victim and her lack of sympathy for the ordeal the girl was going through, is a prominent champion of women's rights.
The story becomes almost incredible when we learn that the lawyer was Hillary Clinton:
Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her "35 years of experience making change" on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.
But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn't mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas - using her child development background to help the defendant.
In May 1975, Washington County prosecutor Mahlon Gibson called Rodham, who had taken over the law clinic months earlier, to tell her she'd been appointed to represent a hard-drinking factory worker named Thomas Alfred Taylor, who had requested a female attorney.
In her 2003 autobiography "Living History," Clinton writes that she initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired "cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples collected by the sheriff's office."
However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.
Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader's honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.
Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child's credibility - although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.
"She was vigorously advocating for her client. What she did was appropriate," said Andrew Schepard, director of Hofstra Law School's Center for Children, Families and the Law. "He was lucky to have her as a lawyer ... In terms of what's good for the little girl? It would have been hell on the victim. But that wasn't Hillary's problem."
And that's the point. Hillary was able to suppress her feminist principles in order to win the case, even if it meant browbeating and confusing a sixth grade rape victim so that the child's testimony was discredited.
The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.
"It's not true, I never sought out older men - I was raped," the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.
Questions: What difference does it make if the girl did seek out older men? Does that justify the rape? Don't feminists like Ms Clinton remind us that sexual provocations on the part of women never justify sexual assault? Is anyone in the MSM ever going to ask her about her tactics in this case?
Answers: None, no, perpetually, be serious.
RLC
