As Donald Trump descended from his podium at a rally in Arkansas last week, a familiar scene of screaming fans met him with requests for autographs and selfies. Everything was gaudy in a typically Trumpian way but for the presence of one person in particular: Paula Jones.
“Go ahead, honey, go,” Trump told Jones as she turns around for a selfie with the Republican frontrunner. When her husband introduced himself, Trump leaned over the railing and said, “You got lucky, man, look how beautiful,” before moving along down the line.
Jones, who made national headlines for suing then-President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment in 1994, has emerged from obscurity to support Trump’s presidential bid, posting a selfie on Twitter after meeting the orange-hued mogul in her home state. Jones’s suit against Clinton was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, but Clinton still agreed to pay her $850,000 in an out-of-court settlement in 1998.
“@realDonaldTrump thanks for stopping and allowing a selfie!” Jones tweeted with the accompanying image, complete with an elephant and American flag emojis. And before even getting the opportunity to meet him, Jones had endorsed Trump for president. “Hey@realDonaldTrump I am 100% voting for you! We need a real President with brains and guts!” she tweeted in December last year.
Jones, who did not return multiple requests for comment by The Daily Beast, is not the only one of Bill Clinton’s accusers to reemerge in this increasingly bizarre election.
“I don’t want to see the Clintons back in the White House,” Kathleen Willey told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. Willey, who alleged that Clinton sexually assaulted her while she was a White House aide in 1993, is doing more than snapping selfies with candidates trying to knock off Clinton: She plans to give public speeches assailing Hillary for her alleged attempts to suppress her husband’s accusers.
“One of the things I really want to do is talk to the millennials and the first-time voters who don’t even remember what happened,” Willey said. “They weren’t even born then. Some of them were too young to remember; their parents had to monitor the TV for the salacious content that was going on.”
Willey has remained outspoken about her never-proven accusations, creating a website in 2015 to document other stories from accusers. “I use it for a safe haven for any woman who has been raped or sexually abused by Bill Clinton,” she said. “Or raped by anybody.”
Despite this being a two-decades-old allegation, Willey views 2016 as an opportunity to strike as more young women gravitate away from supporting Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. This problem for Hillary was compounded on Sunday as her husband ripped into Sanders’s supporters as sexist, a line delivered by a far-from-perfect messenger.
With Bill Clinton getting increased visibility as his wife’s march to the nomination turns into a long slog, Willey took up an offer from a man who has waged a personal vendetta against the Clintons for years: Roger Stone, a political consultant famous for dirty tricks and shady ethics.
The tuxedoed disciple of Richard Nixon has recruited Willey as the spokesperson for his newest endeavor, an all-out war against Hillary Clinton to destroy her chances of becoming the next president.
“This is not about Bill,” Stone, the author of a new book about what he calls the Clintons’ “war on women,” said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “It’s about Hillary’s role in covering up Bill’s sex crimes.” The book includes far-fetched theories, including the allegation that Bill Clinton fathered a biracial child out of wedlock with a prostitute. Stone’s co-author, the conspiracy theorist Robert Morrow, used to write masturbation fantasies about Hillary Clinton on Facebook.
Stone has also registered an anti-Clinton PAC with the FEC, the not-so-subtly titled Rape Accountability Project for Education PAC (RAPE for short), which had $100 on hand by the end of 2015, according to official filings. Stone says that the PAC will have no affiliation with any presidential candidates but he thinks Trump, for whom he used to work as a strategist (Trump says Stone was fired while Stone insists he quit), will win the Republican nomination.
“In boxing you call that leading with your chin,” Stone said, referring to Bill Clinton’s recent comments about Sanders’s sexism. “As long as he starts accusing other people of sexism, then he’s really asking for a full exposition of his record.”
At this point, Willey is the only Clinton accuser on board with Stone’s agenda, or at least the only person publicly discussing the plans of attack. While she says she hasn’t endorsed Trump, or for that matter talked to Jones, Willey was happy that the leading contender for the Republican nomination is making an issue of the sex-assault allegations against Bill Clinton.
“Thank God [Trump] did,” Willey said in an interview. “I thanked him publicly for having the nerve to ask the hard questions. You get all of this stuff from the feminists—[that] it’s unimportant and it shouldn’t matter. That’s just plain wrong. [Hillary] has enabled this behavior of his for almost 40 years now.”
Jones went on to suggest that Bill Clinton had assaulted more women than Bill Cosby, who has faced almost 60 accusations. “He’s a psychotic, pathological, perverted predator. He’s sick.”
Willey has also spoken with Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged that Clinton raped her in the 1970s, a claim Clinton’s camp has long dismissed. But Broaddrick says she’s not interested in getting involved in Stone’s anti-Clinton efforts.
“I’m not doing anything that I would accept money for,” Broaddrick said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “I’d just hate for somebody to say that I’m coming forward for some political party.”
Broaddrick, however, didn’t rule out supporting a candidate for president at some point—so long as that candidate isn’t named Clinton.
“I think [Hillary Clinton] is absolutely a liar and I think she is absolutely not for women’s rights,” Broaddrick said.
Stone remained intentionally opaque about his intentions with the anti-Clinton effort but said he is interested in influencing millennials who have little to no memory of the accusations against the former president. Any association of a former Trump stumper with a campaign against sexism, however, is somewhat ironic. Trump is a man, after all, who once told a friend that he should treat “women like shit.”
This irony, like most things, is not lost on Stone.
“This is not about marital infidelity, it’s not about adultery, it’s about rape. It’s about sexual assault,” Stone said, almost tacitly acknowledging his longtime friend’s alleged adultery.
“[Trump] never raped anybody,” Stone defiantly added.
Clinton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But in the past, she reportedly pushed back against inquiries into her husband's alleged infidelities, leading to an aide coining the term “bimbo eruptions.” When Clinton was asked about these particular women and their accusations in December, she suggested that evidence should tell the story.
“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved on evidence,” Clinton said at the time.
As a person who insists he has such evidence, Stone doesn’t seem to care about Clinton’s dismissals.
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