One of the components to WorldNetDaily’s anti-Hillary jihad is to dredge up stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes (even though Bill isn’t the one who’s running for president). Key to that is being a conduit for Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her 30 years ago.
When the media pointed out that Broaddrick is discredited because she famously changed her story after 15-plus years of claiming she wasn’t sexually assaulted, WND had to go into damage control mode. Cue a May 19 WND article by Bob Unruh, which called up Candice Jackson — who wrote a WND-linked book uncritically telling the stories of woman who claimed to have been sexually involved with Bill Clinton — to run to Broaddrick’s defense:
On Thursday, Jackson was specific: “‘Not credible’ was never a label anyone was able to throw at Juanita – not even Clinton loyalists like George Stephanopolous. ‘Discredited’ has NEVER been used against Juanita before, and it is an outrageous lie. Journalists confirmed details such as Juanita’s attendance at the nursing home event in Little Rock and the location of the hotel where she met with Clinton. Friends at the time confirmed that she told them about the assault right after it occurred. The only thing that has ever been used against Juanita is the fact that she did sign an affidavit denying she’d experienced unwanted sexual advances from Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, in an effort to keep her name out of the Paula Jones lawsuit.
“She admitted to Ken Starr in 1998 that she’d lied in that affidavit (that rape had in fact occurred), and she has told the same consistent version of events ever since. That affidavit existed in 1999 when Juanita first told her story to the WSJ and then on NBC’s ‘Dateline’ with Lisa Myers. That affidavit simply didn’t hold up against the overwhelming evidence of the truth of her story of rape.”
The apparent fact that Broaddrick “has told the same consistent version of events” since flip-flopping in 1998 ignores the fact that she presumably told a consistent version of events before 1998. In other words, story consistency is not necessarily a indicator of truth.
Also, the day before, WND published an lengthy article by Jackson of her interview with Broaddrick that curiously didn’t mention that she flip-flopped. Instead, Jackson baselessly asserts that what allegedly happened to Broaddrick “are historical events that haven’t changed for three decades.”
But despite WND acknowledging the core of Broaddrick’s credibility issues in Unruh’s story, it quickly returned to ignoring this crucial fact. An unbylined May 21 WND article attacked the media for calling Broaddrick’s story discredited, but doesn’t admit that she flip-flopped her story.