“I feel like people are starting to believe and realize that I was truly sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton,” Juanita Broaddrick said on Fox News nearly two decades after first going public with her story.
“All victims matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Who cares if you’re straight or you’re gay, or if you believe in God or not. We all have a right to be believed.”
The cultural conversation about women, power and sexual misconduct that has consumed the United States in recent weeks has now raised a question that is eagerly promoted by those on the political right just as it discomfits those on the political left: What about Bill?
While Fox News and other conservative outlets revive years-old charges against Mr. Clinton to accuse Mr. Moore’s critics of hypocrisy, some liberals say it may be time to rethink their defense of the 42nd president.
Matthew Yglesias, a liberal blogger who once worked at the Center for American Progress, a pillar of the Clinton political world, wrote on Vox.com on Wednesday that “I think we got it wrong” by defending Mr. Clinton in the 1990s and that he should have resigned.
Chris Hayes, the liberal MSNBC host, said on Twitter that “Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.”
Caitlin Flanagan, a social critic who calls herself a “lifelong Democrat, an enemy of machine feminism and a sexual assault survivor,” wrote on The Atlantic’s website that “the Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton.”
Michelle Goldberg wrote a New York Times column headlined, “I Believe Juanita.” David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, said Monica S. Lewinsky “deserves an apology from many of us she has never received.”
The emerging revisionism may influence a historical legacy that Mr. Clinton and his allies have spent the past 17 years scrubbing of scandal. Despite his impeachment on perjury and obstruction for covering up sexual liaisons with Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton until lately had made progress in framing the national memory of his presidency as a time of peace and prosperity.
But the arrival of President Trump on the political stage has chipped away at that. To counter damage from the “Access Hollywood” tape recording him boasting about groping women as well as allegations by a number of women that it was more than just “locker room talk,” Mr. Trump recruited Ms.
Broaddrick and other women who had accused Mr. Clinton to join him on the campaign trail last year.
The spate of sexual misconduct stories in recent weeks has brought those cases back into the public spotlight.
“It’s about time,” Kathleen Willey, another woman who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual harassment, said Wednesday in a telephone interview from her home in Richmond, Va. “We’ve waited for years for vindication.”
She expressed bitterness that liberals and feminists did not believe her or the other accusers at the time. “They’re hypocrites,” she said. “They worship at the altar of all things Clinton.
They’re all over Roy Moore, but they had nothing to say about Bill Clinton when he was accused of doing what he was accused of doing.”
Some Democratic leaders rejected the comparison. “I don’t think there’s any double standard here,” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said last weekend on “Fox News Sunday.” “You were also talking in this case, as you know, about allegations of child sexual abuse.”
Mr. Clinton’s behavior, proved or otherwise, has long been an uncomfortable subject for Democrats. Many chose to defend him for his White House trysts with Ms. Lewinsky because, despite the power differential between a president and a former intern, she was a willing partner.
To this day, Ms. Lewinsky rejects the idea that she was a victim because of the affair; “any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath” when the political system took over, as she wrote in 2014.
Ms. Willey, Ms. Broaddrick and Paula Jones, however, described unwilling encounters. Ms. Jones asserted that Mr. Clinton, while he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee, summoned her to a hotel room, dropped his pants and requested oral sex.
Ms. Willey, a former White House volunteer, accused him of kissing and groping her in the Oval Office. Ms. Broaddrick, an Arkansas nursing home owner, alleged that Mr. Clinton forced her to have sex during a meeting on the campaign trail in 1978.
Mr. Clinton’s lawyers have disputed all three charges, although he eventually paid $850,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit by Ms. Jones without admitting wrongdoing, citing the political costs of continuing to fight it.
None of those cases was part of the impeachment articles against Mr. Clinton, which rested on whether he lied under oath about his interactions with Ms. Lewinsky and coaxed her to lie, too. The House impeached him along party lines in December 1998, but the Senate acquitted him two months later.
Many Democrats condemned Mr. Clinton at the time, but they opposed his removal from office, citing what they considered the partisan nature of the attempt. The fact that some of his accusers willingly collaborated with Mr. Clinton’s conservative opponents troubled some.
Others seized on inconsistencies in the women’s accounts. Ms. Broaddrick, for instance, initially denied that anything happened, saying later that she did so because she did not want to be dragged into the political arena. Ms. Willey later said she suspected the Clintons were somehow involved in the death of her husband, which was called a suicide.
Gloria Steinem, who at the time wrote a column generally defending Mr. Clinton, remains unmoved by time. “Most important is to listen to the women themselves,” she said in an email forwarded by her office on Wednesday.
“Please watch Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk. It is important, moving and tells you who the abusers are.” She did not respond to questions about Ms. Broaddrick or the others.
Of course, many liberals and Democrats stood by Mr. Clinton despite the allegations because they agreed with his policy stances and did not want to reward those on the other side. Nina Burleigh, a journalist, wrote a column at the time joking that she would give Mr. Clinton oral sex for protecting abortion rights.
In an email on Wednesday, she said she did not mean to imply she supported sexual harassment. “As far as I know, Monica Lewinsky was a willing participant, not a victim,” she said. As for the other accusations against Mr. Clinton, she said, “Was he a Harvey Weinstein? I doubt it, but I have no evidence either way.”
Still, some on the other side in the 1990s have noticed a change. “Some of the same people who dismissed the women who came forward” then, “it seems like they’re evaluating these issues differently now than they did during that time,” said Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican who was one of the House impeachment managers.
Mr. Clinton has kept publicly quiet amid the flurry of sexual misconduct stories lately, and his office had no comment on Wednesday. But other Democrats were not as willing to come to his defense this week. Of a dozen prominent political activists contacted on Wednesday, none went on the record on Mr. Clinton’s behalf.
Follow Peter Baker on Twitter: @peterbakernyt.
