The Clinton campaign has removed a statement from its Web site declaring that all survivors of sexual assault “have the right to be believed” — after being reminded that Bill Clinton was accused of rape decades ago.
The passage had been prominently featured on a page dedicated to “campus sexual assault” on HillaryClinton.com.
“I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed, and we’re with you,” it read.
But by February, the sentence “You have the right to be believed, and we’re with you” was deleted, BuzzFeed News found.
The deletion came after new attention was focused on Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978, when he was the attorney general of Arkansas.
She was 35 at the time and a volunteer in his campaign. He was 31 and married for less than three years.
The incident allegedly occurred in Broaddrick’s hotel room near Little Rock after Bill Clinton invited himself to her room, rather than meet her in the lobby, where he claimed reporters were waiting.
The future president forcibly tried to kiss her, but ended up biting her lip, according to Broaddrick.
Clinton ignored her protests, forcibly moving her onto the bed, where he raped her, she alleges.
“There was no remorse,” Broaddrick told BuzzFeed. “He acted like it was an everyday occurrence. He was not the least bit apologetic. It was just unreal.”
Hillary Clinton tweeted in September that every sex-assault survivor has “the right to be believed.”
In November, she reiterated that “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”
The phrase was also added to her campaign’s Web site.
At a December campaign rally in New Hampshire, a woman asked Hillary Clinton if the women who had accused her husband of sexual harassment and assault, including Broaddrick, deserved to be “believed” also.
“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence,” Clinton responded.
It was in the weeks after that event that the site was scrubbed.
Broaddrick, now 73, has accused Hillary Clinton of enabling her husband and of threatening her to keep her allegations against Bill Clinton silent.
“It’s important for everyone to know that Hillary Clinton is not innocent in all of the coverup and the attempted attacks on all of the women that Bill Clinton abused,” Broaddrick told Boston radio station WRKO in May.
Donald Trump has repeated Broaddrick’s rape allegations and has even released video of Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey, another woman who has accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment.
In May, Trump released an Instagram ad featuring the two accusers.