The Facts
In 1975, Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was a 27-year-old law instructor running a legal aid clinic at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After a 41-year-old factory worker was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, he asked the judge to replace his
court-appointed male attorney with a female one. The judge went through the list of a half-dozen women practicing law in the county and picked Clinton. She has said she was not thrilled with the assignment but felt she had little choice but to take the court appointment — which the
prosecutor in the case confirmed to CNN.
Court records describe a sad tale.
Shelton, at the time 12 years old, went out for a late-night drive with Tom Taylor, then 41, a 20-year-old cousin, and a 15-year-old boy with whom she was apparently infatuated.
They bought a pint of Old Grand-Dad whisky, which was mixed with Coca-Cola for Shelton. After hanging out at a bowling alley for a few hours, they allegedly drove to a ravine where the two older men left Shelton and the 15-year-old together. The two then had sex, the boy told police.
After they were finished, Taylor approached the truck and apparently attacked Shelton. The boy reported that Shelton screamed and he saw Taylor hitching up his pants.
As part of her handling of the case, Clinton filed an affidavit July 28, 1975, requesting that the girl go through a psychiatric examination. “I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,” Clinton said. “I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body. Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
Clinton offered no source for the claims.
When Glenn Thrush, then a reporter for Newsday, showed the affidavit to Shelton in 2007, he wrote that she was visibly stunned. “It kind of shocks me – it’s not true,” she said. “I never said anybody attacked my body before, never in my life.”
But Shelton told Thrush at the time that she bore no ill will toward Clinton. “I have to understand that she was representing Taylor,” she said. “I’m sure Hillary was just doing her job.”
But in 2014, Shelton told the Daily Beastthat she had been misquoted. “Hillary Clinton took me through hell,” she said.
Shelton’s ire had risen with the 2014 discovery of
previously unpublished audio recordings of Clinton discussing the case in the mid-1980s with Arkansas reporter Roy Reed for an article that was never published.
In the recorded interview,
Clinton is heard laughing or giggling four times when discussing the case with unusual candor; the reporter is also heard laughing, and sometimes Clinton is responding to him.
For instance, Clinton laughed after she said: “Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie-detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
