A former broadcast news reporter in Arkansas has come forward to publicly accuse Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting her several times in 1980.
In an interview with Breitbart News, formerly run by Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, former reporter Leslie Millwee said Mr. Clinton, who was serving as the governor of Arkansas at the time, repeatedly made sexually suggestive comments and touched her inappropriately on three occasions while he was visiting her at the now-defunct news station KLMN-TV.
Breitbart News said it interviewed several of Ms. Millwee’s co-workers who confirmed her account in separate interviews. Ms. Millwee said she thought about coming forward in the late 1990s when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, but she ultimately decided not to out of fear for the media storm that would inevitably follow.
“I was very prepared to go forward then and talk about it, and I watched the way the Clintons and Hillary slandered those women, harassed them, did unthinkable things to them,” she said. “I did not want to be part of that.”
Ms. Millwee said the worst of Mr. Clinton’s abuse was in a small, isolated editing room at KLMN. The first time, Mr. Clinton groped her and laughed when Ms. Millwee told him repeatedly to stop, she said.
She said on the second and third occasions, Mr. Clinton groped her from behind while he rubbed his genitalia against her back and reached climax.
“I was crying,” she told Breitbart. “The third time it happened it was just so overwhelming.”
She said that she felt “trapped” in the editing room and that she felt there was “nothing I could do to stop him once he started.”
Ms. Millwee said the final straw was when Mr. Clinton showed up at her apartment and knocked on her door for five to 10 minutes begging her to let him in. She quit her job at the news station shortly afterward.
Karen Pharis, who was Ms. Millwee’s editor and later became KLMN TV’s acting news director in Fort Smith, told Breitbart that she was surprised at the time by her colleague’s abrupt departure. She wasn’t made aware of the alleged abuse until Ms. Millwee told her about a year ago.
Ms. Pharis, who is currently the general manager of the Fort Smith Radio Group, said she “finds Millwee to be credible and that she has no reason to doubt Millwee’s story, explaining that it was a different climate in 1980 for female sexual assault accusers to go public or to tell their superiors about alleged assaults,” Breitbart reported.
Ms. Milwee made the accusation just hours before Mr. Clinton’s wife, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was to face off against Donald Trump in their final presidential debate Wednesday night.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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