News Reporter: Fact Checker: Did Hillary Clinton 'shame' women who made sexual allegations against her husband?

Friday, 1 July 2016

Fact Checker: Did Hillary Clinton 'shame' women who made sexual allegations against her husband?

The truth behind the rhetoric

Did Hillary Clinton ‘shame’ women who made sexual allegations against her husband?

Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC supporting Donald Trump, has officially aired its first ad. The group plans to counter the efforts of pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, which has launched an aggressive anti-Trump ad campaign (we fact-checked one of their ads last week).

The ad attacks Clinton over her responses to women who made sexual allegations, specifically against two Bills: Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton. The ad says that when women made allegations against Cosby, Clinton tweeted in support of the women. But the tweet was specifically about victims of sexual assault on college campuses, with no reference to Cosby, so it was quite misleading.

Then it says when women made sexual allegations against her husband, Clinton “savaged their dignity and shamed them.” But it misuses a video clip to support that. It comes from a 1998 Today Show interview with Matt Lauer, just after the Monica Lewinsky allegations surfaced. Clinton refuses to comment directly about Lewinsky, but insists there’s a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to discredit her husband.

We’ve written about this interview before. It frequently gets used because it was pivotal moment for her husband’s career; Clinton fiercely defended her husband and blamed his political opponents. But at the time, Clinton was not aware of the full extent of the Lewinsky affair, and Lewinsky herself had denied there was a relationship. So it’s misleading to say she was “shaming” women in this interview. We awarded Three Pinocchios to an overall misleading editing job.

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Happy 4th, everyone. (Courtesy of giphy.com)

Breaking news: Trump campaign is releasing back-up information!

Regular readers know that the Trump campaign rarely responds to our repeated requests for information to back up Trump’s claims. The burden of proof is always on the speaker, but we often find the burden placed on us to find morsels of proof for some of his claims. But twice in the past week, his campaign released supporting information — with footnotes! — to his major speeches. It’s a great step toward accountability and transparency.

Now, if the footnotes could actually relate to the specific claim, it’d be even better. We used the footnotes of Trump’s big speech on trade this week to find out whether there was support to his claim that China will enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal “through the back door at a later date” and that China is watching to see if it should. China was not a negotiating country for the trade accord. (Our friends at PolitiFact had rated Pants on Fire for a version of this claim.)

But it wasn’t clear what the footnotes had to do with his claim. Half of the footnotes didn’t mention China. The other half alluded to a really technical aspect of trade law, but it wasn’t clear whether this could be considered a “back door.” There’s a possibility that China might enter the trade deal one day, and all signs point to China watching to see if it should. But this “back door” claim didn’t quite hold up. We awarded Three Pinocchios.

Happy Fourth of July!

Enjoy your long weekend and ~~Budweiser~~“America” beer this weekend. If you’re looking for some reads, check out our Pinocchio round-up below of this week’s fact checks. June was a banner month for The Fact Checker, so we also compiled five of our most-read fact checks of the month here.

The No. 1 reader favorite this month was our fact-check on Trump’s Four Pinocchio claim that Elizabeth Warren made a “quick killing” by flipping foreclosed houses. Other reader faves this month included: Trump’s Four Pinocchio claim that the Clinton State Department awarded $55.2 million in grants to a for-profit college that hired Bill Clinton, and Three Pinocchios given to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for his claims about assault weapons and guns after the Orlando shootings.

(Courtesy of giphy.com)

Help us find ads, statements, speeches, quotes and figures that don’t quite pass muster. Send your fact-check suggestions: fill out this form, e-mail us or tweet us at @myhlee, @GlennKesslerWP or using #FactCheckThis. Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio round-up.

–Michelle Ye Hee Lee