When Hillary Clinton was just beginning her career as an attorney in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she received a request to represent a 41-year-old man by the name of Thomas Alfred Taylor who had been accused of raping a 12-year-old girl whom he had allegedly lured into his car.
Clinton accepted the case, represented Taylor, and succeeded in securing a plea to a much lesser charge. Years later, Clinton was taped discussing the case (sometime between 1983-1987) and the audio contained in these tapes shocked even those who may have already maintained a hatred for a politician who may be the most openly psychopathic “leader” since Dick Cheney.
The audio tapes – obtained and released by the Washington Free Beacon revealed that, not only did Clinton use a number of technicalities and devious tricks to essentially free Taylor, she did so knowing full well that he was guilty the whole time. In fact, Clinton even went so far as to slander the victim of the case in her effort to get Taylor a lesser charge than the 30 years he was originally facing.[1][2]
These revelations came out as far back as 2014 yet Clinton continues to paint herself as atireless advocate for women and children ever since she began her legal career.
Clinton’s comments on the rape trial were taken down during the course of unpublishedinterviews with Bill and Hillary conducted by reporter Roy Reed in the 1980s while Bill was governor of Arkansas.
Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon sums up the details of the case as follows, along with pertinent quotes from Clinton herself. Goodman writes,
Twenty-seven-year-old Hillary Rodham had just moved to Fayetteville, and was running the University of Arkansas’ newly-formed legal aid clinic, when she received a call from prosecutor Mahlon Gibson.
“The prosecutor called me a few years ago, he said he had a guy who had been accused of rape, and the guy wanted a woman lawyer,” said Clinton in the interview. “Would I do it as a favor for him?”
The case was not easy. In the early hours of May 10, 1975, the Springdale, Arkansas police department received a call from a nearby hospital. It was treating a 12-year-old girl who said she had been raped.
The suspect was identified as Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker and friend of the girl’s family.
And though the former first lady mentioned the ethical difficulties of the case in Living History, her written account some three decades later is short on details and has a far different tone than the tapes.
“It was a fascinating case, it was a very interesting case,” Clinton says in the recording. “This guy was accused of raping a 12-year-old. Course he claimed that he didn’t, and all this stuff” (LISTEN HERE).[3]
Describing the events almost a decade after they had occurred, Clinton’s struck a casual and complacent attitude toward her client and the trial for rape of a minor.
“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she added with a laugh.
Clinton can also be heard laughing at several points when discussing the crime lab’s accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied Taylor to the crime.
Hillary can hardly be vilified for doing her job. Whether a lawyer is a defense attorney or a prosecutor their goal is to win the case. Prosecutors will continue to prosecute a defendant even if they have come into possession of proof that the defendant is innocent. To them it’s all about their conviction rate. A defense attorney is obligated to provide her client with the best possible defense even if they know their client is guilty.