The Hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton

Empowering a Womanizer

How a Champion of Women Spent Decades Silencing Them — And Whether She’s Finally Reckoning With It

Source: NBC News

Introduction: The Two Hillarys

Hillary Rodham Clinton has long occupied a paradoxical space in American life. She is at once a trailblazer — the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination, a former Secretary of State, a U.S. Senator, and a globally recognized advocate for women’s rights — and a figure whose personal history raises uncomfortable questions about the distance between her public advocacy and private conduct.

For decades, Clinton positioned herself as a champion of women. Her famous 1995 declaration in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights” became a rallying cry. Yet behind the speeches and the policy platforms, there existed a parallel narrative: one in which Hillary Clinton actively participated in discrediting, silencing, and marginalizing the women who accused her husband, President Bill Clinton, of sexual misconduct. That narrative, long whispered about in political circles, has only grown louder in the era of #MeToo.

This is not simply the story of a wronged wife who chose to stand by her husband. It is the story of a woman who, in the pursuit of political power, made calculated choices that caused real harm to other women — women who were often younger, less powerful, and more vulnerable than she was. And it is, perhaps, also the story of a woman who may be beginning to understand what she did.

I. The Name: From Rodham to Clinton

Before the scandals, before the Senate seat and the Secretary of State title, before the presidential campaigns and the global foundation, there was a name — and the story of what happened to it tells you nearly everything you need to know about the compromises that would follow.

Hillary Diane Rodham arrived at Yale Law School in 1969 as one of the most promising young women of her generation. She had already made national news as a student commencement speaker at Wellesley. She was brilliant, ambitious, and unapologetically herself. When she married Bill Clinton in 1975, she kept her name. She was Hillary Rodham — not Mrs. Clinton, not an appendage to her husband’s identity, but a woman who understood, in the way that second-wave feminists did, that a name was not a trivial thing. A name was a declaration of selfhood.

In Arkansas, this was radical. When Bill Clinton ran for governor and lost his reelection bid in 1980, his advisors pointed to Hillary’s refusal to take his name as one of the liabilities. Voters, they argued, didn’t trust a politician whose wife wouldn’t even share his surname. It signaled something alien, something threatening to the traditional order. And so, when Bill ran again in 1982, Hillary Rodham became Hillary Clinton. She later adopted the compromise “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” but the message had been sent and received: when her feminist principles collided with her husband’s political ambitions, the principles bent first.

It might have seemed like a minor detail. People change their names for various reasons, and not every choice to adopt a spouse’s name is a surrender. Hillary likely grasped the historical significance of altering one's "maiden" name; it symbolized a shift in property ownership from father to daughter. However, in context — considering who Hillary Rodham was, her beliefs, and the clear political strategy behind the change — it marked the first noticeable flaw in her defenses. This set a precedent that would characterize her public life for the next forty years: feminism as a belief, until that belief became inconvenient.

Source: Rueters

The First Lady Trap

When Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, Hillary arrived in Washington with ambitions that far exceeded the traditional boundaries of the First Lady role. She was not interested in being a ceremonial hostess. She was a Yale-trained lawyer, a former partner at Rose Law Firm, a policy mind of genuine substance. Bill appointed her to lead his health care reform task force — an unprecedented move that signaled the Clintons intended to redefine what a First Lady could be.

The backlash was ferocious. The health care initiative failed spectacularly. Hillary was caricatured as Lady Macbeth, as a power-hungry ideologue overstepping her unelected role. The political establishment, and much of the public, pushed back hard. And Hillary, once again, retreated. She recalibrated. She softened her public image. She began doing the things First Ladies were expected to do.

This is where the story becomes particularly painful for those who had hoped she might use the platform to break the mold permanently. After the health care debacle, Hillary leaned into the ceremonial aspects of the role. She selected a White House china pattern — a task that has, for generations, been one of the signature domestic rituals expected of First Ladies. It is, on its face, a harmless tradition. But in the context of a woman who had come to Washington determined to prove that a First Lady could be a policy architect, the image of Hillary Clinton choosing dinnerware is quietly devastating. It is the visual representation of a retreat, a woman of enormous intellect and ambition reduced to performing the precise kind of gendered domesticity she had once defined herself against.

She could have refused. She could have said, publicly and plainly, that the selection of fine china was not a meaningful use of her time or her talents, that the expectation itself was a relic of an era in which women in the White House were decorative rather than substantive. Such a refusal would have been controversial — but controversy was supposedly something Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fear. Instead, she played the part. She reinforced the very gender roles she claimed to oppose. She chose the path of least resistance, just as she had when she changed her name in Arkansas.

The pattern was becoming clear. Hillary’s feminism was genuine in the abstract — in speeches, in policy proposals, in the world of ideas. But when it came into direct conflict with the political machinery that sustained her power, it yielded. Every time. The name changed. The ambitions were recalibrated. The china was selected. And later, when the women came forward, they would be silenced. The principle was always the same: the feminist ideal was real, but it was never the highest priority. Power was.

II. The Pattern: Protecting Bill, Destroying the Women

To understand the depth of the contradiction at the heart of Hillary Clinton’s legacy, one must begin with the system that was built around Bill Clinton’s behavior with women. It was not a system of accountability. It was a system of containment.

From the earliest days of their political partnership, the Clintons operated as a unit. When Bill’s extramarital relationships threatened their shared ambitions — first in Arkansas, then on the national stage — the response was not introspection or reform. It was management. And Hillary was not merely aware of the management. She was, by numerous accounts, central to it.

The approach followed a consistent playbook. When a woman came forward or threatened to come forward with allegations against Bill, the Clinton operation moved to discredit her. The woman’s character, her motives, her mental stability, and her sexual history were scrutinized and, when useful, weaponized. Allies were deployed. Media narratives were shaped. The message, delivered through surrogates and sometimes through Hillary herself, was clear: these women were not to be believed.

Gennifer Flowers

Gennifer Flowers was, in many ways, the prototype. A former Arkansas state employee and sometime cabaret singer, Flowers claimed in early 1992 that she had conducted a twelve-year affair with Bill Clinton. The timing was catastrophic — Bill was surging in the Democratic presidential primary.

The Clintons’ response was swift and coordinated. They appeared together on 60 Minutes immediately after the Super Bowl, the most-watched television event of the year. Hillary sat beside Bill, composed and deliberate, and helped frame Flowers as a liar and an opportunist. She dismissed the allegations and signaled to voters that if she, the wronged wife, didn’t believe them, neither should they.

It worked. Bill survived the primary and went on to win the presidency. Years later, under oath in the Paula Jones deposition, Bill Clinton admitted to a sexual encounter with Flowers. By then, the damage to Flowers’s credibility had been done, and it had been done with Hillary’s active participation.

Paula Jones

Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton in 1994, alleging that he had exposed himself to her and propositioned her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991. The case was significant: it would eventually lead to the discovery of Bill’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

But before that chain of events was set in motion, the Clinton apparatus went to work on Jones. She was portrayed as a tool of right-wing operatives, a woman of questionable character seeking attention and money. James Carville, one of the Clintons’ most trusted political advisors, famously said of Jones: “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” The remark was staggeringly cruel and classist. Hillary Clinton did not disavow it. The case was eventually settled for $850,000, with no admission of guilt.

Kathleen Willey

Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer, alleged that Bill Clinton had groped her in the Oval Office in 1993 during what she believed would be a meeting about a potential job. Willey’s story emerged publicly during the Jones lawsuit. She described a pattern of intimidation that followed her coming forward, including what she perceived as threats against her.

The Clinton response was to undermine Willey’s account. Her personal troubles — her husband’s death, financial difficulties — were used to cast doubt on her motivations and her reliability as a witness. The effect was to make Willey’s life more difficult at the very moment she was most vulnerable.

Juanita Broaddrick

Of all the allegations against Bill Clinton, Juanita Broaddrick’s is the most serious. Broaddrick, a nursing home administrator from Arkansas, alleged that Bill Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978. She did not go public with the allegation until the late 1990s, and when she did, she described not only the alleged assault itself but a subsequent encounter with Hillary Clinton that she found deeply unsettling.

According to Broaddrick, shortly after the alleged assault, Hillary approached her at a political event, gripped her hand, and thanked her for “everything you do for Bill.” Broaddrick interpreted the encounter as a message: a tacit acknowledgment and a warning to stay silent. Whether or not that interpretation is accurate, Broaddrick carried the experience with her for decades, and it shaped her view of both Clintons permanently.

Bill Clinton denied the allegation. The Clintons’ allies worked to discredit Broaddrick. She was largely ignored by the mainstream media and the political establishment. It was not until the #MeToo era that her account received broader attention and some measure of the public reckoning she had sought.

Source: Getty Images

III. Monica: A Mother’s Blind Spot

The Monica Lewinsky scandal is, by now, one of the most dissected episodes in modern American political history. But it is rarely examined through the lens that may be most revealing: Hillary Clinton as a mother.

When the affair between President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Monica was twenty-two years old when the relationship began. Chelsea Clinton was eighteen, two year later in 1998, when the story broke to the public. Monica was not a child but she was a young woman. Chelsea had just passed the legal threshold to womanhood.

Hillary Clinton was, at that moment, both the most powerful woman in the country and the mother of a teenager. She understood, better than almost anyone, the vulnerabilities that young women face. She had spent years speaking eloquently about the importance of protecting children and empowering the next generation.

Her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, was a meditation on the collective responsibility adults bear for the well-being of young people. And yet, when confronted with a situation in which a young woman barely older than her own daughter had been drawn into a sexual relationship with the most powerful man in the world — her husband — Hillary’s response was not empathy. It was war.

How It Began

Monica Lewinsky was twenty-two and just a month into her unpaid internship at the White House when her relationship with the President started. This internship was intended to help her learn and develop following her recent graduation with a Bachelor's degree.

It was November 1995, during a government shutdown that had reduced the White House staff from 430 to roughly 90. Interns, because they were unpaid, could continue working, and Lewinsky was assigned to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta’s West Wing office, answering phones and running errands. It was there that the flirtation with Clinton escalated from eye contact and small talk into something more.

On the evening of November 15, during a lull in the shutdown chaos, the President beckoned the young intern into a senior advisor’s empty office. She told him she had a crush on him. He asked if she would like to see his private office. What followed was the first of nine sexual encounters that would take place over the next eighteen months, conducted in the hallways and private rooms adjacent to the Oval Office while the leader of the free world took phone calls from members of Congress.

She was twenty-two. He was forty-nine — the President of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, her ultimate employer. She was an intern who had been in the building for five months. The gulf between them — in age, in authority, in the capacity to shape or destroy the other’s life — was not a gray area. It was an abyss. And yet this is the relationship that Hillary Clinton would later frame not as her husband’s exploitation of a young woman, but as a threat to be neutralized, a scandal to be managed, a girl to be discredited and destroyed.

The Power Imbalance

The relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was not, by any reasonable measure, a relationship between equals. He was the President of the United States, Forty-Nine years old, the leader of the free world. She was an unpaid intern in her early twenties, starstruck and ambitious, navigating the most intoxicating corridors of power on earth. The power differential was immense and unmistakable.

In the years since, Lewinsky herself has spoken and written extensively about this dynamic. She has described the affair as consensual but has also acknowledged the enormous imbalance of power that defined it. In a 2018 essay, she reflected on the #MeToo movement and wrote that she had come to see the relationship through new eyes, recognizing the role that power played in shaping what happened between them.

Many mothers, viewing the situation from an outsider's perspective, saw it clearly: a young woman, similar to their own daughters, trapped in an impossible situation by a man who should have behaved more responsibly and was fully aware of his actions. However, Hillary Clinton was not an outside observer. She was deeply involved, and her response was motivated by the necessity of political survival rather than maternal instinct. Aware of Bill's previous sexual relationships, she chose politics over compassion.

The Destruction of Monica Lewinsky

In the weeks and months that followed the revelation of the affair, Monica Lewinsky became one of the most publicly humiliated women in American history. She was mocked on late-night television, reduced to a punchline, and subjected to a level of public shaming that would, in retrospect, come to be understood as a form of cultural abuse.

Hillary’s contribution to this destruction was not incidental. In the earliest days of the scandal, before the blue dress and the DNA evidence made denial impossible, Hillary went on the Today show and attributed the allegations to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” This was not merely a political talking point. It was an implicit declaration that Lewinsky was either a liar or a pawn — not a young woman telling the truth about a relationship with the President.

Even after Bill’s admission, the framing did not shift toward empathy for Lewinsky. In private, according to multiple accounts, Hillary referred to Lewinsky in demeaning terms. The young woman was cast as a seductress, a stalker, a narcissistic threat — anything but what she actually was: someone’s daughter, close in age to Hillary’s own.

The human cost of this destruction was nearly fatal. In the hours after FBI agents confronted her about the affair in January 1998, Lewinsky has described staring out a hotel window and contemplating jumping. She has spoken of a relentless mantra that consumed her thoughts in those early days: “I want to die.” She experienced suicidal ideations repeatedly during the investigation and in the years that followed. Her mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Her father considered throwing himself off a balcony. Lewinsky was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition typically associated with combat veterans and survivors of violent crime, now afflicting a twenty-four-year-old whose life had been detonated because she had an affair with a man who faced no equivalent reckoning. She was called a slut, a whore, and a bimbo on a daily basis. She became, in her own words, the first person to have her reputation destroyed worldwide via the internet — patient zero of cyberbullying. She could not find employment for years because of what prospective employers delicately referred to as her “history.”

Nearly three decades later, as recently as this month, she has spoken publicly about still living in fear that everything she has painstakingly rebuilt could be taken from her again.

And through all of it — the suicidal despair, the public annihilation, the decades of trauma — Hillary Clinton has never once acknowledged her own role in what was done to Monica Lewinsky. She has never apologized. She has never said the young woman’s name with anything resembling remorse.

The woman who wrote It Takes a Village watched a village destroy a girl barely older than her own daughter, and she helped.

Chelsea’s Shadow

This is where the contradiction becomes most painful. When the Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998, Monica was twenty-four years old. Chelsea was seventeen — a high school senior, just seven years younger than the woman her father had drawn into an affair in the West Wing. By the time the scandal consumed the nation through impeachment proceedings later that year, Chelsea had turned eighteen. She and Monica Lewinsky were, in the plainest terms, young women of the same generation, separated by less than a decade of life experience.

Chelsea Clinton was, by all accounts, the center of Hillary’s personal universe. Hillary was fiercely protective of her daughter, vigilant about shielding her from the cruelties of political life. She understood, viscerally, what it meant to be a young woman in a world that could be careless and cruel. She could look at her seventeen-year-old daughter and see every danger, every predatory dynamic, every way the world could chew up and discard a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

And yet that understanding did not extend to Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-four-year-old barely half a decade ahead of Chelsea on the same path. Hillary could see her own daughter’s vulnerability with perfect clarity while remaining blind to — or indifferent to — the vulnerability of a woman nearly the same age who had been caught in the orbit of her husband’s recklessness. The protective instinct that defined her motherhood did not translate into solidarity with another young woman. The wall between personal love and political calculus held firm.

One cannot help but wonder: if the situation had been reversed — if Chelsea, at twenty-two or twenty-three, had been drawn into a relationship with a man thirty years her senior who held absolute power over her career and her future — would Hillary have seen it differently? Would she have recognized the exploitation? Would she have demanded accountability from the man rather than destruction of the young woman? The answer seems self-evident. And that is the heart of the hypocrisy.

“I Have Moved On”

In May 2014, after sixteen years of near-silence, Monica Lewinsky published an essay in Vanity Fair. It was raw, reflective, and searingly honest. She wrote about her regrets, her depression, her suicidal thoughts, and the lasting damage that the scandal had inflicted on every dimension of her life. She wrote about learning that Hillary Clinton had reportedly called her a “narcissistic loony toon” in correspondence with a close friend, and she found Hillary’s impulse to blame the woman — not only Monica, but herself — deeply troubling. The essay was, in its way, an invitation: a door opened for acknowledgment, for accountability, perhaps even for reconciliation.

Hillary Clinton did not walk through it. Asked during her book tour whether she had read Lewinsky’s essay, the former Secretary of State said flatly: “No. I dealt with all of that in my book Living History. That was a long time ago. I certainly have moved on.” When pressed on whether she had any regrets about reportedly calling Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon,” she replied: “I’m not going to comment on what did or didn’t happen. I think everybody needs to look to the future.” And then, pivoting with the ease of a lifetime politician, she turned the conversation to brighter things. Chelsea was pregnant. Hillary was about to become a grandmother. “With the extra joy of ‘I’m about to become a grandmother,’” she said, “I want to live in the moment.”

Live in the moment. Look to the future. Move on. These are the words of a woman who had never been forced to reckon with what she helped do to another human being, because that human being had been too powerless to demand it. Monica Lewinsky could not move on — she was still unemployable, still defined by the scandal, still battling PTSD, still fighting suicidal thoughts — but Hillary Clinton could, because moving on is a luxury afforded to the powerful. Lewinsky had spent sixteen years trapped in a past that Hillary helped create, and when she finally summoned the courage to tell her story, the woman who had helped destroy her could not be bothered to read it. She was too busy living in the moment, anticipating the joy of a grandchild — the same maternal joy she had never once extended beyond her own bloodline. The circle of care, as always, ended at the Clinton family threshold. Everyone else could look to the future on their own.

The Feminist Obligation

This failure illuminates something larger than one woman’s contradictions. It exposes a fault line in how women in power choose to define their responsibility to other women. In patriarchal societies, the expectation placed on women is narrow and ancient: protect your own. Guard your daughters, your sisters, your kin. The circle of care extends to blood and stops at the threshold. Women in traditional power structures — the political wife, the matriarch, the queen — have always operated within this boundary, defending family while remaining indifferent, or even hostile, to women outside it.

Feminism, at its core, demands something fundamentally different. It asks women — especially women with power, visibility, and influence — to extend that circle of protection beyond family. It insists that the young woman in your daughter’s generation deserves the same fierce advocacy whether she shares your last name or not. The feminist project is, in this sense, a radical expansion of the maternal instinct: the recognition that every young woman navigating a world built by and for powerful men is someone’s daughter, and that the obligation to protect her does not depend on biology.

Hillary Clinton, who claimed the mantle of feminism more publicly and more prominently than perhaps any woman of her generation, failed this test. When it mattered most, she reverted to the older, more primitive code: protect the family, destroy the outsider. Monica Lewinsky was not Chelsea, and so Monica Lewinsky could be sacrificed. The women who accused Bill were not kin, and so they could be discredited and dismissed. This is not feminism. It is tribalism dressed in feminist language. And until that distinction is acknowledged honestly, the evolution remains incomplete.

Source: CNN

IV. The Weinstein Alliance: Hollywood’s Open Secret and Clinton’s Closed Eyes

If the treatment of Bill Clinton’s accusers represented Hillary’s willingness to destroy women who threatened her family’s power, her long and lucrative relationship with Harvey Weinstein represented something arguably worse: a willingness to embrace and elevate a man whose predatory behavior toward women was, by many accounts, widely known — and to do so while positioning herself as the foremost champion of women in American public life.

The Money and the Machine

Harvey Weinstein was not merely a donor to Hillary Clinton. He was one of the most important financial engines of her political career. Federal Election Commission filings show that Weinstein bundled approximately $1.4 million for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and contributed an additional $73,000 to her campaigns dating back to her first Senate run in 1999. He hosted fundraisers at his New York home where guests paid a minimum of $33,400 per person. He threw a birthday party for Hillary during her Senate candidacy in 2000. The relationship was deep, personal, and mutually beneficial.

But Weinstein offered more than money. He offered cultural legitimacy. As perhaps the most powerful producer in Hollywood, the man behind films that defined a generation of American cinema, Weinstein served as a bridge between the Clinton political operation and the world of celebrity, media influence, and cultural capital. He was a campaign surrogate, a connector, a man who could fill a room with famous faces and open checkbooks. For a politician who understood that power in modern America is as much about narrative as about policy, Weinstein was invaluable.

The Warnings She Received

The most damning element of the Clinton-Weinstein relationship is not the money or the proximity. It is the evidence that Hillary’s own circle was warned, explicitly, about who Weinstein was — and that those warnings were ignored or suppressed.

In 2016, during Clinton’s presidential campaign, actress and writer Lena Dunham told Clinton’s deputy communications director, Kristina Schake, directly that Weinstein was a rapist. Dunham has described her warning in stark terms: she told Schake that Weinstein’s predatory behavior was an open secret in Hollywood, that allegations of sexual assault would eventually become public, and that his involvement in Clinton’s campaign — hosting fundraisers, serving as a visible ally — was dangerous. Dunham said she also warned Clinton spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod. Both women later denied that Dunham had specifically used the word rape, but the substance of the warning was clear.

Dunham was not the only one. Tina Brown, the legendary magazine editor and former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, told the New York Times that she had spoken to someone close to Hillary as early as 2008, warning that Weinstein’s behavior with women had escalated and that close association with him was unwise. And when journalist Ronan Farrow was investigating the Weinstein allegations for The New Yorker, Clinton’s team cut off contact with him. According to Farrow’s account in Catch and Kill, Clinton’s communications director sent Farrow an email describing the Weinstein story as “a problem for us” — a phrase that reveals, with chilling clarity, where the campaign’s priorities lay. The problem was not that a serial predator was abusing women. The problem was that the story might become public and damage the campaign.

The Documentary That Almost Was

Perhaps the most extraordinary detail in the Clinton-Weinstein saga is this: as late as September 2017, just weeks before the New York Times published its devastating exposé of Weinstein’s decades of abuse, Clinton’s attorney Robert Barnett was actively negotiating with Weinstein to produce a documentary series about Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton, the self-proclaimed champion of women, was preparing to enter a creative and business partnership with a man her own allies had warned was a sexual predator.

Barnett told the Times that talks ceased once the allegations were published. But the timeline is damning. The warnings had come in 2008 and 2016. The whisper network in Hollywood had been active for years. And still, in 2017, the Clinton operation was prepared to put Harvey Weinstein’s name on a project designed to burnish Hillary’s legacy. The willingness to collaborate with Weinstein, even after direct warnings about his behavior, suggests that the Clinton calculation was the same as it had always been: the benefits of the relationship outweighed the costs — costs that would be borne, as they always were, by women who were not Hillary Clinton.

“How Could We Have Known?”

When the Weinstein story finally broke in October 2017, Clinton waited five days before issuing a statement. She said she was “shocked and appalled.” She pledged to donate the direct campaign contributions she had received from Weinstein to charity, though she acknowledged it was not possible to return the full scope of what he had raised. In subsequent interviews, her defense crystallized into a single question: “How could we have known?”

The answer, based on the evidence, is that they could have known because they were told. Lena Dunham told them. Tina Brown told them. The whisper network that extended through Hollywood, media, and elite social circles told them. Ronan Farrow’s investigation, which Clinton’s own team characterized as a threat, told them. The claim of ignorance does not survive scrutiny. And it is, in its way, the most revealing statement Hillary Clinton has ever made about her relationship to the women’s movement. It tells us that for Hillary, as for the Clinton operation more broadly, the definition of “knowing” was elastic. You could be warned, directly and repeatedly, about a predator in your orbit, and still claim not to have known — because knowing would have required acting, and acting would have required sacrificing a relationship that was politically and financially useful.

Clinton later deflected further by noting that Weinstein donated to virtually every Democrat, including Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore. This is true. But no other Democrat received $1.4 million from Weinstein. No other Democrat was negotiating a documentary deal with him weeks before the story broke. And no other Democrat had built an entire political identity around the empowerment and protection of women. The scale of the hypocrisy is proportional to the scale of the claim.

Source: AOL

V. The Epstein Connection: What She Knew and When

If the Monica Lewinsky affair represents the most public chapter of the Clintons’ complicated relationship with the mistreatment of women, the Jeffrey Epstein connection represents the most shadowed. It is a story of proximity, power, and deeply troubling questions that have never been fully answered.

The Documented Ties

Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex trafficker who died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 under circumstances that remain the subject of widespread suspicion, moved in the highest circles of American power for decades. Among those circles were the Clintons.

Bill Clinton’s connection to Epstein is well-documented. Flight logs from Epstein’s private aircraft, known colloquially as the “Lolita Express,” show that Clinton flew on the plane multiple times. Clinton initially acknowledged a handful of flights related to charitable work, but logs suggested more extensive travel. Epstein also reportedly visited the Clinton White House and contributed to the Clinton Foundation.

These were not casual acquaintances passing each other at large gatherings. The relationship involved private flights, shared social events, and the kind of access that only comes with genuine familiarity. It was, by the standards of elite social networks, a real connection.

The Question of Knowledge

The central question, and the one that bears most directly on Hillary Clinton’s credibility as a champion of women, is what she knew about Epstein’s conduct and when she knew it.

Epstein’s predatory behavior was, by many accounts, an open secret in certain circles long before his first arrest in 2006. He surrounded himself with young women. His lifestyle raised eyebrows even among people accustomed to the eccentricities of extreme wealth. Journalists, law enforcement officials, and some members of the social elite were aware, at varying levels, that something was deeply wrong.

Did that awareness extend to the Clintons? Neither Bill nor Hillary has ever acknowledged any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes prior to his public exposure. But the sheer volume of their social and professional connections to Epstein makes the question unavoidable. In a world where Hillary Clinton prided herself on her intelligence, her perceptiveness, and her commitment to protecting women and girls, the claim that she noticed nothing seems, at a minimum, incomplete.

A Broader Pattern

The Epstein connection does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader pattern in which the Clintons maintained relationships with powerful men whose behavior toward women was, at best, questionable and, at worst, criminal. The world they inhabited — the world of private jets, exclusive fundraisers, and rarefied social circles — was a world in which the abuse of young women by wealthy and powerful men was tolerated, overlooked, and sometimes facilitated.

Hillary Clinton moved through that world with extraordinary sophistication. She understood its codes and its compromises. The question is whether she also understood its costs — and whether those costs, borne almost exclusively by the young and the powerless, registered as something more than acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of power.

The full truth about the Clintons’ relationship with Jeffrey Epstein may never be known. Key evidence remains sealed. Key witnesses are dead. But the mere existence of the connection adds another layer to the central contradiction of Hillary Clinton’s public life: a woman who built a brand on empowering women while maintaining intimate proximity to men who exploited them.

Source: Scary Mommy

VI. The Reckoning: Is It Real?

And yet, people change. Even public figures. Even politicians. And there are signs — tentative, imperfect, but real — that Hillary Clinton may be beginning to grapple with the contradictions of her own history.

The #MeToo movement, which erupted in late 2017, created a cultural moment that was impossible to ignore. Women across every industry came forward with stories of harassment, abuse, and assault by powerful men. The movement demanded not just accountability from perpetrators but a reckoning from the institutions and individuals that had enabled them. For Hillary Clinton, the implications were personal.

In interviews during this period, Clinton acknowledged that her handling of certain situations had been imperfect. She admitted that a senior advisor on her 2008 presidential campaign had been accused of sexual harassment and that she had not handled the complaint well. She spoke more broadly about the importance of believing women and creating systems that protect them.

The Grandmother Effect

Perhaps the most significant catalyst for whatever evolution Clinton has undergone is not political but personal. She is now a grandmother. Chelsea Clinton has spoken about the experience of raising children in a world still defined by gender inequality, and Hillary has echoed those sentiments.

There is something about watching the next generation navigate the same dangers and injustices that can strip away the rationalizations and political calculations that once seemed so necessary. A grandmother looking at her granddaughter may see the world differently than a political operative looking at a potential scandal. The question is whether that new clarity can coexist with an honest accounting of the past.

Clinton has never fully apologized to the women who accused her husband. She has never publicly reckoned with the specific ways in which she participated in their marginalization. The closest she has come are general statements about growth and the evolution of her thinking — the kind of language that acknowledges imperfection without naming the imperfections themselves.

The Test of Authenticity

For those who want to believe in Hillary Clinton’s evolution, the evidence is there if one looks for it. Her post-political life has included genuine advocacy for women and girls around the world. Her reflections on the #MeToo movement, however belated, represent a departure from the siege mentality that defined the Clinton response to allegations for decades.

But for those who have followed the arc of her career — from the 60 Minutes appearance with Bill in 1992 to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” defense in 1998 to the Epstein-adjacent social world of the 2000s — the question of authenticity remains open. Is this the genuine growth of a woman who lived through extraordinary circumstances and is only now, in the quieter chapters of her life, coming to terms with what was lost along the way? Or is it the latest repositioning of a consummate political figure who has always understood which way the wind is blowing?

Conclusion: February 26, 2026 — Which Hillary Will We Get?

The story of Hillary Clinton and the women her husband harmed is not a simple morality tale. It is a story about power — who has it, who doesn’t, and what people are willing to sacrifice to keep it. It is a story about the gap between public principle and private conduct, a gap that exists in many lives but that was, in Hillary Clinton’s case, magnified to a scale that affected real people in real and lasting ways.

Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Monica Lewinsky, and the countless victims of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were all, in their different ways, casualties of a world that Hillary Clinton helped to sustain. They were women and girls who found themselves on the wrong side of power — an operation, a system, a culture that valued political survival and financial utility above nearly everything else. And Hillary Clinton was not a bystander. She was an architect.

Now, the reckoning she has so long avoided is arriving whether she wants it or not. On February 26, 2026, Hillary Clinton is scheduled to sit for a transcribed, filmed deposition before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Bill Clinton will follow her the next day, on February 27 — marking an unprecedented moment in American history: a former president compelled to testify before Congress about his ties to a convicted sex trafficker.

The Clintons did not come willingly. They resisted subpoenas issued in August 2025 for six months, declining scheduled deposition dates, disputing the legal basis of the subpoenas, and offering limited alternatives that the committee rejected. It was only when the House Oversight Committee — with bipartisan support — voted to advance criminal contempt of Congress resolutions, with a full House floor vote imminent, that the Clintons capitulated. Chairman James Comer was blunt: they “completely caved.” The Clintons, through their spokesperson, insisted they had negotiated in good faith and called for the depositions to be conducted as public hearings, where the American people could watch. Comer agreed to consider a public hearing after the depositions are complete.

This is the moment the article has been building toward. Not the political theater of a congressional hearing, but the moral question at its center: which Hillary Clinton will appear on February 26?

Will it be the Hillary of the 1990s — the strategist, the defender of the machine, the woman who helped destroy other women to protect her husband and their shared power? Will she arrive with lawyers and talking points and carefully calibrated non-answers, treating the deposition as one more political obstacle to be managed, one more threat to be neutralized?

Or will it be the Hillary who has spoken, however tentatively, about growth and reckoning? The grandmother who has talked about wanting a different world for the next generation? The woman who, after a lifetime of choosing power over principle, might finally choose something else?

The stakes are not abstract. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes left behind an estimated one thousand or more victims — young women and girls who were recruited, trafficked, and sexually abused by some of the most powerful people in the world. Many of those victims are still seeking answers. Many are still seeking justice. Many are still waiting for the people who moved through Epstein’s world to tell the truth about what they saw, what they knew, and what they chose to ignore.

Hillary Clinton has the opportunity — perhaps the last significant opportunity of her public life — to be something other than what she has always been. She could answer the committee’s questions fully and honestly. She could acknowledge what the Clinton operation knew about Epstein, and when. She could name the compromises that were made and the warnings that were dismissed. She could, for the first time, extend to

Epstein’s victims the same fierce advocacy she has always reserved for her own family.

She could, as a mother and a grandmother, finally stand up and support women — not in a speech, not in a policy platform, not in the safe language of political aspiration, but in the hard, specific, uncomfortable act of telling the truth under oath about powerful men who hurt them.

That is the test. Not whether Hillary Clinton can survive the deposition politically. She has survived worse. The test is whether, after a lifetime of choosing the expedient path — changing her name, selecting the china, discrediting the accusers, embracing the donors, looking away from the predators — she can finally choose the honest one.

The women are watching.

The victims are watching.

Her granddaughters, someday, will look back at this moment.

And the question they will ask is the question we are all asking now: when it mattered most, which Hillary showed up?

A Note on Perspective

This article is written from the viewpoint of a feminist perspective using publicly available internet research. The research relies on news reports, government statements, court documents, video evidence, and expert analysis available online as of February 2026. I do not claim neutrality; I am an advocate for the rights of women.. Readers should evaluate the evidence and reach their own conclusions about the impact of feminism on the USA. The goal is to present documented facts and invite engagement with urgent questions about the impact of feminism in the USA.