Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  In my opening statement, drafted by two speechwriters after several rounds of discussion, I talked about jobs, education, and clean energy, though, above all, I was trying to seem warm and positive. Nick-as-Bill focused on the unprecedented problems and opportunities before us, and celebrated how the tech revolution was just beginning; Nick also emulated Bill’s confident, long-winded speaking style, his tendency to use his hands and intermittently hold up his pointer finger. Bob–as–Jim Webb described his military experience, and Clay–as–Martin O’Malley spoke of how his time as a mayor and governor made him qualified for the presidency.

  Then Greg–as–Anderson Cooper, along with three other faux moderators, asked us about the economy and gun control, about immigration and financial reform and reproductive freedom and zero-carbon power and ISIS. When I responded to a question on healthcare, I mentioned Misty LaPointe, who would be one of my three special guests in the audience, all of them people I’d met campaigning; the others were a veteran-turned-teacher from Lebanon, New Hampshire, and a construction worker from Chicago.

  CNN would be partnering with Facebook to host the debate, and some questions would come from ordinary voters. During the last few minutes of the mock debate, the ordinary voters were played by various staffers raising their hands. An attorney named Maryanne said, “Governor O’Malley, you have a strange accent that I can’t place. Are you part elf?” My communications director, Aaron, said, “Senator Rodham, Donald Trump is now both your very close friend and your spiritual adviser. Can you tell me from firsthand experience if his famous toilet is gold plated or actual solid gold?” And a campaign consultant named Rebecca said, “Governor Clinton, we know you’re fond of orgies. Do you use Viagra?”

  But the silliness aside, answering the real questions was invigorating. On planes and in my bed at night, in my nest, I had pored over green binders containing briefings on policy of every topic. In some cases, I’d asked questions and been provided with additional information; it was possible that Bill could come off better in the debate than I did, but it was not possible that he could have prepared more thoroughly.

  At last, Greg–as–Anderson Cooper said, “Thank you, candidates and voters alike, for joining us,” and everyone clapped and cheered.

  “Fantastic job, Senator,” Clarissa said, and Greg-as-himself said, “That was very impressive.” I knew the compliments were a prelude to extensive criticism.

  Still in a Bill accent, Nick Chess said, “Hillary, was the sound of my voice as mellifluous to you as it was to me?” and everyone chuckled. I was still onstage as, one by one, my staffers were checking their phones then looking at one another. Prior to the mock debate, I had given my phone to Kenya, and I said, “Did something happen?”

  I made eye contact with Theresa, who was in the amphitheater’s front row and who looked at Clarissa then back at me. It was Denise, my campaign manager, who spoke. She said, “A piece was posted a few minutes ago on American Truth alleging that you sexually harassed a member of your staff in the early nineties.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I said. “Is the man claiming this was someone who really worked for me?” American Truth was a fringy, ultraconservative website.

  “It’s actually a woman named Jill Perkins.” The expression on Denise’s face was uneasy. “She’s saying that during your first Senate campaign, you forced her to shave your legs.”

  I heard Greg say, “Wait, do you mean Jill Rossi?” Though I didn’t recall either the first or last name of the young woman who in 1992, in a taxi on the way to my interview with the Chicago Tribune, had shaved my legs, the surge of indignant anger I’d experienced just seconds before changed into a sickened dismay. There was a part of me that wanted to laugh because the situation was so preposterous. But the grain of truth in this distortion, and the colorful nature of the story and the irony and the timing—all of these factors meant it was likelier to stick. Truly, there was no bottom to the coarseness, ruthlessness, and disloyalty in politics.

  “Jill Rossi, you little bitch,” Greg was saying. “You trashy, whorish conservative pawn.”

  “Easy, Greg,” I said.

  “Do you remember her?” Denise was looking between us.

  Greg said, “She was my assistant for about ten minutes, until I fired her for gross incompetence.”

  We needed to evaluate how the mock debate had gone, while it was still fresh in all our minds, because the real debate was arguably the single most important event of the campaign. And we also needed to do triage on this breaking scandal. We needed to do both right away.

  I breathed as my Pilates instructor, Nora, had taught me—in through the nose, out through the mouth. “Let’s all take a ten-minute break,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “Listen,” Bill told one of the television reporters traveling with his campaign after an eight-thousand-person rally in Madison, Wisconsin, that had, of course, aired in its entirety on multiple networks. “Did Hillary exercise bad judgment? Clearly. Is she a bad person? Absolutely not. Times have changed, and there are ways people acted twenty years ago, or, hell, even ten years ago that just don’t fly anymore. And yes, I’m including myself in this assessment. Brave individuals coming forward and speaking out help our society move forward together, and that’s all to the good. By the same token, do you throw out anyone who’s ever made a mistake? I don’t think you do.” He paused and smiled. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, you know?”

  Debate prep had finished, after eight hours, at close to 4:00 P.M., and I was in my armored SUV on the way to my apartment with Kenya, Theresa, and Denise. We’d be joined by a handful of other high-level staffers for a strategizing session. When we finished watching the clip of Bill, Denise said in a fake-Southern, fake-husky voice, “Just call me False Equivalence Clinton.”

  Obviously, the scandal had been engineered by Bill’s campaign, and obviously they had created it to get ahead of accusations of sexual harassment or sexual assault about him; in fact, there were rumors that a big interview was about to run in Vanity Fair with a young woman who’d had a sexual encounter with Bill at a Silicon Valley sex party. I felt fury, and also a peculiar respect for his team’s nefarious cleverness.

  Already, the media had a name for it. They were calling it Razorgate.

  * * *

  —

  Seven of us were assembled around my dining room table, and Gigi, who was in Washington, was joining in on speakerphone from Theresa’s iPhone in the table’s center. The consensus was that I needed to categorically deny sexually harassing any person in any form ever. I had described to everyone present what had actually happened in the taxi twenty-three years prior, and from that point on, none of us at the table used the word lie. Of course we didn’t.

  The questions under discussion were where, when, and how this categorical denial should be issued: Aaron, my communications director, could release a statement calling the claims meritless. I could speak in an ostensibly off-the-cuff moment to a reporter, as Bill had done after his Madison rally, though I had no public events scheduled before the debate. In the next day or two, I could hold a press conference at which I’d address the claim as one among an array of topics. But press conferences often didn’t go well for me—I had difficulty concealing my irritation with the journalists’ ridiculous questions. We also could simply ignore the story and hope it went away, especially given its dubious origins. In general, directly addressing accusations, even in the form of denial, almost always conferred legitimacy on them and extended their lives. Finally, we could pretend to ignore the story while having surrogates deny it.

  It was almost 8:00 P.M., and my dining room table was strewn with pizza crusts on paper plates and cans of Coke and Diet Coke. Around the table, my staffers looked as tired as I felt. Directing my voice toward Theresa’s iPhone, I said, “Gigi, can you give us what you have on Jill Rossi Per
kins?”

  “We’ll keep digging, but so far, the basic outlines are, she’s forty-eight, married to a dentist, three teenage kids. After Greg fired her, she worked for the PR firm Blaise Cartwell for seven years, until her first child was born, then she stayed home. From 2005 to 2009, she wrote a column for a Chicago-based parenting magazine. The columns are about stuff like driving her kids to sports practice and how hyper they got after eating Halloween candy.”

  “That sounds riveting,” I said.

  “Although she voted consistently, it doesn’t appear that she was actively involved in any campaigns. But, Senator, she made a $250 donation to your Republican challenger in ’98.”

  “This is so unsatisfying,” Greg said. “Can’t you find anything about her selling edibles out of her station wagon?”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Denise said, “but I just got a text from someone at ABC, and the bad news is that Jill Perkins and her lawyer will be on Good Morning America tomorrow.”

  I sighed. “What’s the good news?”

  Denise looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “If that’s the bad news, what’s the good news?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Denise said, “but at this point, I wouldn’t say there is any.”

  Quickly, Theresa said, “The good news is that you’re the front-runner to be the Democratic nominee for president.”

  * * *

  —

  On the night in September 2005 when I left Bill’s penthouse after our disastrous nondinner together, the doorman of his building called a taxi for me, and I sat in it feeling embarrassment, anger, and, above all, astonishment. I was stunned that my feeling on the way to see Bill had been wrong. My own prescience, reliable since my youth, had failed me. I had thought that something good and special had been about to happen, and I’d been wrong. I considered calling Maureen, worried I’d break down when I heard her voice, and instead emailed her from my BlackBerry. It turns out there’s one woman on Earth who Bill Clinton doesn’t want to have sex with, I typed. The woman is me.

  Another five years had passed when I once again found myself at a large and rarefied event with him, in this case a cybersecurity conference in San Diego. Bill and I stood thirty feet apart and didn’t speak. Though the sight of him made me shaky, it did not make me hopeful. I suspected he didn’t notice my presence. Ten months later, at a tech summit at the White House, we made eye contact and again didn’t speak. The next day, an email from him appeared in my inbox: Thought you’d enjoy this if you haven’t seen it. The attachment was a white paper on artificial intelligence and populism.

  We then, to my surprise, entered a new epoch of distant but collegial contact, exchanging emails every two or three months that included an attachment or link to the findings of an academic study or an article from The New Yorker or The New York Times. The topics could be anything from tax regulation to substandard federal prison conditions to the future of NATO. Always, the emails contained a slight variation of the words Thought you’d find this interesting. The recipient would read the article within a day or two—sometimes I’d already read what he sent and had even considered sending it to him—and reply with a similarly brief bit of editorializing: Astute analysis of limitations of zero tolerance policies or Fails to acknowledge China’s role in supplying arms.

  This contact, with its external focus and regularity that wasn’t frequency, achieved something that had for me proven elusive: It demystified Bill. When I saw him in Davos in 2013, we casually chatted for ten minutes, and the stakes felt blessedly, unprecedentedly low. In 2014, I was using the elliptical machine in the female senators’ gym when I realized I’d forgotten to acknowledge an email he’d sent more than a week before. Wasn’t this lapse proof that I was—finally—over him? And perhaps my prescience that night in San Francisco hadn’t been wrong; perhaps that had been a night of significance because it was when my true liberation from Bill began.

  Our mostly digital contact of the last few years was also the reason that I’d thought if he decided to run for president, I’d know well in advance. I hadn’t only been exchanging articles; I’d also been keeping tabs on him.

  * * *

  —

  Jill Perkins had wavy dark-brown hair, wore a cream-colored blouse, and seemed anxious in a way that came off as sincere as she said, “Watching Hillary Rodham pretend to be a champion of women, I just couldn’t stay silent. No matter who you are, that doesn’t give you the right to abuse other people.”

  She and her lawyer, a man with a neatly trimmed brown beard, sat together on a short couch, and the anchor interviewing them sat on a chair to their left, emoting concern; though it was 7:20 A.M. on the East Coast, she wore what appeared to be a turquoise cocktail dress. The anchor said, “You’re alleging that more than twenty years ago, when you were an aide on Hillary Rodham’s first Senate campaign, she subjected you to severe and pervasive sexual harassment. One of your most provocative accusations is that Senator Rodham once required you to shave her legs. Can you take us through how this happened?”

  Jill Perkins glanced at the lawyer, who nodded once. In a shaky voice, Jill Perkins said, “We were in a taxi. Hillary Rodham was wearing a skirt and nylons, and she realized she hadn’t shaved her legs and her leg hair was visible. She told me to kneel on the floor of the taxi and shave her legs for her. I immediately was very uncomfortable, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I felt humiliated and violated.”

  The lawyer said, “Jill was twenty-five years old at the time.”

  Denise, Theresa, and Kenya all had stayed over at my apartment after the meeting, and before we returned to debate prep, we were watching this on the television in my den. In their presence, my embarrassment at the picture of me being painted in front of TV viewers nationwide intensified. Were these female staffers whom I liked and respected appalled by me? Did they identify with Jill Perkins? I also felt anger at Jill Perkins’s disingenuousness, her misrepresentation of the spirit of the moment, as well as her misrepresentation of the facts, her omission of Greg’s presence and role in instigating the moment. Ironically, this misrepresentation would be helpful in issuing a denial—my campaign hadn’t yet done so—and I already, reflexively, was composing the wording in my head. (“The story that Ms. Perkins told is simply false….”) And yet I also felt remorse. If my boss had asked me to shave her legs when I was twenty-five, I didn’t know if I’d have done it—I thought with a pang of Gwen Greenberger, though I always thought of Gwen with a pang—but either way, I’d have found the request distasteful and extraordinarily awkward. It was possible that the reason Jill Perkins seemed sincere was that she was.

  “But, Jill, I want to ask you,” the anchor said, “what makes this sexual harassment rather than workplace harassment?”

  It was the lawyer, not Jill, who responded. He said, “Senator Rodham showed a pattern of sexually suggestive behavior and remarks. The physical aspect of what she did, the inappropriate touching and unwanted contact—this was a person in a position of power creating a hostile work environment for a subordinate.” The chyron beneath the man read ROB NEWCOMB, ATTORNEY FOR RODHAM ACCUSER. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it; perhaps I had met so many people that every name sounded familiar.

  The anchor said, “When you say ‘pattern,’ can you give other examples?”

  Again, Jill Perkins glanced at the lawyer before speaking. “I felt unsafe,” she said. “I realized very quickly that working for Hillary Rodham, I’d always have to keep my guard up. I didn’t know what she’d do next, if she’d try to kiss me or—” She paused. “Anything else.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, “Subtle.”

  In the chair beside me, somberly, Theresa said, “How can that woman live with herself?”

  The anchor said, “You worked for Rodham’s campaign for just two weeks. Is this why you left?”

  “It just felt
unsafe. I just—the way Hillary Rodham is—I wasn’t used to a woman like her.”

  “Hoo boy,” Denise said. “Don’t hold back, Jill.”

  My phone had been buzzing repeatedly, and when I looked at it, the most recent text was from Greg: Welcome to Team Homo! I found this faintly amusing, and I also wondered if Greg would apologize to me for his role in the current mess. I shouldn’t have gone along with his suggestion that Jill shave my legs, but he shouldn’t have suggested it.

  The anchor said, “Jill, thank you for sharing your story, and Rob, thank you. We’ll all continue to follow Razorgate with great interest. It’s been an unusual presidential campaign in so many ways, and it doesn’t look like that’s about to change anytime soon.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Her lawyer—Rob Newcomb—he’s my former student. He was at Northwestern in the early nineties, and he hated me even then.”

  * * *

  —

  But it wasn’t just that I was a lesbian; apparently, for years, I’d been involved in a clandestine love affair with Beverly Collins, my TV host friend. Within an hour of the Good Morning America interview, stills of my appearances on Beverly’s shows over the years—images in which we shared a laugh or looked fondly at each other—were plastered all over the Internet. The mainstream media was handling the implication of my gayness with marginally greater restraint than the right-wing websites, substituting insinuations for declarations: