Hot Tub Bill From Hot Springs
Back in the 1990s, Democrats tried to feed the American public a whopper. Liberals excitedly presented a new wonder couple: William Jefferson Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. This magazine wasn’t fooled. The Clintons were known to us by various names bestowed by our venerable founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: “Boy Clinton,” the “Arkansas marvel,” the “Virgin President,” and his “lovely wife Bruno.”
The American Spectator made history with scintillating investigative journalism exposing Bill exposing himself, whether at nightclubs around Little Rock or under desks at the Oval Office, where he made history with his intern-girlfriend Monica. The women connected to Clinton were many. Paula and Gennifer and Kathleen and Dolly and Elizabeth and Juanita, among others. To be sure, some of those poor gals were victims rather than eager participants of the blue-dress sort. What this magazine reported actually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton by the end of the decade. (READ: Paul Kengor, The Clintons vs. The American Spectator)
This magazine thereby rendered a noble if not indispensable public service. The liberals had billed their Bill as “The Man from Hope,” the name of the Arkansas backwater of his birth. He was destined to bring us “hope” even before the blessed Barack Obama could heap it upon us.
It was pure buncombe. And the liberals might have gotten away with it if not for the fearless, riveting reporting of The American Spectator.
What this magazine revealed is that Bill was not the man from Hope. Rather, he hailed from Hot Springs. Born William Jefferson Blythe III in Hope in December 1946, he soon moved with his mom and stepfather and brother to Hot Springs, where he was raised.
In the words of Roger Morris, biographer of the Clintons, Hot Springs was “pervasively corrupt … a fount of vice and official venality, gambling and prostitution, protection rackets and other graft that constituted a backroom criminal economy.” Al Capone was said to have a “permanent lease” on Suite 443 in the old Arlington Hotel. A place of gangsters, slot machines, call girls, booze, brothels, nightclubs, spas, baths. It was a place of hot tubs rather than hope.
From hot tubs he was raised, and to hot tubs he was destined to return.
Bill Clinton hailed from the hot tubs. Ultimately, he seemed to embody the seedy environment. He would turn the governor’s mansion in Little Rock into his own version of Hot Springs.
From hot tubs he was raised, and to hot tubs he was destined to return.
I share this now not merely for a fun albeit sordid romp down memory lane. I note it because, as reported by our Ellie Gardey Holmes, Bill Clinton apparently hasn’t changed his stripes (or swim suits) from his days in Arkansas or inside the Oval Office closet. It looks like he continued his hot tubbing, all the way to the sinister Epstein Island. (RELATED: Bill Clinton Has Much to Answer for on Epstein)
We learned some of the tawdry details from a deposition that Clinton gave on Feb. 28 regarding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. To quote Ellie’s summary: “Clinton had a decade-long relationship with Epstein that extended to the point that he flew on the disgraced financier’s private plane 24 times and appears in the Epstein files in photographs with multiple young women.” We’ve learned that the FBI investigated claims against Clinton. Federal investigators even questioned Epstein himself on the relationship. Epstein pleaded the Fifth.
Such shamed silence was not an uncommon response among people who showed up in the life of Bill Clinton. Also not uncommon are the women. And this time, there are images.
Ellie’s piece includes photos. She notes one particularly disturbing photo published by the Daily Mail, in which Clinton is shown in 2002 receiving a “shoulder massage” from a girl named Chauntae Davies — a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. “At the time the photo was taken,” notes Ellie, “Davies was 22 years old. She later accused Epstein of having repeatedly raped her for four years from 2001 until 2005, when she was able to escape. She has said that massaging the former president was consensual.”
Still more pictures: Ellie notes that two other photos from the Epstein files show Clinton posing with unidentified young women whose faces are redacted. In each, the sly devil has his arm around the girl’s shoulder, sporting that infamous, impish Bill grin. A Department of Justice photo shows bad-boy Clinton with another unidentified woman, and yet another captures him in a pool or hot tub with Epstein “co-conspirator” Ghislaine Maxwell and an unidentified young woman whose face is blacked out.
The many sleezy, slimy, creepy, and sometimes bizarre images of Bill Clinton released from the Epstein files are plainly remarkable, even by Clintonian standards. Of course, I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked. Not here at The American Spectator.
Asked specifically about the hot tub photo, Clinton said: “He [Epstein] invited me to stay there and he said, ‘I want you to stay at this hotel and I hope you’ll use the pool.’ I swam around. I sat in the hot tub for five minutes or whatever it was, and I got up and went to bed.”
Clinton did not say if he “went to bed” alone, or if perhaps he took care of business right there in the water. With the master of the parsed word, who creatively redefined words like “sexual relations,” you never know. In August 1998, the bad boy told a grand jury during his Monica Lewinsky testimony: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
They didn’t call him “Slick Willie” for nothing.
The day before his deposition last Friday, Bill’s wife was asked about her husband’s antics at Epstein Island, and specifically the photos of him frolicking in hot tubs. Hillary provided an answer she has no doubt given a thousand times: “You’ll have to ask my husband.”
Indeed, Hillary.
“The number of times that she said, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to ask my husband,’ was more than a dozen,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) observed to reporters after Hillary’s deposition.
A well-rehearsed response.
Looking at the photos in Ellie’s story, one marvels at the Arkansas marvel’s stamina and, candidly, sex drive at that point in his life. For the last 20 years or so, Bill has looked so frail that you could push him over with a toothpick. You would have thought his days frolicking in pools with some nubile young lass would be far gone.
You would be wrong!
Quite the spectacle — there was Bill, bouncing aside gals much younger than him in swimsuits, with that frat-boy smile that The American Spectator caricatured so well in the 1990s by artists such as our John Springs.
In essence, what we see here is the same problem we saw with Bill in the 1990s once he became president. To wit: he didn’t stop the playboy lifestyle. Say what you want about Donald Trump’s previous lifestyle, but at least he kept his zipper up once he became president.
William Jefferson Clinton, however, never seemed to learn nor desire that self-control, even after presidential duties and Father Time should have provided him with some nature-given constraints.
The photos of Bill at Epstein’s estate leave us astounded yet again. They leave his spouse astounded — nay, screaming — yet again. And yes, she screamed a lot. I’m reminded of what the Arkansas state troopers who served as Governor Clinton’s security detail told us at The American Spectator in the 1990s.
“I remember one time when Bill had been quoted in the morning paper saying something she [Hillary] didn’t like,” said one of the troopers, Larry Patterson. “I came into the mansion and he was standing at the top of the stairs and she was standing at the bottom screaming. She has a garbage mouth on her, and she was calling him motherf—er, c—sucker, and everything else. I went into the kitchen, and the cook, Miss Emma, turned to me and said, ‘The devil’s in that woman.’”
That account of Hillary chewing out the mild Virgin (“Living with the Clintons,” The American Spectator, January 1994) and pretty much anyone else who crossed her ice-strewn path was not atypical.
One of our reporters in 1993 spent over 30 hours interviewing four state troopers, two of whom, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, courageously went on the record with breathtaking candor. These Arkansas troopers were not a bunch of bumpkins who had just rolled off the turnip truck. They were the cream of the Arkansas crop, among the state’s highest-ranking police officers, with decades of veteran experience. And yet, said Patterson, “We lied for him [Bill] and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs.”
Actually, he treated them like pimps. As one of our articles reported: “The troopers said their ‘official’ duties included facilitating Clinton’s cheating on his wife. This meant that, on the state payroll and using state time, vehicles, and resources, they were instructed by Clinton on a regular basis to approach women and to solicit their telephone numbers for the governor; to drive him in state vehicles to rendezvous points and guard him during sexual encounters; to secure hotel rooms and other meeting places for sex; to lend Clinton their state cars so he could slip away and visit women unnoticed; to deliver gifts from Clinton to various women; and to help Clinton cover up his activities by keeping tabs on Hillary’s whereabouts and lying to Hillary about her husband’s whereabouts.”
And so, when Hillary today says she has no idea what Bill was doing on Epstein Island, well, things apparently haven’t changed much. Though she no doubt had a general idea. We all did. It looks like we may soon learn more.
As for us at The American Spectator, we’ll be sure to keep you posted, as we did decades ago when we first exposed hot tub Bill from Hot Springs.
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