NEW YORK – In an emotional Breitbart News exclusive video interview, Kathy Shelton, who was raped by a 41-year-old drifter when she was only 12 years old, said that in the course of defending her rapist as a lawyer, Hillary Clinton “hurt a child inside too very bad.”
“And she says she’s for children and women? If she was for children she could have never went there with me as a 12-year-old girl,” added Shelton.
Watch video here:
Fighting tears, Shelton reacted as this reporter played audio, unearthed in 2014, in which Clinton can be heard laughing at several points in the recording while discussing the case in which she got Taylor off the hook in a plea bargain.
As part of the case, Clinton filed numerous affidavits attacking Shelton’s credibility and family, even accusing the 12-year old of a tendency to “seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing.”
She also demanded that Shelton be put through a psychiatric examination, although the judge in the case reportedly denied Clinton’s request.
Clinton took these actions despite strongly implying in the audio – recorded as part of an interview with a local reporter that was never published – that she knew Taylor to be guilty.
Shelton’s current attorney, Candice Jackson, points out that some of Clinton’s harsh tactics against the child rape victim would likely have been illegal under Arkansas’s rape shield act, which was not in force at the time.
During the Breitbart News interview, Shelton recounted the rape by Thomas Alfred Taylor and an underage male, which took place in Arkansas in 1975. The assault was particularly brutal, resulting in Shelton remaining in a coma and waking up with stitches on her private parts, she says.
Shelton stated in the interview:
I was going like a couple of blocks to go to church and these two guys stopped in a truck and started approaching me, which one was underage so they couldn’t bring him into it. They said I was going with them. And I said, “No I’m not.” And I tried to take off. And they jerked me off my bicycle and they put me in a truck and they were hitting me and I was screaming and crying that I didn’t want to go.
And I guess no one heard me. And we went on to a road where there was fields. And I’m not sure what road it was today. And by the time we got there, all of my clothes was ripped off of me and they raped me … in the car.
And they were hitting me and beating me so bad that parts of it I don’t even remember. They threw me out of the truck into the field or the edge of the field and they were beating me. And I’m pretty sure they thought I was dead.
Shelton says she remembers crawling, with blood on her body, to the porch of a nearby resident, and then she collapsed.
And I started crawling and I crawled. And I found this house and I crawled up on the porch. And knocked on the door. And she answered the door and the porch light came on and I seen them coming back and at that point I went out and I don’t remember anything until five days later after coming out of a coma in the hospital. …
I was totally beaten. I had blood all over me. … I went into a coma because I had some pretty hard head issues where they threw me up against the door. Punching me and so forth. I just know that I had cuts and bruises all over me. I had stitches around my private part and I was told at that point by the doctor that there was a 99 percent chance that I could never have kids.
While Shelton says she was in a coma for five days, the Washington Post found court documents showing that four days after the rape, an investigator filed a signed report stating that he had “personally interviewed” Shelton, whose name was removed from the report because she was a minor.
Jackson, Shelton’s attorney, responded, “There are a lot of details in those documents that turn it to be questionable. For example, in the same document it says the victim’s ‘parents’ reported this – yet Kathy was being raised by a single mom and her dad had been out of the picture for a long time. And I don’t think four days/five days is a significant enough detail to call into question Kathy’s veracity; it’s the Washington Post doing all it can to question Kathy and defend Hillary.”
Shelton reacts to Clinton audio: ‘It makes me sick’
The audio, archived at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, comes from a 1980s interview with Arkansas reporter Roy Reed intended for an Esquire magazine profile that was never published. It was unearthed in 2014 by the Washington Free Beacon.
In the audio, Clinton says she took on Taylor’s case as a favor to another attorney who wanted the rapist to be represented by a woman. “A prosecutor called me years ago, said that he had a guy who was accused of rape, and the guy wanted a woman lawyer,” Clinton can be heard saying. “Would I do it as a favor to him?”
Later, Clinton said she was picked by a judge to defend Taylor and that she was not happy with the assignment.
As part of the case, Clinton filed numerous affidavits attacking Shelton’s credibility and family, even accusing the twelve-year old of having a tendency to “seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing.” She also demanded that Shelton be put through a psychiatric examination, although the judge in the case reportedly denied Clinton’s request.
“I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,” Clinton wrote in one affidavit without citing any evidence. “I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body. Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
“I have also been told by an expert in child psychology that children in early adolescence tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences and that adolescents in disorganized families, such as the complainant’s, are even more prone to exaggerate behavior,” Clinton further claimed.
In another affidavit, Clinton claimed that Shelton “exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”
In the audio, Clinton is heard laughing when she says: “Of course he [the defendant] claimed he didn’t [rape]. All this stuff. He took a lie-detector test. I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”
She also boasts that she “Got [Taylor] off with time served in the county jail. He had been in the county jail about two months.”
The court records show Taylor was eventually sentenced to one year in prison, with the two months reduced for the time he served in the county jail.
Listening to the audio during the Breitbart News interview, Shelton reacted that some of Clinton’s statements are “totally uncalled for.” Shelton, of course, had heard the audio several times since it has been released.
“Some of the stuff she says about me,” she added. “She didn’t even know me and she is just putting this in her own mind to lie about it. To make herself look good… She knew they were guilty the whole time. But she wants to look big.”
Continued Shelton:
It makes me sick. I… seeing Hillary for the first time in the last debate. And three times I almost come up from there. If my attorney hadn’t been sitting beside me and helping me stay calm I think I would have come up from there. Sitting there, every statement I hear she is for women and children. If she was for women or for children she wouldn’t have put me through what she has put me through. …
She don’t care if it’s lie, cheat, or steal. She is going to get there one way or another. As long as she can get what she wants. She hurt a child inside too very bad. And she says she’s for children and women? If she was for children she could have never went there with me as a twelve-year-old girl.
Shelton says she didn’t know it was Clinton who defended her rapist until being informed of the matter by a Newsday reporter in 2007.
She was not aware of the existence of the audio until it was unearthed and published by the Washington Free Beacon in 2014.
The Free Beacon further reported on the recording: “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.”
“The crime lab took the pair of underpants, neatly cut out the part that they were gonna test, tested it, came back with the result of what kind of blood it was what was mixed in with it – then sent the pants back with the hole in it to evidence,” said Clinton in the audio. “Of course the crime lab had thrown away the piece they had cut out.”
Clinton was referring to underwear stained with blood and possibly semen that she took to a renowned New York City blood expert whose opinion she successfully used to raise questions about the forensic evidence because part of it was misplaced by a crime lab. That detail was key to Clinton’s ability to obtain a plea deal for Taylor.
Continued the Free Beacon:
Clinton said she got permission from the court to take the underwear to a renowned forensics expert in New York City to see if he could confirm that the evidence had been invalidated.
“The story through the grapevine was that if you could get [this investigator] interested in the case then you had the foremost expert in the world willing to testify, so maybe it came out the way you wanted it to come out,” she said.
She said the investigator examined the cut-up underwear and told her there was not enough blood left on it to test.
When Clinton returned to Arkansas, she said she gave the prosecutor a clipping of the New York forensic investigator’s “Who’s Who.”
“I handed it to Gibson, and I said, ‘Well this guy’s ready to come up from New York to prevent this miscarriage of justice,’” said Clinton, breaking into laughter.
“So we were gonna plea bargain,” she continued. …
Reed asked what happened to the rapist.
“Oh, he plea bargained. Got him off with time served in the county jail, he’d been in the county jail for about two months,” said Clinton.
When asked why Taylor wanted a female lawyer, Clinton responded, “Who knows. Probably saw a TV show. He just wanted one.”
Speaking last month to Arkansas Online, Reed said he doesn’t believe that Clinton was laughing at Shelton:
“As far as her laughing, God knows she was not laughing over the notion that this rapist was going to go free,” said Reed. “I challenge any fair-minded reader of that transcript to make a case that Hillary Rodham was a coldblooded lawyer who was laughing over the plight of the 12-year-old rape victim.”
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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