A new Vanity Fair article in the July issue alleges former President Bill Clinton had several affairs during his tenure as President in the White House. The article suggests that Clinton had affairs with many women on the road including actress Gina Gershon and billionaire heiress Belinda Stronach.
Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.
But four former Clinton aides told me that, about 18 months ago, one of the president’s former assistants, who still advises him on political matters, had heard so many complaints about such reports from Clinton supporters around the country that he felt compelled to try to conduct what one of these aides called an “intervention,” because, the aide believed, “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.” The would-be intercessor was rebuffed by people around Clinton before ever getting an audience with the former president, and another aide told me that the effort was not well received by either Bill or Hillary Clinton and that some Hillarylanders, in particular, were in denial about the continuing political risks that Bill’s behavior might pose. source
A former Clinton associate Jeffrey Epstein who was involved in soliciting prostitution was also mentioned in the article.In 2006, Epstein was indicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution in Palm Beach, Florida, and he later came under investigation by federal authorities amid allegations that he hired under-age girls for massages and more in a house stocked with sex toys and genitalia-shaped soaps. source Bill Clinton fired back at Vanity Fair calling the article "a tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece".
Former president Bill Clinton's office yesterday sharply attacked an article on the former president in this month's Vanity Fair magazine, calling it "a tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece" and "journalism of personal destruction at its worst" in a long-memo that detailed its faults.
The article, written by former New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum, included former advisers slamming Clinton for bringing negative attention to his wife's candidacy and surrounding himself with friends who former aides thought could tarnish the ex-president's reputation. Many of these former aides, most of whom were not quoted by name, also attacked Doug Band, Clinton's right-hand man since he left office, for not managing Clinton's carefully.
While Hillary Clinton's campaign did not provide a direct response to the piece, her aides are known to coordinate closely with her husband's office, which released the memo. The 2400-word rebuttal not only slammed Purdum for his use of unnamed sources in much of the piece, but detailed the work of Clinton's nonprofit foundation on HIV/AIDS prevention and other issues, calling the Clinton Foundation "a leading global nongovernmental organization." source
Gina and Bill have been friends for a few years and they have many mutual friends, so it wouldn't be odd for the two to hang out. Besides, she's got a boyfriend, Leroy Powell, and hasn't even been in California for the last couple months; she's doing a play in New York.
Posted by: Jessica | June 02, 2008 at 06:32 PM
I guess his staff doesn't want to be on their enemy list.
Posted by: MominCT | June 03, 2008 at 10:25 AM