As the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll demonstrated, the key to continued Democratic electoral success is maintaining their dominance among female voters by relentlessly hyping the fake Republican “war on women.” And there is no more potent element for that crucial tactic than the use of the word rape. Yet while the media was quick to use stray stupid remarks by Republican senatorial candidates to brand the GOP as a party that was insensitive to victims of sexual violence, revelations about Hillary Clinton’s role in abusing a real victim of rape continues to be ignored by much of the mainstream media.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the revelations about Clinton’s successful defense of a rapist that she later laughingly admitted on tape to be guilty uncovered by our former COMMENTARY colleague Alana Goodman in the Washington Free Beacon are the sort of thing that would destroy any Republican. But rather than the story going viral, it has drawn little interest in mainstream publications that can usually be relied upon to hype any GOP gaffe if it validates the war on women charge. But while the New York Times has ignored the story, the 12-year-old victim in the 1975 case has now stepped forward to denounce the putative 2016 Democratic presidential nominee as a hypocrite. As much as the mainstream press would like to treat this as just one more instance of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Clinton blamed for uncovering her husband’s peccadilloes in the White House, the voice of the woman who remembers how Hillary “took me through hell” may not be so easy to suppress as her supporters think.

The interview with the now 52-year-old victim in the Daily Beast provides a devastating riposte to Clinton’s claim in her first autobiography that her early legal work inspired a lifetime of dedication to defending the rights of women and children. Faced with a clearly guilty client, the young Hillary Rodham pulled out all the stops to discredit the child victim and to muddle the facts in a case which she later, as the Free Beacon discovered, humorously recalled (in a fake southern accent that she used during her time as first lady of Arkansas that was easily discarded once she moved on to greener pastures) as an early triumph. The victim would like to confront the Democratic frontrunner and talk about how Clinton’s sleazy tactics helped ruin her life but is afraid of what such a powerful person might do to her.

“I would say [to Clinton], ‘You took a case of mine in ’75, you lied on me… I realize the truth now, the heart of what you’ve done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? And I hear you on tape laughing.”

Let’s specify again that what Clinton did was perfectly legal. Lawyers do all sorts of unsavory things in conducting a zealous defense of the accused without blinking an eye. But Clinton is not a character on the SVU version of Law & Order. She aspires to the highest office of the land, a post that requires a standard of behavior that ought to be slightly higher than the sort of thing that is par for the course in your local county courthouse. It’s not possible to be a gutter-dwelling defender of rapists while also posing as a champion of women and children on the national political stage. That is, it certainly isn’t possible for any Republican or maybe even a Democratic male. What we may be discovering is that if you’re the woman who could be the first female to be elected president, you can have just about anything in your past. But the publication of the interview in the Daily Beast and the subsequent story about it in Politico demonstrates that this kind of political dynamite isn’t so easily suppressed.

The Clinton camp has to hope that the Times and the major networks will continue to decide that this is ancient history or no big deal. If so, they think they can ride out this storm and then spend the next two and a half years until her 2016 coronation repeating the mantra that this is nothing but a smear.

In the meantime, Clinton’s old friends back in Arkansas are determined to stop the Free Beacon from discovering anything else that might be unflattering about their former first lady. As Politico’s Dylan Byers reports, the University of Arkansas has suspended the Free Beacon from access to its special collections where they have found several interesting nuggets about the Clintons—including the tape of Clinton laughing about her trashing of a child rape victim—in the archives tucked away in the school’s library. The university claims the Beacon had no right to disseminate the Clinton tapes even though the site was provided access to it with no conditions or being forced to sign any agreement about it.

Shutting up critics has always been the Clinton’s standard tactic when confronted by critics. But in this case, the effort by their allies to shut down research about her reprehensible behavior came a little too late.

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