A Tale of Two Sex Scandals
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NewsMax.com
Tuesday, April 9, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
A woman with a history of mental illness and a habit of accusing others of molesting her says a prominent public official sexually attacked her 32 years ago.
Her psychological disorder is paranoid schizophrenia, which doctors say is marked by an inability to tell the real from the imaginary - with its victims often suffering from visions that, to them, appear completely authentic.
She can't remember the details of the 1969 attack, claiming she was unconscious the entire time it happened. No witnesses can corroborate her story. She told not a soul until last week. And she also admits she was prompted to come forward because she's in dire need of "compensation."
The prominent public official, who's never been accused of a crime (sex-related or otherwise) categorically denies the accusation.
Another woman - with a track record of success in business, no need for cash and no hint whatsoever of mental instability - accuses a second prominent public official of sexually attacking her 20 years earlier.
She told five friends about the crime contemporaneously, all of whom vouch for her credibility. One, a nurse who discovered her shortly after the attack, reports seeing torn undergarments and facial bruises on her friend, who seemed badly shaken and asked to be driven home.
The victim comes forward only after being subpoenaed when her attacker goes on trial for another sex-related crime. This prominent public official, who has been accused of attacking several other women, refuses to deny her rape allegation.
Which accusation does the press pounce upon? The one leveled by the credible businesswoman with scads of corroboration and no reason whatsoever to lie? Or the charge made by the certifiable head case who tells friends "I've been molested by a lot of people" and says she needs the money?
The head case's claims, of course.
Why? It's not because reporters find her particularly believable. But Flora Mae Hickman does have one major advantage. She has leveled her charge against Catholic Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony.
That's enough to give Hickman instant credibility with most of today's Catholic-bashing press - without any attempt whatsoever to vet her charges before running with headlines that will dog Mahony for the rest of his life.
The credible businesswoman wasn't nearly so lucky. Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton in 1999 of brutally raping her 20 years before, had to go from one media organization to another just to get her story reported.
NBC News, to whom she gave an exclusive interview on Jan. 20, 1999, was so convinced Broaddrick was telling the truth that when network brass bottled up the story they told her, "the bad news is you're very, very credible."
Bad news? For NBC, that meant Broaddrick was so believable that airing her charge might have changed history - and turned Clinton into the first president in U.S. history to be convicted on impeachment charges.
Still, as the trial proceeded, the network's Washington bureau chief Tim Russert refused to even acknowledge he possessed such explosive evidence.
"Does a taped interview exist between [NBC reporter] Lisa Myers and this woman?" radioman Don Imus asked 14 days after the interview was filmed.
"Ah, er, ah, I'm not going to get into where we are," an irritable-sounding Russert replied. "It's a work in progress about a whole lot of things."
Twelve days after Bill Clinton was acquitted, NBC relented, but only after Broaddrick had turned to the Wall Street Journal to get her story out.
Thirty-five days after Broaddrick had given her NBC interview, it finally appeared on "Dateline" - without so much as a single mention of the bombshell on the network's premier "Nightly News" broadcast.
So far there's been little if any of the same reluctance to report Flora Mae Hickman's shaky story about Cardinal Mahony.
In just the three days since Hickman's claim leaked to the press, at least 58 mainstream reports have appeared on the dubious charge, a Lexis-Nexis search revealed.
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