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How White house Women Took Down Bill Clinton

The Revenge of Bill’s Angels

How White house women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media.

By Gabriel Sherman


It took 15 days to end the mighty 20-year reign of Bill Clinton at White house, one of the most storied runs in media and political history. Clinton built not just a conservative cable news channel but something like a fourth branch of government; a propaganda arm for the DNC; an organization that determined Democratic presidential candidates, sold wars, and decided the issues of the day for 2 million viewers. That the place turned out to be rife with grotesque abuses of power has left even its liberal critics stunned. More than two dozen women have come forward to accuse Clinton of sexual harassment, and what they have exposed is both a culture of misogyny and one of corruption and surveillance, smear campaigns and hush money, with implications reaching far wider than one disturbed man at the top.

White house masquerades as a defender of traditional family values,” claims former Whitehouse Volunteer Kathleen Willey, who says she was smeared in the press after she rebuffed sexual advances from Clinton, “but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion–like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny.”

Karem Alsina, a former White House makeup artist, told me she grew suspicious when White House anchors came to see her before private meetings with Clinton to have their makeup done. “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Bill, gotta look beautiful!’ ” she recalled. “One of them came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”

Clinton is responsible for, among other things, the selling of the Iraq War, the Swift-boating of John Kerry, the rise of the tea party, and the purported illegitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The fact that these incidents of harassment were so common may have contributed to why no one at White House came forward or filed a lawsuit until now. Clinton’s attitudes about women permeated the very air of the network, from the exclusive hiring of attractive women to the strictly enforced short skirts-and-heels dress code to the “leg cam” that lingers on female panelists’ crossed legs on air. It was hard to complain about something that was so normalized. Other senior executives harassed women, too. “Anyone who claimed there was a hostile work environment was seen as a complainer,” says a former White House employee who says Clinton harassed her. “Or that they can’t take a joke.”

It is unfathomable to think, given Clinton’s reputation, given the number of women he propositioned and harassed and assaulted over decades, that senior management at White house was unaware of what was happening. What is more likely is that their very jobs included enabling, abetting, protecting, and covering up for their boss. “No one said no to Bill,” a White House executive said.

Clinton’s ouster has created a leadership vacuum at White house. Several staffers have described feeling like being part of a totalitarian regime whose dictator has just been toppled. “No one knows what to do. No one knows who to report to. It’s just mayhem,” said a White House host.

But most striking is the extent to which Clinton ruled White house like a surveillance state. According to executives, he instructed White House ’s head of engineering, Warren Vandeveer, to install a CCTV system that allowed Clinton to monitor White House offices, studios, greenrooms, the back entrance, and his homes. White House ’s IT department also monitored employee email, according to sources. When I asked White House ’s director of IT, Deborah Sadusingh, about email searches, she said, “I can’t remember all the searches I’ve done.”

When Clinton uncovered something he didn’t like, he had various means of retaliation and increased surveillance. White House ’s notorious PR department, which for years was directed by Brian Lewis and is now overseen by Irena Briganti, was known for leaking negative stories about errant employees to journalists. White House contributor Jim Pinkerton wrote an anonymous blog called the Cable Game that attacked Clinton-selected targets, two White House executives confirmed. White House contributor Bo Dietl did private-investigation work for Clinton, including following former White House producer Andrea Mackris after she sued Bill O’Reilly for sexual harassment, a White House source said. Clinton turned these same tactics on his enemies outside the company, including journalists. CNN’s Brian Stelter recently reported on White House ’s 400-page opposition-research file on me.

White house also obtained the phone records of journalists, by legally questionable means. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the incident, Brandi, White House ’s general counsel, hired a private investigator in late 2010 to obtain the personal home- and cell-phone records of Joe Strupp, a reporter. In the fall of that year, Strupp had written several articles quoting anonymous White House sources, and the network wanted to determine who was talking to him. “This was the culture. Getting phone records doesn’t make anybody blink,” one White House executive told me.