The Atlantic - October 2019

THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 17

the woman who later greeted me with a

bear hug when we met in the lobby of a

Days Inn near her home. I’d mentioned

on the phone that I’d forgotten my tooth-

brush, and, though it was a Sunday morn-

ing, she’d come over to transport me to

the nearest drugstore. She hadn’t been

planning on church that day anyway, she

assured me. Even the story of how she’d

launched her Twitter activism—her

grandson had helped; she’d barely known

how the thing worked—was endearing.

Toothbrush secured, Broad drick took

me on a tour of the place where she’s spent

almost her whole life, Fort Smith and

neighboring Van Buren. Fort Smith has

the second-largest population in the state,

after Little Rock, though it’s by no means a

metropolis. The downtown’s stately, wide

boulevards and meticulously preserved

ante bellum architecture are its main sell-

ing points. The city is so quintessentially

old South that it served as a location for

The Blue and the Gray, a 1980s miniseries

about the Civil War starring Stacy Keach.

Most interesting were Broad drick’s

personal landmarks. She pointed out the

spot where her parents—both white south-

erners, despite what her first name might

suggest—used to own a dry cleaner. The

place where a tomboyish Juanita broke

her arm at 8 years old while visiting a

classmate’s horse farm (now a Walmart—

welcome to Arkansas). The movie theater

where 4-year-old Juanita and her 6-year-

old sister, Patsy, would take the bus to

watch spaghetti Westerns while their par-

ents spent 12-hour days pressing suits—life

was different back then, or her mother

and father were really ir responsible; she’s

undecided. The sprawling 40-acre prop-

erty where she’d lived with her second

husband, a cowboy who lassoed cattle in

their backyard, and then by herself after

the two divorced in 2003. (She downsized

only last year, moving to a two-bedroom

condo in a nearby gated community.) The

law offices of her only child, Kevin, whom

she adopted when he was two days old.

The high school where she attends every

home football game to watch Kevin’s boy,

her 16-year-old grandson, play fullback.

Broaddrick was most animated,

however, when we stopped at a nursing

home she’d run that had won awards for

outstanding patient care and at a facil-

ity for children with severe disabilities

she’d owned and operated before retir-

ing in 2008. In fact, she said, the whole

hate speech (retweeting a picture of the

short-haired soccer star Megan Rapinoe

and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez captioned “Boy Meets Girl”). She

travels the country speaking to conserva-

tive groups and signing copies of her self-

published memoir, You’d Better Put Some

Ice on That (so named for the last thing

Broad drick says Clinton uttered before

leaving the scene of the alleged assault,

in which he bit her lip so violently that he

drew blood).

Twitter augments the snarkier side

of almost everyone’s personality, but the

gulf between Broad drick’s social-media

persona and her actual one is especially

wide. In the days after Broad drick deni-

grated E. Jean Carroll, the woman who

accused Trump of rape in her new book,

tweeting that she looked like the Jeopardy

host Alex Trebek, I called her to request

an interview. To hear Broad drick’s genial,

alto drawl was jarring, as was the con-

trast between the vitriolic @atensnut

(Broaddrick is a huge tennis fan) and

on with her life. Then Hillary Clinton ran
for president, and her pronounced pro-
woman agenda stirred up decades-old
resentment. “I kept thinking, Why can’t
you see this huge elephant in the room?”
Broad drick recalled. “Why can’t you see
this woman for what she really is?” One day,
Broad drick decided she had to weigh in.
Though she’d tweeted only three times
before the 2016 election cycle, she sent
out a statement that went viral: “I was 35
years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attor-
ney General raped me. I am now 73 ... it
never goes away.” Nine months later, the
Trump campaign issued what would be
a fateful invitation: Would she sit in the
audience during the candidate’s second
debate with Hillary Clinton?
Since that October evening, Broad-
drick has popped up semi-regularly on Fox
News and become something of a MAGA
thought leader, with 133,000 followers on
Twitter, where her commentary ranges
from insults (like calling Representative
Schiff “Schiff for Brains”) to border line

Illustration by JOHN CUNEO