White House adviser Kellyanne Conway dropped a painful bombshell on CNN Sunday morning during an interview with Jake Tapper on “State of the Nation.” She revealed that she herself was a victim of sexual assault. (See the interview in the video below.)
Conway brought up her own experience while discussing the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct that have been leveled against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who gave emotional testimony last Thursday — as did his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford — before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I feel very empathetic, frankly, for victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape,” Conway told Tapper. Then, after clearing her throat, she said, “I’m a victim of sexual assault.”
She continued, “I don’t expect Judge Kavanaugh or Jake Tapper or Jeff Flake or anybody to be held responsible for that. You have to be responsible for your own conduct.”
She pushed back against the comparisons of Kavanaugh to disgraced comedian Bill Cosby — who was just sentenced to prison for indecent sexual assault — that she said she heard on CNN, calling those comparisons “a disgrace.”
“This is not Bill Cosby … this is not even Bill Clinton,” Conway pointed out. “You had Senate Judiciary Committee members who refused to remove Bill Clinton from office after he received oral sex in the Oval Office and lied about it to a grand jury, as the president of the Unites States … the hypocrisy is ridiculous.”
Tapper told Conway he was very sorry for her assault — but then said that President Donald Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women.
“You work for a president who says that all the women who have accused him are lying,” he said.
Conway told him not to “conflate” her experience with the allegations against Trump, saying, “Let’s not always bring Trump into everything that happens in this universe. That’s mistake number one.”
Tapper posited that Conway’s own personal experience might make her more certain that all women need to be heard, saying, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“Jake, they should all be heard,” said Conway, “and they should be heard in courts of law. We do treat people differently who are either the victims or the perpetrators of [it] based on their politics and their gender, and that is a huge mistake.”
See Kellyanne Conway share her personal story in the video below.
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