Fact-Check: Yes, Hillary Clinton Did Laugh After Successfully Defending a Child Rapist

The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Katie McHugh

During the second presidential debate, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said, “Hillary Clinton attacked them viciously,” referring to former president Bill Clinton’s female victims and a child rape victim whose attacker Clinton defended.

“One of them is a wonderful woman, [who] at 12 years old was raped. At twelve. Her client — she represented — got him off, laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl that was raped. Kathy Shelton, that young woman, is here with us tonight. So, don’t tell me about words,” Trump said.  

Fact-Check: TRUE

In the mid-1980s, journalist Roy Reed interviewed Hillary Clinton, and a tape of that interview has been uploaded to YouTube and is available in the Special Collections Department of the University of Arkansas libraries.  

“He took a lie detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” Clinton said about her client Thomas Alfred Taylor, who raped Shelton in 1975, laughing. 

Clinton also laughed in the video about saving the child rapist from a “miscarriage of justice.” He served one year in county jail, with two months shaved off his sentence for the time he already served. Shelton’s injuries were so traumatic, she could never have children. 

WATCH: 

Clinton also argued in court that the 12-year-old rape victim sought out older men. 

Shelton came forward after 40 years of silence, as reported by the Daily Mail: 

A child rape victim says she cannot forgive Hillary Clinton for defending her rapist in court 40 years ago, saying the Democratic presidential candidate attacked her credibility despite knowing that her assailant was guilty – and later laughed about it in a taped interview.

Kathy Shelton was just 12 years old when a 41-year-old drifter raped her on the side of a desolate Arkansas road in 1975.

Now, four decades later, she has agreed to be named and pictured for the first time in this Daily Mail Online exclusive because she is furious that her rapist’s defense attorney – Hillary Clinton – has been portraying herself as a lifelong advocate of women and girls on the campaign trail.

‘It’s put a lot of anger back in me,’ said Shelton, now 54, in an exclusive interview at her Springdale, Arkansas, home in August. ‘Every time I see [Clinton] on TV I just want to reach in there and grab her, but I can’t do that.’

In 1975, Clinton served as the defense lawyer for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker accused of raping Shelton after luring her to his car.

Taylor pleaded down to ‘unlawful fondling of a minor’ and served less than a year in prison after Clinton was able to block the admission of forensic evidence that linked her client to the crime.

Shelton also tweeted about her suffering at Hillary’s hands.

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