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As the 2016 presidential campaign closed in on the finish line, the Washington Post published an eleven-year-old tape of Republican nominee Donald Trump's making controversial remarks about women. The inevitable partisan rancor that ensued largely targeted the behavior Bill Clinton, husband of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, including the repetition of rumors that he had been expelled from Oxford University in 1969 for raping classmate Eileen Wellstone. The allegations weren't new — Republican opposition research strategist Roger Stone had tweeted about them a year earlier: The backdrop for these rumors was that just prior to his graduation from Georgetown University, Bill Clinton won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at University College, Oxford, for two years and headed off to England for the 1968-69 academic term — but he returned to the United States before finishing out the full two-year course of study. In October 1992, during Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, a British news report included interviews with a number of Clinton's Oxford classmates. The article described Clinton's truncated study trajectory at Oxford as one that was disrupted by the Vietnam-era draft, not by penalties for misbehavior. Had Clinton left Oxford under dubious circumstances, reporting on such a scoop just prior to the presidential election of 1992 would have been irresistible for the British (and American) press. But Clinton's classmates made absolutely no mention of his departing abruptly or in disgrace: Clinton's non-completion of the scholar program at Oxford was public knowledge more than 20 years prior to the origination of rumors that he had been expelled from that university for sexual misconduct. And as documented in a separate article on this site, Clinton's efforts to avoid the military draft (ostensibly by joining the ROTC at the University of Arkansas) were the likely reason behind the timing of his movements between the U.S. and England. Nonetheless, by June 2004 the Eileen Wellstone rape allegation had appeared in the Washington Times, published in an article that lacked an author, a citation, or any other information supporting the claim: Although often unattributed, the claim appears to have originated with a February 1999 article on Capitol Hill Blue (a web site known for publishing dubious information at that time). That primary iteration (since deleted) mentioned nothing about Clinton's having been expelled from Oxford, but it alleged — based on a second-hand report from an anonymous source — that Wellstone had accused Clinton of sexually assaulting her during his time at Oxford: This account doesn't jibe with the timeline established in our own research and stated elsewhere, which has Clinton in the United States (not on a European tour) during the summer of 1969, and then returning to England for his second year at Oxford (rather than being told he was no longer welcome there) where he remained at least as late as January 1970: Roger Stone was a primary catalyst of the rumor's spread. But while he maintained in 2014 that Clinton was expelled from Oxford over a sexual assault incident, he said in 2015 that little to no action was taken. His later reference didn't involve Clinton's expulsion and hinged on what Stone believed may have taken place: Stone also made two mentions of Wellstone in his 2015 book The Clintons' War on Women, co-authored by Robert Morrow, who was the subject of a 2008 Tampa Bay Times profile which didn't imply an overabundance of credibility or tendency toward critical examination of Clinton conspiracies: Stone and Morrow's book contained two passages about Wellstone which appeared be be based on second- or third-hand information. Moreover, those passages contained contradictory information: in one, the authors said Clinton's expulsion or coerced departure from Oxford could not be confirmed; in another, the authors plainly asserted without qualification that Clinton had been expelled. And all of the cited information traced back to the single questionable 1999 Capitol Hill Blue report: The original Capitol Hill Blue piece included several instances that all followed the same pattern: A young woman whom no one had ever heard of (in most cases the women weren't even identified by name) had supposedly accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault decades earlier but had declined to pursue any charges against him at the time. Capitol Hill Blue somehow managed to track all these women down, and all of them allegedly confirmed their experiences — yet none of them was directly quoted, and all of them declined to go on record or discuss the matter any further. Moreover all of these incidents were coincidentally also confirmed by other people (e.g., government officials, retired policemen, former students), none of whom was identified by name or directly quoted either. Even more curiously, as far as we know no one else has ever located, talked to, or interviewed Eileen Wellstone or any of the other women referenced in Capitol Hill Blue who were supposedly the victim of sexual assaults by Bill Clinton between 1969 and 1974. Nor has anyone else ever identified, located, talked to, or interviewed the anonymous State Department official and others who purportedly confirmed these rumors. All in all, the rumors about Bill Clinton's having been expelled from Oxford over a rape allegation appear to have stemmed from a single uncorroborated, anonymous second-hand report published on a web site of dubious repute in 1999, combined with mere speculation about Clinton's having departed Oxford prior to the completion of a full two-year course of study. We haven't yet turned up anything that would counter the notion that the Eileen Wellstone claim was simply a fabrication made up in 1999.
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