IN A story that is widely being judged as credible, a 56-year-old woman is finally telling a story that has circulated privately for years - that President Clinton, when he was attorney general of Arkansas, raped her in 1978.
Ms Juanita Broaddrick is the owner of a nursing home and is married with children. She says that she never pressed charges at the time or reported Mr Clinton because of her shame about the rape, and because of Mr Clinton's status.
She came forward now, she says, after years of being hounded by the media trying to confirm rumours, because of a tabloid report claiming that her husband had been bribed to keep quiet.
Ms Broaddrick's interview with Dateline NBC was broadcast on Wednesday night, less than a week after her claim was reported in newspapers.
The story Ms Broaddrick tells is a harrowing one. In 1978, she had already owned a nursing home for five years. Mr Clinton visited the facility during his campaign for governor and chatted with Ms Broaddrick, inviting her to call in to his headquarters in Little Rock.
As she was already planning to attend a conference of nursing home operators the following week, Ms Broaddrick said she would. When she called Mr Clinton the next week, he suggested they meet at the Camelot Hotel, where the conference was being held. When he arrived, he phoned her room and suggested they have coffee in her room because too many reporters were in the lobby.
In the room for about five minutes, Mrs Broaddrick says, Mr Clinton moved close as they stood looking out at the Arkansas River. He pointed out an old jailhouse and told her that when he became governor he was going to renovate the place. (The building has since been torn down.)
He then pushed her down on the bed and bit her lip. She says she protested and struggled. She told Mr Clinton she was married, but that failed to deter him. She also told him she was in love with another man - the man whom she married after a subsequent divorce and to whom she has now been married for 18 years. But Mr Clinton ripped her pantyhose and forced a sexual entry.
Afterward, Ms Broaddrick says, she began to cry. Mr Clinton looked down at her and told her not to worry - that he was sterile because he had had mumps as a child.
As he got to the door, she says, he turned to her, and looked at her bloody and swollen lip. "This is the part that always stays in my mind - the way he put on his sunglasses. Then he looked at me and said, `You better put some ice on that.' And then he left."
Ms Norma Rogers, a nurse who was sharing Ms Broaddrick's room, soon returned to find Ms Broaddrick on the bed. Ms Broaddrick told her the story immediately and the two left Little Rock.
Ms Rogers endorsed the story in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. She said that she found Ms Broaddrick in a state of shock - lips swollen to double their size, mouth discoloured from the biting, her pantyhose torn in the crotch.
"She just stayed on the bed and kept repeating, `I can't believe what happened'," Ms Rogers said.
Ms Rogers applied ice to Juanita Broaddrick's mouth, and they drove back home, stopping along the way for more ice, Ms Rogers told the Wall Street Journal.
Ms Broaddrick says she chastised herself for agreeing to coffee in a hotel room. "But who, for heaven's sake, would have imagined anything like this? This was the attorney general."
A televised interview with Ms Broaddrick was shown on national television on Wednesday night. Mr Clinton, through his lawyer, Mr David Kendell, has denied the allegation, but has declined to elaborate further.