One of the most important questions raised by Juanita Broaddrick’s allegations is how we would react if someone just like her claimed to have been raped 21 years ago by (for example) George W. Bush, or Al Gore, or Henry Hyde.

Would the news media report the allegations? Should they? Does their handling of such cases hinge on neutral principles of evidence and fairness–or on the particulars of the accuser and the accused?

The answers are not self-evident. Much depends on the mass of details that should inform our necessarily subjective evaluations both of the importance of such allegations and of the probability that they are true.

But the working presumption, I submit, should be that allegations as ancient as Broaddrick’s–even those that seem plausible–are neither newsworthy nor of public importance. That is, unless the available evidence, including character evidence, very strongly suggests that they are more probable than not.

The reason for this is not merely that a ”she-said, he- said” standoff can be neither proved nor disproved with complete confidence so many years after the event, given the unavailability of eyewitnesses, medical records, and the like. Clinton defenders and others seem a bit off the mark in arguing that Broaddrick’s charges can never be proved with the kind of rigor required in actual criminal prosecutions.

The uncomfortable truth is that in acquaintance-rape prosecutions, we rarely have eyewitnesses, dispositive documentary evidence, or other proof strong enough to dispel all doubt–even when the woman goes to the police immediately.

Men go to prison for rape all the time based on the uncorroborated testimony of a woman who claims that she did not consent when the man says that she did. Mike Tyson, for one. And men are acquitted all the time in similar cases. William Kennedy Smith, for one.

Medical evidence can prove only that sex occurred between a woman and a particular man. Except when there are dramatic physical injuries, it cannot prove lack of consent. Most other cases come down to she-said, he-said swearing contests.

In these cases, almost all of President Clinton’s feminist supporters have held in the past that credibility should ordinarily be given to the woman, not the man.

The requirement of proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and other common-law rules once made it almost impossible to win convictions in instances of acquaintance rape. The feminist-led legal reforms changed that. Among them are shield laws that prevent inquiries by defendants in rape (and sexual harassment) cases into the past sexual conduct of the complaining women; meanwhile, other new evidentiary rules expose defendants to wide-ranging exploration of their alleged conduct with other women.

In 1994, President Clinton supported and signed into law new federal evidentiary rules of precisely this sort. In 1997, Paula Jones’ lawyers invoked those very rules against the President himself, in persuading Judge Susan Webber Wright to authorize inquiries into Clinton’s alleged sexual predation of both Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.

Rape defendants are still protected by statutes of limitations (six years in Arkansas). Part of the reason for this is that evidence tends to disappear with the passage of time. But there are other justifications: The long-silent woman has waived any right to legal redress; it is unfair to expect the man to mount a defense so many years after any possible alibi-witnesses and other exculpatory evidence may have faded away.

Journalists operate under their own peculiar rules. But they should not dredge up old and perhaps unprovable charges against elected officials either–again, unless the case for those charges is not merely plausible but compelling, and unless the charges are germane to the elected official’s fitness to serve.

Juanita Broaddrick’s allegations would probably not pass that test if all she had going for her was her sincere and convincing demeanor. As we have learned, lots of people can lie quite convincingly. And Broaddrick’s credibility is damaged by her years of public silence, her sworn denial in January 1998 that Clinton had made unwelcome advances, and her attendance at a Clinton fund-raiser weeks after the alleged rape.

But few witnesses are ever completely credible. Consider Anita Hill’s 1991 claim that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her a decade earlier by talking dirty and pestering her for dates. Hill had followed Thomas from job to job; she had maintained a public silence for years while asking Thomas for favors and making at least 10 phone calls to him; and she gave sworn testimony on some checkable details that has been convincingly discredited.

Still, most of those who now dismiss Broaddrick hailed Hill as a heroine who had ”transformed consciousness and changed history with her courageous testimony,” as Hillary Rodham Clinton put it in 1992.

By comparison with Anita Hill, Broaddrick seems quite credible: Nobody has disproved a single detail of her rather detailed story; her explanation for waiting so long to tell it rings true; nobody has even suggested that she is a habitual liar or fantasist; and unlike Hill, she is supported by no fewer than five witnesses to whom she described the alleged rape within hours or days.

Four of them (Norma Rogers Kelsay, her sister Jean Darden, Louise Ma, and Susan Lewis) are friends; the fifth (David Broaddrick) is her husband now and was her lover in 1978. While it’s conceivable that they are all lying, it is not probable.

And then there is Clinton’s oddly hedged response to Broaddrick’s accusation: While denying through a lawyer that he had ”assaulted” Broaddrick, he has not denied meeting alone with her, has not denied making sexual advances, and has not denied having sex with her.

Given all this, only two realistic scenarios present themselves: Either Clinton had a consensual sexual encounter with Broaddrick, or–as she claims–he raped her, while violently biting her top lip to help subdue her.

If it was consensual, then it is (in my view) not of sufficient public importance to be newsworthy. And it’s certainly possible to imagine that Broaddrick had a consensual encounter, came away with swollen lips, and then told her friends and her lover that it was rape.

Possible–but not easy. If that’s what really happened, why lunge for a cover story that includes concocting a charge of rape against the attorney general and likely next Governor of Arkansas?

And how does one explain the account of Norma Rogers Kelsay? She was sharing the hotel room in which Broaddrick says she was raped, and she recalls her extremely upset friend telling her the whole story that same afternoon. Kelsay says she also remembers that Broaddrick had a swollen, bruised mouth and that her pantyhose had been ripped at the crotch. David Broaddrick has told reporters that Broaddrick’s upper lip was ”black” when she got home from Little Rock.

Then there are the statements by Broaddrick, Kelsay, and Darden that in 1991, Clinton had Broaddrick called out of a nursing home meeting attended by all three women and (Broaddrick says) apologized to her. Clinton has not denied this.

It’s hard to dismiss Broaddrick’s allegation as a lie without dismissing the other witnesses–or at least Kelsay–as liars, too. Many journalists seem eager to do just that, by placing unwarranted weight on the fact that in 1981, Clinton commuted the death sentence of the killer of Kelsay’s (and Darden’s) father. That gothic detail has some bearing on Kelsay’s credibility, but not much.

For all this, Broaddrick’s rape allegation might not pass the test of clear probability if she were talking about a man who had never before been plausibly accused of sexual assault. If she were accusing Al Gore, for example, she would not be plausible; the alleged conduct would be wildly out of line with what we know of Gore’s character. But while Broaddrick is the first woman to accuse Clinton of rape, she is not the first–or the second, or the third–to accuse him of sexual assault.

Paula Jones has plausibly accused Clinton of unwelcome advances, including caressing her thigh and exposing himself after being rebuffed. Kathleen Willey has plausibly accused him of grabbing her breast and taking her hand and placing it on his crotch.

Somewhat similar allegations of uninvited sexual gropings and assaults by Clinton are making the rounds of Washington’s whisper circuit. Some have appeared on an anti-Clinton site on the Internet, where anything and everything is asserted.

How much weight should we give to accusations that there has been a real pattern of uninvited sexual gropings and assaults by Clinton? Very little, unless and until such accusations have been investigated by the mainstream media and found to be credible. But the mainstream media for the most part refuses– still–to investigate these sorts of assertions against Clinton. Why?