FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST: Wayne Dumond raped Ashley Stevens, Clinton’s distant cousin, in 1984 when she was a 17-year-old high school student in Forest City, Arkansas. He was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison, plus 20 years. In 1992, Jim Guy Tucker, who became governor of Arkansas after Clinton left office, reduced Dumond’s sentence to 39.5 years.Shortly after taking office in 1996, Huckabee announced his intention to commute Dumond’s sentence to time served. A public outcry ensued. Twenty women members of the state House of Representatives protested the commutation proposal. The editorial pages of some Arkansas newspapers questioned Huckabee’s judgment and suggested he reconsider.
What the public never knew, however, was that other women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond had privately written Huckabee about their anguish. Their very private attempts at changing Huckabee’s mind, they later told the Huffington Post, were based on concerns that speaking out publicly would have been too painful and traumatizing.
One such letter was from the daughter of a Dumond rape victim:
When you ran for office, one of the reasons I voted for you was the fact you are/were a Baptist preacher. I come from a very strong Baptist background… [O]ne of my grandfathers is also a preacher. I have always been a faithful church member where I am the choir director, yet this is one event that is not so easily forgiven.I have prayed about these feelings, but once someone hurts your mother, or daughter the way this man hurt my mother I believe that you would feel the same…
Please understand that this letter is coming from my heart…. I would love to have the
chance to talk to you about this matter as a daughter of a surviving rape victim.
The woman provided Huckabee with her personal phone number in hopes that he or at least someone on his staff would call. She says that she never heard back.
What was left unsaid in her letter to Huckabee was that she was three years old when, in the 1970s, Dumond raped her mother. The girl was in her mother’s bed asleep when the rape occurred. Dumond held a butcher’s knife to her mother’s throat during the assault.
In an interview, her mother told the Huffington Post how she fought with Dumond to wrestle the knife away from him, willing to risk her own life rather than suffer at Dumond’s hands.
But Dumond overcame her resistance. He pointed to her daughter sleeping next to her and threatened: “If you don’t cooperate with me, she’ll be next.”
The woman did as she was told. As Dumond continued to violently rape her, the woman recalled, she lay consciously and deliberately silent. Even as she was being assaulted, she gently stroked her daughter’s hair, praying she would not wake up.
When the assault was over, the woman said, Dumond threatened to come back and rape and kill her daughter if she told anyone.
Twenty-three years after the rape, the girl who had been protected by her mother’s silence attempted to persuade Huckabee to keep Dumond behind bars. Fearing that the rapist would attack her mother again, she wrote to the governor. MORE
RELATED: Wayne DuMond has died. Wayne DuMond would normally not be someone especially famous — or in
his case, infamous. But he was used as a pawn in a disgusting political game whose intent was to attack Bill Clinton, and the people playing the game didn’t give a rat’s behind who got hurt as a result. According to the Clinton-haters, DuMond was framed for raping 17-year-old Ashley Stephens, a distant Clinton cousin. So eventually they got Huckabee — a Republican, and one of Clinton’s biggest enemies locally — to let DuMond out early. What happened after that? Wayne DuMond killed a woman
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