FLASHBACK

Clinton Nemesis Ken Starr Fired Over a Sex Scandal of His Own

Baylor University removed Starr as president following reports of sexual assault by members of the school’s football team.
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Starr in 1998, testifying against Bill Clinton before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.By Roger M. Richards/Redux.

Update: Thursday, 1:25 P.M.: After much speculation, Baylor University's Board of Regents officially voted to strip Ken Starrfrom his role as president as the result of an investigation into how the school handled reported incidents of sexual assaults by members of the football team. The University announced the changes Thursday, saying in a statementthat Starr would transition into the position of chancellor and would continue to teach at its law school.

Just as Donald Trump starts to dig into some of the seedier gossip surrounding the Clintons’ past, one of their chief tormenters from the 1990s is suddenly coming to their defense.

Ken Starr, the former independent counsel tasked with investigating the Whitewater real-estate venture, and who eventually pursued the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky scandals that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, is now lavishing praise on the man whose public and private lives he spent years trying to destroy.

“His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear,” Starr said last week in a panel at the National Constitution Center, according to The New York Times. “It is powerful, it is palpable and the folks of Arkansas really understood that about him—that he genuinely cared. The ‘I feel your pain’ is absolutely genuine.” He called Clinton “the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation.”

Starr hinted at his own regret for the time exposing Bill Clinton’s messes in the mid-1990s, but expressed an almost relieved sense of pride at how he revived his image in the wake of all the destruction. “There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” he said. “That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully.”

Starr’s newfound empathy for the Clintons is born of the reflection that comes with distance, of course. But it also comes at a time when Starr himself is under the microscope for his actions as the president of Baylor University, where he has faced criticism for his leadership while the Baptist school wades through a sex scandal of its own. The school’s leadership is accused of not taking any action after at least six female students reported that they were sexually assaulted by Baylor football players—two of whom were convicted of rape, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Now, Starr is reportedly being pushed out of his position, according to HornsDigest.com. Sources have said that the three dozen members of Baylor’s regents board blame Starr for the breakdown in leadership. Baylor has not issued a statement on the report.

Starr’s words last week, then, read more like something he hopes someone will say of him in a decade or two, once he lives through a shame spiral of his own. Just don’t count on it coming from the Clintons.