Alicia Machado's shady history foils Clinton sex smear

It’s about the last thing we needed this election season.

Sex has been brought into the presidential campaign. Who started it? Well, put the blame this time squarely on Hillary Clinton and her new de facto running mate: former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

The Clinton campaign has made a big gamble by featuring Ms. Machado in their latest negative political ads. The spots paint her as a victim of Donald Trump’s bullying, but her real motivation seems to be to reclaim the limelight. Her story is increasingly hard to credit when one examines Ms. Machado’s controversial and tumultuous background, where she allegedly threatened a judge in her native Venezuela, was involved in a murder trial, had sex on a Spanish reality television show and posed for Playboy.

Her past activities have now become the focus both English and Spanish-language media coverage, distracting from the Clintons’ original goal of portraying Mr. Trump as a sexist, fat-shaming cad. The effort to smear her opponent might have just backfired.

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