Jones Vs. the President

By Richard Lacayo

Washington may be one of the few places on earth where people have trouble keeping their minds on sex. The titillations of power are too distracting. For the rest of the country, it will take a while to absorb the details of Paula Jones' charge that Bill Clinton, when he was still Governor of Arkansas, spotted her at a Little Rock hotel, summoned her to his room, promptly dropped his pants and made a blunt sexual proposition. When she finally filed a $700,000 lawsuit against the President last week, she added a detail that launched the case decisively into the tabloid universe of Michael Jackson and the Bobbitts. To prove her allegation, she says, she can identify "distinguishing characteristics in Clinton's genital area."

That should be enough for the Leno and Letterman monologues. But by now Washington is more transfixed by the really dirty part -- the politics. In a week when Clinton won a close but smashing victory in Congress on assault weapons, the big question is what impact the lawsuit could have on his effectiveness as President. Even if the case is dismissed, it can't help the President to have the national imagination supplied with one more image of him as the Libido in Chief. And at a time when public curiosity about the tales of Clinton's womanizing might have died down, Jones' accusations revive them with a feminist angle: sexual harassment. That has conservatives hoping for a mirror-image replay of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle, this time with the No. 1 Democrat as the accused.

Four witnesses -- two friends and two family members -- have said that Jones told them about Clinton's advances on the day they took place. That didn't stop Robert Bennett, the Washington legal pit bull whom Clinton brought on last week to defend him, from tearing into the charges. "The President adamantly denies the vicious and meanspirited allegations in the complaint," said Bennett. "Quite simply, the incident did not occur."

Asked if he would have Clinton repeat his denial under oath, Bennett stopped short. "That's a very premature question," he said. The Administration is hoping the case will be dismissed before it comes to that. Bennett will argue that the charges were filed too late for the federal statute Clinton is accused of violating. Moreover, Bennett suggested last week that he will move to dismiss the case on grounds that a sitting President cannot be sued on matters that occurred before he took office. Unless the courts buy that argument swiftly, however, Bennett's client is in for a lengthy and politically damaging period of civil discovery in which depositions might be taken from other witnesses, other women and perhaps even the President himself.

If the case proceeds, the main Clinton defense strategy is to depict Jones as a gold digger in the service of people out to destroy the Clinton presidency. "This is about money and book contracts, and radio and television appearances," Bennett says. It probably helps his case that a covey of Clinton haters have been the biggest promoters of the Jones story. Jones first made her charges during a February press conference at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, to which she was brought by Cliff Jackson, a Little Rock lawyer and full-time Enemy of Bill.

Jones says Clinton made his move on May 8, 1991, five months before he launched his presidential bid. On that day they were both at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel for an annual gathering of business executives and government officials. Jones, who was then a 24-year-old clerk (salary: $10,270) for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, a state agency, was working at a table in the hotel lobby, handing out name tags. Her account of the episode proceeds like this:

A state trooper, Danny Ferguson, came by her table to relay a message from Clinton: "The Governor said you make his knees knock." Ferguson came back with Clinton's hotel-room number and the message that the Governor wanted her to stop up in a few minutes. She told the Washington Post that she wasn't wary of the invitation because "I was brought up to trust people, and especially of that stature -- you know, a Governor."

Ferguson led her to Clinton's room, she says, which was furnished with a sofa and chairs but no bed. With the trooper waiting in the hallway, Clinton closed the door and made small talk about her job. Then he took her hand and pulled her toward him. When she pulled away, he told her, "I love the way your hair flows down your back," and, "I love your curves." Then he put a hand on her leg and tried to kiss her neck.

Despite the advances, Jones says she didn't leave the room but sat down at the end of a sofa. Clinton's next move, she claims, was to drop his trousers and his underwear, sit down beside her on the sofa and ask her to perform oral sex. At that, she says, she headed for the door. As she departed, she says, Clinton told her, "You are smart. Let's keep this between ourselves."

Jones maintains that Clinton's alleged come-on was harassment because she was an Arkansas state employee in 1991. After refusing Clinton's advances, she says, she was treated badly at work, transferred and denied promotions. Because the federal statute of limitations bars harassment suits after six months, Jones is suing instead for infliction of "emotional distress," as well as deprivation of civil rights and defamation.

The suit presents women's groups with a dilemma similar to the one they faced when Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon was accused of sexual harassment, albeit in that case more than 20 women came forward to make the charge. How fast should women's groups jump to the accuser's defense when her target is a man who has supported many of their goals? For now they are moving very carefully. "We think both Paula Jones and President Clinton deserve their day in court," says Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women. "We are not going to rise to the right wing's bait by jumping aboard either party's case until we have an opportunity to assess the credibility of the witness."

As for the issue of financial gain, Joseph Cammarata, one of two Virginia lawyers who now represent Jones, says his client will donate to charity anything she wins in court beyond her legal costs. Whether she also means to forgo profits from selling her story is not so clear. And she may have sought payments from the White House before going public. In interviews earlier this year, Daniel Traylor, a Little Rock real estate attorney who represented her until she abruptly switched last week, said he had contacted George Cook, a Little Rock businessman who is a friend of the President's. Traylor said he asked Cook to tell the White House that Jones would remain silent in exchange for an apology from Clinton and financial compensation. In a signed affidavit, Cook says Traylor also suggested that Clinton might find jobs for Jones and her husband, an airline ticket agent and would-be actor, who now both live in Long Beach, California. Traylor says he was just trying to settle out of court.

Jones, raised by a devoutly Christian family in small-town Arkansas, insists that it was not money but honor that prompted her decision to come forward. In January the American Spectator, a conservative Washington monthly, published the claims of Arkansas state troopers who said then Governor Clinton had used them to bring him women when they were assigned to his security detail. One of the troopers, who has since been identified as Ferguson, told the story of having taken a woman named "Paula" to a hotel room where Clinton was waiting. When she left the room later, he said, "Paula" told him that she would be willing to be Clinton's girlfriend. Insisting that she never spoke to Ferguson after leaving the room -- she has named him in the defamation count of her suit -- Jones says she went public with her story so that no one would think she had had sexual relations with Clinton.

Jones' older sister, Charlotte Brown, says money was an incentive for the suit. Brown says Jones did indeed tell her on the day of the alleged incident that Clinton had made a sexual advance that she resisted. But in an interview last week, Brown added that her sister had seemed "flattered" by the encounter and had told her that "whichever way it went, it smelled of money." That in turn led Jones' younger sister, Lydia Cathey, to claim that Paula was in tears when she told her of the incident, and to call their older sister "a liar."

Since the scene that Jones described took place behind closed doors, no one can confirm for now whether her account is a vivid remembrance, a cynical concoction or some combination of the two. And if something happened, is it exactly what Jones would have us believe? By his admissions of "having caused pain in his marriage" and the sheer weight of rumors about his womanizing, Clinton has made himself vulnerable to ordeals like this one even if the charges are not justified. By the back-door attempts of her lawyer to get payment, Jones invites many questions about herself. If their present face-off sounds a bit like the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas explosion, there's one important difference. In that encounter, it was hard to think of either party as the kind of person who would not tell the whole truth.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 800 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on May 4-5 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.5% Not Sures omitted

CAPTION: Is Bill Clinton's sexual behavior prior to his becoming President relevant to how he should be judged in office?

With reporting by Nina Burleigh/Little Rock and Michael Duffy/Washington