Slick Willie's recurring nightmare is back.
Jones case returns to haunt Clinton
Supreme Court decision gives woman dismissed as
`trailer-park trash' a new hand to play
Thursday, May 29, 1997
By Graham Fraser
The Globe and Mail
Bill Clinton's recurring nightmare is back.
This week's decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to allow the sexual harassment
case of Paula Corbin Jones v. William Jefferson Clinton to proceed even while Mr. Clinton is in
office means that the President of the United States must once again face his most persistent
accuser.
"Even Clinton's appointments [on the Supreme Court] did not support him," noted Larry Sabato, a
political scientist at the University of Virginia. "It's so emphatic . . . it legitimizes Jones's case," he
said.
"She no longer appears to be trailer-park trash, as one of Clinton's aides once called her. It helps
her, hurts him," he concluded. "If he's smart, he'll settle."
Mr. Clinton faces a series of unpalatable choices in order to defend himself: he can try to postpone
proceedings until he is out of office, he can try to offer a settlement or he can prepare for battle in
court.
Ms. Jones alleges that then-governor Clinton invited her to his Arkansas hotel room, exposed
himself to her and asked her to engage in oral sex.
Thus, if he chooses the courtroom, Mr. Clinton must prepare for the humiliating experience of being
cross-examined in open court on a highly delicate matter.
If he takes that route, the White House and the President's friends and allies are likely to engage in
a serious effort to discredit a woman who, according to one legal reporter who has looked
carefully at her allegations, has a far stronger case than Anita Hill did against Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas. (Ms. Hill was the lawyer who testified at Mr. Thomas's Senate confirmation
hearing in 1992 that he had sexually harassed her. Mr. Thomas denied the accusation, and was
confirmed in office. He was among the nine justices who this week supported Ms. Jones's claims.)
Ms. Jones says that on May 8, 1991, Mr. Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, had a state trooper
tell the then 24-year-old employee of the Arkansas Industrial Commission who was staffing the
registration desk at a conference that he wanted to see her in his hotel suite.
She then claims that, when she went to his suite, he propositioned her. In the words of her legal
claim, "Clinton then approached the sofa and as he sat down he lowered his trousers and
underwear exposing his erect penis and asked Jones to 'kiss it.' "
According to the statement of claim, "Jones became horrified, jumped up from the couch, stated
that she was 'not that kind of girl,' and said: 'Look, I've got to go.' "
Mr. Clinton, according to the account in the claim, replied: "Well, I don't want you to do anything
you don't want to do," and told her that he would take care of it if she got into trouble for leaving
work, and said: "You are smart. Let's keep this between ourselves."
Arguing over such matters would cost Mr. Clinton dearly in his political standing.
"People won't like to hear that a governor was employing state troopers to be his pimps," Mr.
Sabato said. It certainly endangers Mr. Clinton's reputation in history.
"His public standing is higher at this stage than any other second-term president," said Norman
Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute in an interview yesterday. "He's in the high 50s [in
public approval] and after 51 months in office, that's a hell of an achievement."
Delays in the legal proceedings are certainly possible. However, Susan Wright, the federal judge
who has been hearing this case in Arkansas, is also the judge who required Mr. Clinton to testify
by videotape in one of the Whitewater trials.
The most likely defence tactic, observers say, will be to attempt to reach a settlement with Ms.
Jones, and if there is a settlement, it will hinge on an apology by Mr. Clinton in exchange for Ms.
Jones dropping her suit.
In October, 1994, the parties reportedly were close to such a deal. Ms. Jones's lawyers issued a
press release with the text of an apology -- never disputed by the White House -- that was scuttled
only when a White House aide referred to Ms. Jones as "trailer trash."
In that statement, Mr. Clinton said he had "no recollection" of meeting Ms. Jones at the Excelsior
Hotel on May 8, 1991, but that he "did not challenge her claim that we met there, and I may very
well have met her in the past." In addition, he was to have said that she did not engage in any
improper conduct, and that he regretted any "untrue assertions that have been made about her
conduct which may have challenged her character and good name."
In reply, Ms. Jones was to have said that she was grateful for the President's acknowledgment that
he might have met her, and "has acknowledged my good name and disagrees with assertions to the
contrary. However, I stand by my prior statement of the events."
Such a statement may no longer be sufficient.
"The old deal wasn't good enough," said Ms. Jones's lawyer, Joseph Cammarata. "It has to be
stronger now."
If Mr. Clinton again seeks to negotiate a settlement with Ms. Jones, he risks, in effect,
acknowledging that something unseemly happened six years ago in that hotel room in Little Rock.
Ms. Jones has always insisted she is more interested in preserving her reputation than in winning a
damages settlement. But there are reasons that Ms. Jones may want to settle.
"It appears that expectations of all this conservative money flowing into a defence fund have not
materialized," Mr. Ornstein said, pointing out that there are all kinds of ways that Mr. Clinton's
lawyers can delay a court appearance. "The prospect of a long, drawn-out battle may not be
appealing to her lawyers, and there may be an incentive to settle."
In November, one of Ms. Jones's lawyers, Gilbert Davis, said that her legal team had run up
"hundreds of thousands of dollars in time" working on the case. At that point, the Paula Jones Legal
Fund had raised about $200,000.
Mr. Clinton and his wife bought legal liability insurance in the early 1990s that covers their
expenses.
For some years after the incident, Ms. Jones did not make any public complaint or legal claim. But
in late 1993, the right-wing magazine The American Spectator published an article based on
interviews with former Arkansas state troopers in which one unnamed trooper said that a woman
named Paula, whom he had escorted to a hotel room, had said that she was available to be the
governor's regular girlfriend.
In February, 1994, Ms. Jones announced publicly that she was the Paula referred to in the article
-- but insisted that she had rebuffed Mr. Clinton's advances, and had never said that she was
available.
Then in May, 1994, just before the last day she could file a suit, Ms. Jones launched a civil suit
against Mr. Clinton. The White House immediately argued that the case should not be able to
proceed while Mr. Clinton was President.
In January, 1996, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Arkansas ruled 2-1 that the
case could go forward, and on March 29, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals voted not to rehear
the case. In June, 1996, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal, and heard the case in
January.
When the suit was launched, the U.S. mainstream media did not take it seriously; Ms. Jones had
appeared at a right-wing political gathering to make her allegation, and Democratic strategist James
Carville effectively dismissed her story, saying: "Drag $100 through a trailer park and there's no
telling what you'll find."
But in November, the publication The American Lawyer published a lengthy piece by former New
York Times legal reporter Stuart Taylor in which, after interviewing people to whom Ms. Jones
had talked following the alleged incident, concluded that she had a strong case.
"Jones's evidence includes clear proof, scattered through the public record, that then-governor
Clinton's state trooper-bodyguard interrupted the then-24-year-old state employee on the job on
May 8, 1991, and took her to meet Clinton -- the boss of Jones's boss -- alone in an upstairs suite
at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel, for the apparent purpose of sexual dalliance," he wrote. "The
evidence also includes strongly corroborative statements made to me by two of Jones's friends,
complete with tellingly detailed, seamy specifics . . . that are remarkably consistent with Jones's
allegations about what happened inside that suite."
He concluded that Ms. Jones had been the victim of class bias in the media. |
