Finally, A Scandal We Can Understand Sex Scandal May Prove To Be A Bigger Threat To Clinton Than Whitewater Or Fund Raising
Suddenly, Paula Jones looks more threatening to President Clinton than big-time adversaries like special prosecutor Kenneth Starr or subpoena-serving Capitol Hill committee chairmen.
The main reason is that Jones’ tale, unlike theirs, is simple, human, salacious and thus far unrebutted.
For more than two years, the Washington reporting establishment generally turned its collective nose up at Jones and her story. But her accusation turns out to be stronger than Clinton’s spin doctors initially convinced reporters it was by using a very simple tactic: they characterized Jones as a gold-digging, fame-hungry flirt.
That wasn’t hard to do. Jones’ sister Charlotte and brother-in-law initially told reporters she liked to pick up men in bars. Pin-ups taken by an exboyfriend in 1987 showed up in Penthouse. Her first lawyer wanted a piece of her future movie rights. And Jones, who had barely made it through high school, was from tiny Lonoke, 30 miles outside Little Rock.
“Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find,” James Carville, Clinton’s top quipster, told reporters. Evan Thomas, Newsweek’s bureau chief, picked up the theme. On a TV talk show he trashed Jones as a “sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks.”
All but overlooked, until reporter Stuart Taylor Jr. investigated for The American Lawyer magazine last November, were the consistency of Jones’ story and corroborating accounts by two friends.
On May 8, 1991, the day that made her famous, Jones was 24, a brunette in culottes handing out name tags at a state-sponsored business conference in Little Rock for $6.35 an hour.
Jones and the woman who sat beside her at the Hotel Excelsior recalled that Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, stared appraisingly at her. Not long afterward, the woman said, an Arkansas state trooper approached Jones and asked her to join Clinton in a hotel suite. The witness said Jones was upset when she returned. Jones told the witness that Clinton had tried to kiss her, then unzipped his pants and urged Jones to perform oral sex.
Jones said she declined and that Clinton then asked her to say nothing about the episode.
Clinton cannot recall ever meeting Jones, according to his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett.
While only Clinton and Jones know exactly what, if anything, happened in the suite, a second witness said Jones told her the same story on the night of May 8, 1991. Two family members heard sparser versions within 24 hours of the alleged episode.
Jones, employed at the time by the Arkansas development authority, told The American Lawyer that she went to Clinton’s room hoping for a better state job. She said in her pending $700,000 sexual harassment complaint that Clinton had reminded her before the encounter turned sexual that her boss was his appointee.
Contrary to the depiction of her as a gold-digger, Jones swore her friends to secrecy, saying she feared she would lose her state job. She did not go public until 1994 when a magazine disclosed an Arkansas trooper’s recollection that he had once picked up at Clinton’s urging a Little Rock woman identified only as “Paula.”
Jones, believing she could be identified by the article’s details, sued, she says, to induce Clinton to restore her reputation by confirming that nothing happened in the hotel room.
She now lives in Long Beach, Calif., with her husband, Steve, an airline reservations clerk, and two boys, ages 4 and 9 months. She was described as jubilant by a friend Tuesday.
“The two of us just screamed and yelled and cried,” said Susan Carpenter-McMillan of San Marino, Calif. “In her cute little way, she said, ‘Susie, can you believe it? Can you believe it?”’