Trooper Says Clinton Meeting Was Jones’ Idea

An Arkansas state trooper acknowledged Friday that he saw Paula Corbin Jones enter a hotel room occupied by then-Gov. Bill Clinton in 1991, but he insisted she did so on her own initiative rather than at Clinton’s request.

The account contained in a court brief submitted by trooper Danny Lee Ferguson in response to Jones’ high-profile sexual harassment suit against Clinton further complicates an already tangled affair. It differs sharply from her version of the incident, but it also contradicts the White House position that the incident did not occur.

Furthermore, Ferguson, 41, a co-defendant in the suit, told a very different account of the incident to The Times in interviews last year, potentially undermining his credibility in the case. In those interviews, Ferguson described Clinton as the instigator of the encounter.

Jones asserted in her lawsuit, filed here on May 6, that Ferguson approached her at a meeting of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission at the Excelsior Hotel, handed her a piece of paper with a hotel room number scrawled on it and said: “The governor would like to meet you.”

Ferguson flatly denied that crucial element of Jones’ story, and instead implied in his brief that the woman volunteered to meet with Clinton because--as he claims she put it--she liked “his good looks and his sexy demeanor.” He said she also inquired whether Clinton had a girlfriend.

Thus Ferguson’s brief appears to undermine a fundamental ground of Jones’ sexual harassment case: that Clinton, as the nominal head of the development commission for which she worked, illegally sought to use his authority as her employer to lure her into his hotel room.

Ferguson admitted riding up in a hotel elevator with Jones and showing her the room where she found Clinton. He denied her contention that he stood watch outside while she was there, or that he was “displaying a firearm on his person” at the time.

Predictably, Ferguson said he has no knowledge of what occurred inside the hotel room, where Jones claims she rebuffed the governor’s entreaties for oral sex. But when he saw Jones later, he said, she did not appear to be upset by it, as she now claims.

In the weeks and months following her alleged meeting with Clinton on May 8, 1991, Jones claims she ran into Ferguson several times, and he once told her the governor wanted her phone number because he “would like to see you.”

On the contrary, Ferguson now contends that on that occasion Jones asked for a piece of paper, wrote her telephone number on it and asked him to give it to the governor. If her boyfriend answered the phone, she allegedly told him, Clinton should hang up or say he reached a wrong number.

After the American Spectator published an account of the events, identifying Jones only as “Paula,” Jones and Ferguson had another chance meeting at a North Little Rock steakhouse.

According to her suit, Jones confronted Ferguson and demanded to know why he had given her name to a magazine reporter and why the magazine had falsely implied that she had sex with Clinton. According to his brief, she instead asked his advice about how much money she could make by selling her story to the news media.

In his earlier interviews with The Times, Ferguson told a story that was generally similar to the one contained in Jones’ brief. He recalled that Clinton directed him to approach Jones on his behalf and invite her to meet privately with him. “Clinton sent me over to tell her she has that come-hither look,” Ferguson said.

Acting on Clinton’s orders, Ferguson told The Times, he first secured a hotel room for Clinton by telling the hotel manager that the governor was expecting an important call from the White House. “He gave us a room and Clinton sent me down” to invite Jones to the room, Ferguson said.

Jones claims her private meeting with Clinton lasted 15 minutes; Ferguson, in the interview, said it was 30 minutes. When she emerged from the room, he said, she then volunteered to be Clinton’s steady girlfriend.

Ferguson said in his interviews with The Times that Clinton emerged from the encounter and told him “ . . . we only talked.”

Jones is seeking damages of $700,000, claiming she suffered retaliation on her job after rejecting Clinton’s advances. She said she was prompted to file the suit because Clinton had denied her story, implying she was a liar.

On Friday, Robert S. Bennett, Clinton’s attorney, said Ferguson’s response mostly helped Clinton. “It obviously contradicts the essentials of her claim,” he said in a statement.

Times staff writer William C. Rempel and special correspondent Pam Strickland contributed to this story.