NOW Weighs Offering Aid to Paula Jones

Four years after filing her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton, Paula Corbin Jones got word Monday of potential support from the National Organization for Women, which had been criticized for failing to act sooner.

NOW President Patricia Ireland said Monday that her organization is consulting its 500 chapters across the country to decide if it should join Jones’ lawyers in appealing a federal judge’s recent dismissal of her case.

“What we are talking about is the strategy of having women-friendly workplaces and schools, not just for Paula Jones in this case, but for all women in the workplace or in school,” Ireland said, putting a focus on needed enforcement of sexual harassment law.

Interviewed on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” Ireland said NOW would determine within a month “whether this is the right case.”

Asked why she had not supported Jones earlier, Ireland insisted that NOW offered its backing soon after the Jones case was filed. But, she said, Jones “chose her forum . . . and she also chose her friends. She rebuffed our efforts to help her and went with the right wing.”

Susan Carpenter-McMillan, a Jones confidant and spokeswoman, said, however, that Ireland “was never rebuffed.” Jones’ lawyers approached NOW at an early date but after a scheduled conference call with Ireland and Jones fell through, the Jones attorneys never heard again from Ireland, Carpenter-McMillan said.

Supporters of Jones, a former low-level Arkansas state employee, have criticized NOW and other national women’s groups for their failure to rush to Jones’ side, contrasting their silence on the Jones matter with their vocal support in 1991 for Anita Faye Hill, the Oklahoma law professor who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

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If NOW decides to take the step, as is anticipated, it could have more impact on the feminist movement than on Jones’ case.

NOW and other women’s groups have been widely criticized for standing on the sidelines while a series of women, including onetime presidential friend Kathleen E. Willey, has accused a Democratic president of improper conduct and a special prosecutor has been investigating the nature of Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky.

Ireland denied that her group had been siding with the administration by not speaking out earlier in support of Jones.

“We have not been afraid to take on this administration,” she said. “I myself have been arrested outside the White House protesting some of the president’s policies.”

Other feminists have argued that, because the facts of the Jones, Lewinsky and Willey cases are still murky, Clinton should be given the benefit of the doubt. He has been supportive of women’s causes, including child care and family leave programs, and has appointed women to Cabinet positions and the Supreme Court, they noted.

Reacting Monday to Ireland’s announcement, Carpenter-McMillan said: “We’re delighted and thrilled. We would welcome them.

“This case is not about politics but about the right of every woman to be spared a onetime exposure to harassment without any recourse,” McMillan said in an interview.

Jones, in her lawsuit filed in May 1994, alleged that then-Gov. Clinton summoned her to a hotel suite during a state conference in 1991, exposed himself and asked her for oral sex, which she says she refused.

U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed the suit April 1, ruling that Clinton’s conduct, while “boorish and offensive” if true, did not meet the legal standard for sexual harassment.

Jones and her lawyers said last week that they plan to appeal the dismissal to the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Writing in the current issue of Vanity Fair, self-described feminist and Democrat Marjorie Williams says that “feminists have all along muffled, disguised, excused and denied the worst aspects of the president’s behavior with women--especially in their reactions to Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment suit they have greeted with attitudes ranging from tepid boilerplate support to outright hostility.”