Jones’ Work History Central in Legal Fight

When she left, they gave her a party. The group at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, where Paula Corbin Jones had worked for two years, set out a tray of snacks and dip, and someone brought a cake. They toasted her and wished her well.

A few days later, returning to clean out her desk, Jones confronted two supervisors in the hallway and angrily complained that she had been mistreated and never really given a chance to succeed.

The scene stunned her bosses. “She used a lot of bad language that day,” recalled personnel manager Clydine Pennington.

Two months from now, Jones is scheduled to square off with another former supervisor, this one the ex-governor of Arkansas, now president of the United States.

And although the public is likely to concentrate on what occurred between Jones and Bill Clinton in a Little Rock hotel room, her case that she was a victim of sexual harassment will rise or fall on whether her career suffered after the alleged sexual encounter.

She contends that she was purposely ostracized, her professional future ruined because she rebuffed Clinton’s advances.

“Just every day when I went there,” she said in a deposition, “it just seemed like there was a lot of smoke in the air, just cloudy, you know, the way my supervisor treated me. It was just a day-to-day thing.”

But Clinton and his lawyers say Jones was a satisfactory employee who earned steady pay raises and later voluntarily resigned because her husband was being transferred to Southern California.

Robert S. Bennett, Clinton’s lead attorney, said: “There has been a total failure of proof” that she was harassed at work. “This suit is an attempt to humiliate and damage the president.”

Now, from interviews and hundreds of pages of affidavits and legal depositions recently filed in the case, a clearer picture emerges of what each side will present to the jury if the historic case goes to trial in late May.

Nothing stuck for Jones when it came to jobs. She rented cars for Hertz in the late 1980s. She tried the Dillards department store but was fired for reasons not made clear in the depositions.

She also worked briefly for an Arkansas trucking outfit, and when she applied for a state job, she used that as a reference. Pennington, the personnel manager, called J. B. Hunt Transport and was surprised to learn that some of the older female employees there did not much care for Jones.

“Mr. Hunt would take her to lunch or to ride in his Corvette,” Pennington recalled in her deposition. “And the older ladies were jealous.”

Paula Rosalee Corbin (Jones is her married name) was 24 when she applied for an entry-level clerical position with the development commission in January 1991. She had a high school diploma and eight months of study at the Capitol City Junior College on how to become an executive secretary.

On her application, she listed her skills with a word processor, a fax and mailing machine and a typewriter. “Lots of computer experience,” she added.

On her resume, she included some personal information: her height (5 foot 3), her weight (107), and the fact that she was still “single.” Among her activities, she listed “acting classes.”

She was hired two months later, at $4.93 an hour. And from the start, she attracted attention to herself.

“She had extremely tight ski-type leggings on, and sweaters,” Pennington said. “And that was something we considered to be unacceptable office attire.”

But Jones said David Harrington, the agency director and Pennington’s supervisor, was more approving.

“I remember him one time saying how really nice I always tried to dress and everything when I was up there. And after I had the baby, I remember him commenting on how I got my weight back down, and how nice I was looking.”

She also was known as an office gossip, a complaint that Jones does not completely deny.

“She and some of the girls were fairly vocal,” said Harrington, and were often engrossed in “discussions about their life and what they did last night.”

Jones conceded: “I’m sure I got in trouble for talking.”

She often was late for work and was equally tardy when running errands to the Capitol.

“Sometimes she would bring information to the wrong location in the office,” said Phil Price, a senior assistant to then-Gov. Clinton for economic development. “And the information that I was needing was usually very timely, the governor’s briefing notes or maybe a phone call he was going to make to a company official or something.

“I would call back to AIDC and ask, ‘Where is the information? I needed it 30 minutes ago.’ ”

On May 8, 1991, while working the registration desk for an economic conference at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel, Jones went upstairs to a room and, with the door ajar, stepped inside and met the governor. What happened next is the basis of her lawsuit against the president.

The next day, according to Carol Phillips, the governor’s receptionist, Jones showed up looking “happy and excited.”

She said Jones mentioned meeting Clinton but never described any sexual advances. Rather, Phillips said, Jones characterized Clinton as “gentle, nice and sweet.”

In the weeks that followed, Phillips said, Jones seemed to always be popping by the governor’s reception area, asking if he was in or when he might return. Sometimes Jones would telephone ahead to see if Clinton was around. She checked his parking space too, Phillips said.

Jones would wave at the security cameras in the reception area, Phillips recalled, and then motion the governor’s troopers to come out and chat. “Ms. Jones would ask the troopers questions about Mr. Clinton and his whereabouts,” Phillips said.

Jones’ employment records show satisfactory performance evaluations and steady pay increases.

On July 1, 1991, she received a cost-of-living increase from $4.93 an hour to $5.06 an hour. She soon was awarded an additional 69 cents an hour.

“I thought this was fair to Ms. Jones,” Pennington said. “She had demonstrated a willingness to learn, improved her data-processing skills and expressed an interest in developing a career at AIDC.”

That August, she completed her six-month probationary period.

“Goodness how time flies,” Pennington wrote in Jones’ personnel file. “Seems just yesterday you came in for an interview. . . . I have been excited about your willingness to learn. . . . It’s always special to find someone young who is interested in learning and developing a career. This probationary period is really only the beginning of your career in state government.”

At her one-year anniversary the following March, Jones received a 2.5% merit increase. “It’s a pleasure to work with you in developing skills,” Pennington wrote in Jones’ evaluation. “You’re anxious to please, and I’ve seen improvement.”

In her last evaluation, Pennington noted: “Paula’s skills and professional demeanor are both developing in a very satisfactory manner.”

Although no one in her office spoke directly to Jones about the alleged incident--in which Jones says Clinton asked her to perform oral sex--she has said she felt the pleasant atmosphere at work change abruptly in May 1991, after she told the governor, “No.”

“I’m not a hyper--one of those schizophrenics that thinks that’s something’s wrong all the time,” she said. “And you can tell when there’s a lot of static in an office place when you go there every day for two years.”

In 1992, she took a six-week maternity leave, and the office never called. When she returned to work, she said, her desk was pushed away from the others and isolated just outside Harrington’s office.

“My supervisor would always try to discourage me, try to keep me over in that corner saying that I could grow and make something of myself if I stay over there,” Jones maintained. “And I never went anywhere.”

She said she applied for promotions; nothing gelled.

“No, you stay over here,” she said Pennington would tell her. “We want to keep you over here.”

But, Jones said, “I didn’t have any work to do. My work had been gone. I was sitting there doing nothing.”

On Secretary’s Day in February 1992, she said, “I was the only one that did not get any flowers. Everybody noticed it and was coming around and saying, ‘That is so cruel of them. I cannot believe they did that to you.’

“Now,” Jones asked, “what other reason would they do that?”

Bennett inquired about the flowers during her deposition.

“Do you believe as you sit here today under oath that the reason you did not get flowers on Secretary’s Day is because you would not engage in sex with Gov. Clinton in May of 1991?” he asked.

“I believe that has something to do with it, yes,” she answered.

But Pennington said that if flowers did not arrive for Jones, it was an oversight. “I never intended to leave out any staff, nor am I aware of ever having done so.”

Jones resigned in February 1993. She left without ever filing a formal grievance. “I was just kind of scared to do that,” she said.

So they held the farewell party with the cake and snacks, and a couple of days later, Jones stormily confronted Pennington and Harrington when she returned to clean out her desk.

“Nobody would let me try to get another job and better myself,” Jones recalled. “And I just, I spewed on them really.”

By spewing, she meant: “I was upset, and I was telling them.”

Pennington was insulted by Jones’ behavior. “She became very loud and created a scene in the hall outside my office,” Pennington recalled. “She screamed profanities at Mr. Harrington, disparaging him and the agency. . . .”

Pennington didn’t see Jones until a year later--February 1994--and then she was on television, at a news conference in Washington, publicly announcing that she had been sexually assaulted by Clinton in that hotel room and then harassed at work.

“It was a day in Arkansas that it snowed,” Pennington remembered. “I was one of the few people at work, and the phones were ringing off the wall.”

* DIVISIVE ALLEGATIONS: Women split over claims of Clinton sexual misconduct. A13