A Charge of Harassment

“Only after Mr. Clinton and his staff denied these events had ever happened, and called me ‘pathetic,’ and in effect a liar, did I decide to seek legal relief for the wrong done to me by Mr. Clinton. . . . I did so for the sole reason of clearing my name.”

--Paula Corbin Jones, upon filing her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton on May 5, 1994

*

The path to peril first came into public view in the basement of a Washington hotel during an ice and snow storm five years ago.

Thin and scared, Paula Corbin Jones stood alone among the media wolves, 200 reporters and cameramen knocking snow clods off their boots as they crowded into the little room just down the stairs from the coat-check counter.

With schools and the government closed by the weather, the media--full of skepticism and a good measure of derision--had come to the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a news conference.

Jones was 27 years old. She wore a black dress and appeared a slight wisp shivering before the microphones. Her physical appearance would later be much commented on, especially by the president’s defenders, who would poke fun at her hairdo. She would eventually reshape her looks. What lasted was her determination.

On Feb. 11, 1994, Jones described how, about three years earlier, while employed by the Arkansas state government, she had been summoned to another hotel room, this one in Little Rock. There she had encountered her ultimate boss--the governor--with his pants down, demanding oral sex.

“It was wrong that a woman could work in the workplace and be harassed by a figure that high,” she said. “It was just humiliating what he did to me.”

President Clinton himself watched some of the press conference on the news. A presidential spokesman had this reaction: “It is not true. He [Clinton] does not recall meeting her. He was never alone in a hotel with her.”

At least one of the White House staff had heard of her earlier, when she had made a request through Arkansas back channels for a private apology. It was flatly rejected. To the Clinton team, the threat from Paula Corbin Jones seemed no more lasting than the snow that would soon melt.

From a Small Town to a State Job

Lonoke, Ark., is far from the national spotlight. A rugged, rural patch, it is home to just 4,000 souls and endless rice and soybean fields. Locals either stay at home to tend the crops or commute 30 miles to Little Rock to work for the state. Paula Corbin chose to commute, to an entry-level clerk’s job for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission.

She had been raised in a strict family and sent to a Nazarene Church school, where girls were admonished against makeup and skirts that did not cover the knee. But Paula, a preacher’s kid, soon embraced the fast life--a choice that would leave her with some regret, as her personal history was opened for the world, including nude photos of her with an ex-boyfriend splashed over the pages of a men’s magazine.

Jones went to work for the state with little formal education after high school, just eight months at a junior college studying how to become an executive secretary. On her resume she said she could type and run a fax machine.

Although her work was boring and often meaningless--sometimes the highlight was carrying files from one state agency to the next or over to the governor’s office--going to work for the state was a big step for the young woman from the small town. “It was a big day in her life,” her supervisor, Clydine Pennington, would recall.

She was hired at $4.93 an hour and earned standard promotions, but not all went well. Pennington admonished her about tardiness, excessive socializing, personal phone calls and inappropriate office attire, such as tight leggings and sweaters.

But Jones, in her own legal deposition, said that other supervisors, such as Dave Harrington, who was Pennington’s boss, commented on “how really nice I always tried to dress.”

“Before,” to Jones, meant before that notorious encounter at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel on the banks of the Arkansas River.

That day in May 1991, a state trooper tapped her on the shoulder while she was attending to a courtesy booth during the Governor’s Quality Conference at the hotel. The governor would like to see her, the trooper said.

She flushed. What could he want, she wondered. She followed Officer Danny Ferguson upstairs.

When she came down the elevator, there emerged sharply differing accounts of what had transpired. Ferguson himself was responsible for two of them.

In a sworn deposition the trooper claimed that she had asked to meet the governor, that she had spotted him in the hotel and thought he was a “good-looking” man with “sexy hair.”

Ferguson said he told her, “That won’t be any problem. . . . We do that all the time.” He said he escorted her to the eighth floor, where Clinton had taken a room in expectation of a phone call from President Bush.

In earlier interviews with reporters Ferguson said it was Clinton who noticed Jones, commenting on her “come-hither look” and dispatching the trooper to arrange a meeting.

In both versions, the trooper remembered that, when she came back down 15 or 20 minutes later, she was smiling. “She asked me if the governor had any girlfriends,” Ferguson testified. “I said, ‘No.’ She said that she would be his girlfriend.”

Jones offered a starkly different version.

She said Ferguson approached her, saying the governor wanted to meet her. When she stepped into the hotel room, according to her account, Clinton groped at her and suddenly dropped his pants and asked for oral sex. She said she refused and headed for the door.

“You could tell he was embarrassed and everything,” she recalled. “And he was pulling up his pants. And he said, ‘Well, if you have any trouble, you have Dave Harrington call me immediately.’ ”

She said she opened the door, and then Clinton held his hand on the door. “You’re a smart girl,” she said he told her. “Let’s keep this between ourselves.”

Jones took that as a threat: “He didn’t want me to tell anybody.”

Forever afterward, she says, she felt intimidated by Clinton. She recalled once running into him near the rotunda in the state Capitol: He squeezed her and laughed and told his entourage that they made “a good couple” and didn’t they look like “The Beauty and the Beast”?

The fourth version is Clinton’s.

In his Jan. 17, 1998, deposition in Washington--the same appearance at which lawyers for Jones brought up the names of former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and former White House volunteer Kathleen Willey--Clinton was asked if he recalled meeting a woman in an Excelsior Hotel room on that spring day almost seven years past.

“No . . . I . . . you know,” he began.

“Over the years I met a lot of people at a lot of these meetings. I don’t . . . let me just say . . . if the Excelsior, if they let me use a room . . . “

The Jones lawyers stopped him.

“Seated to my right two chairs down is Ms. Paula Jones,” attorney James A. Fisher said. “Do you recall ever having met her before today?”

“No,” the president answered. “I’ve said that many times. I don’t.”

“Do you recall ever having seen her before early 1994 when she first made public her accusations against you?” Fisher asked.

“No . . . I . . . I actually saw her on television then, just by accident,” Clinton said. “I just happened to be walking by a television in the office, and I remember I asked [deputy White House counsel] Bruce Lindsey to come here. I said, ‘Bruce, do we know this lady, who is this person?’ That was my first surprised reaction.”

Jones Says Work Atmosphere Chilled

After her encounter with Clinton, Jones said she could sense the atmosphere at work suddenly chill. Once-friendly co-workers and supervisors seemed distant. Her desk was moved to an isolated spot in the office; she believed management wanted to watch her closely. She got no flowers on Secretaries Day. She said she was ordered to reimburse the office for personal phone calls. And when she took a six-week maternity leave, she said, no one from work called to wish her well.

There was no job demotion or cut in pay, and Jones filed no job grievance. She said she nevertheless connected the abrupt unpleasantness at work with her unwillingness to give in to the governor.

Her supervisors and some of her colleagues said the problem was Jones. They noticed that her performance had slipped, that she was late to work more often, that she was more cranky, more difficult.

They said that she developed a fascination with the governor, that she was the first to volunteer to make deliveries to the governor’s reception area. Some saw her as a stalker. When she was told he was inside working, she would smile and wave at the security cameras.

When she resigned in February 1993, her colleagues cut a cake and toasted her at her office goodbye party. And Paula Corbin Jones cried.

Still, she maintained that she had been forced out. “I had applied for different other jobs within the agency,” she said, “and 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.

“And I never went anywhere.”

In December 1993, stories appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the conservative American Spectator magazine reporting allegations that Gov. Clinton used state troopers to help him score with young women.

Buried two-thirds down into the lengthy American Spectator version was a one-paragraph mention of a woman a state trooper remembered “only as Paula,” who had spent an intimate hour with Clinton at the Excelsior. The citation concluded by stating that Paula “was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired.”

By then, Jones had moved to Southern California, and Clinton was in Washington. She was home in Arkansas over the Christmas holidays when she learned of the article.

In the small-town world that is Arkansas, she was sure many friends, family and former associates would recognize her as the naughty one.

She contacted a Little Rock attorney, Daniel M. Traylor, whose specialty was real estate law. So small was his practice that he shared support staff with other tenants in the First Commercial Bank Building. Traylor’s political pedigree was solidly Democratic. His father, a former two-term state representative, was a prominent member of the Democratic Party in North Little Rock.

The lawyer’s first move was to send word to Clinton through a local Democratic Party leader that Jones wanted Clinton to help refute the story.

Traylor envisioned a simple settlement: a private apology from Clinton, $5,000 to cover his legal costs and a joint public statement from Jones and the president condemning those who leaked and published accounts of their hotel meeting.

The real estate lawyer thought Jones and Clinton could actually appear in public as allies, blasting Ferguson for “shooting his mouth and spreading lies.”

Instead, the case was sent hurtling toward history-altering litigation when Traylor got a call from the Democratic operative rejecting his private bid.

“It was a terrible moment,” Traylor said, recalling the phone call. “I said he should go back to whoever he talked to and try again. I said they didn’t understand that this was going to be a disaster. This was no bimbo eruption. This was going to be a lawsuit.” It was, he said, “the turning point.”

Traylor then contacted Cliff Jackson, a noted Clinton nemesis in Little Rock, who as a lawyer represented two of the state troopers. Speaking lawyer to lawyer, Traylor, who mistakenly thought Jackson also represented Ferguson, said he was prepared to file a claim against Ferguson for giving the name “Paula” to the American Spectator.

Like Traylor, Jackson ran his law practice on a shoestring out of a converted residence in a commercial area of west Little Rock. His old pickup truck took up most of the available off-street parking, but he had few visitors. And he was not looking for new clients.

When Traylor called that day, Jackson, who had no office staff, picked up the phone himself. They agreed to set up a meeting.

At the session, Jones “broke down crying when she described what happened in the room,” Jackson recalled. “She described Clinton’s face. It was so red she said she would never forget it.”

“They said they had tried making the demand through private channels without success,” Jackson said. “They thought they had nothing to lose going public.”

Jackson said he told Traylor and Jones that they would never get an apology out of the White House and tried to dissuade them. But when they said they wanted to go ahead with the news conference anyway, Jackson noted that he already had scheduled one for the troopers during the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual retreat in Washington the next month. He was going to announce creation of a whistle-blower fund to aid two troopers who feared financial hardship for their public roles in the stories published in American Spectator and The Times.

Jackson invited Jones to join them for a media doubleheader.

The downside, Jackson warned, was that the White House would likely spin it as a “right-wing political plot.”

Traylor did not care. “We want to do it with you.”

Jackson said he bought plane tickets to Washington for Jones and Traylor, using seed money for the whistle-blower fund already provided by a conservative Chicago financier. But they demurred, deciding to pay their own way. They reached Washington in the midst of an ice storm.

In their hotel room in a Virginia suburb before the news conference, Jones and her husband were wound tight. “Paula and Steve were pacing,” Jackson said. “They were very nervous.”

Against Jackson’s advice, the Jones team had decided not to let Jones stand up and tell her own story, for fear that the press would “eat her alive.”

The next day at the news conference, Jackson announced the whistle-blower fund, then introduced Traylor and sat down. Pounded by insistent reporters, Traylor finally let Jones take a few questions. The reporters were merciless. It was, Jackson thought, a disaster.

“She was scared,” said Craig Shirley, a media consultant with conservative political groups who watched Jones valiantly trying to go on. “She was nervous. Her voice was quaking. At one point she got a little bit weepy.”

What was worse, the big national papers either played down the story or ignored it. Sitting in a hotel hospitality suite, Paula and Steve Jones felt broken. “The room was like a funeral parlor,” Jackson said.

Resentment and Perhaps Naivete

But Jones did not want to give up. Resentful at the treatment she had received, and perhaps naive about what lay ahead, she decided it was time to sue Clinton for sexual harassment.

Traylor tried to find help in liberal quarters, pitching his client’s case to the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union. He consulted by phone over several days with an associate of prominent Wyoming defense attorney Gerry Spence. He sent a packet of affidavits and a letter to Anita Faye Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment before he became a Supreme Court Justice. Each time, he struck out.

Convinced only Clinton’s foes would take up Jones’ cause, Traylor settled on Washington-area lawyers Gilbert K. Davis and Joseph Cammarata, who had handled conservative causes before. Traylor said, however, that he was convinced they came into the case with no political agenda.

On May 6, 1994, they filed her sexual harassment lawsuit in federal court in Little Rock.

The wisp of a woman from Lonoke might be frightened, or frivolous, or likely to dissolve into tears in moments of stress. Yet merely by setting her name to a piece of paper she had acquired an awesome power: the authority, eventually backed by the highest courts in the land, to rummage through the personal lives of dozens of individuals and compel even the president of the United States to answer the most sensitive questions about his personal conduct.

In time, Jones’ team of lawyers would be able to ask the president under oath whether he had engaged in sexual relations with other women whose careers he could influence. One name that would come up: Monica S. Lewinsky.