AEP: An apology would have avoided this, says Paula
Bill Nalty
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000118613908976&rtmo=a3eRbJJL&atmo=qteRbJM9&pg=/et/98/1/29/wclin529.html
International News
Electronic Telegraph
Thursday 29 January 1998
Issue 979
An apology would have avoided this, says Paula Jones
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
AT their home in Long Beach, California, far away from Washington, where
the drama they initiated is taking place, and Arkansas, where it began,
Paula and Steve Jones are contemplating an extraordinary week.
The revelations that Mrs Jones's case against President Clinton for
sexual harassment have brought to light have, quite simply, changed
everything. Now she is ecstatic about her chances; just last summer, she
came within a whisker of abandoning the lawsuit, as the strain broke her
resolve.
"They don't know how close they came," says Mr Jones, a ticket agent for
Northwest Airlines in California and an aspiring screen actor with
conservative views. "If we'd backed down then, nobody would ever have
heard of Monica Lewinsky. None of this crisis would ever have happened."
It is Mr Jones who, as his wife does her best to prevent their two young
children running amok and raiding the fridge, has to speak on their
behalf. Mrs Jones is under a gagging order set down in the case by judge
Susan Webber Wright, and no details of the sensitive evidence
accumulated by their lawyers and investigators can be mentioned.
Many of the allegations and counter-allegations are well-known, however,
and others have leaked out in the last week of revelation, since first
the Internet and then the newspapers revealed that the President was
under criminal investigation by the Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr,
for possible obstruction of justice in the Jones lawsuit.
It is alleged that he perjured himself by denying an affair with Monica
Lewinsky in a deposition given to Mrs Jones's lawyers, and that he
suborned perjury by directing her to lie under oath. Armed with this,
Mrs Jones seems certain to take Mr Clinton to court.
Just a few months ago, though, her original lawyers pressed her to take
a financial settlement, paid for by liability insurance policies, that
would have allowed the President to get off without an apology.
She refused after a bitter dispute, sticking to her demand that Mr
Clinton be held to account for his alleged act of indecent exposure in
Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel in May, 1991. She was adamant that Mr
Clinton be made to atone for calling her a "pathetic liar".
The lawyers, Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata, withdrew from the case in
September demanding $700,000 (£432,000) in legal fees. The Joneses claim
that the firm, which would receive fees as a percentage of the damages,
were too keen to take the money and settle.
"It was the worst time in our lives," said Steve Jones. "When Paula
cracked I had to hold her and carry her through. I don't know how we
made it, really. The lawyers were trying to force feed this proposal,
and the pressure tactics were horrendous. These people in Washington
just don't seem to understand that being called a whore means something,
something we can't live with."
The couple now have five lawyers from Dallas, led by Don Campbell, who
are working on a contingency fee basis. It has been reported in the US
press that the legal costs are being paid by the conservative Rutherford
Institute, but in fact it is paying only travel costs and
"out-of-pocket" expenses.
Mr Jones said: "I told the new team that this is not a money case.
You're going to have to work to death, but you've got a client who's
telling the truth and who's going to take it all the way. I told them
that the only settlement we're going to accept from Bill Clinton is: 'I
was wrong. I apologise. I admit that I was in that room with Paula'. We
gave him wiggle room before. We were willing to let him say 'I may
have'. But now we've collected a lot more evidence and the days of
wiggle room are over. The word 'may' has been stricken. He is going to
have to confess to everything on our terms now, or face Paula in court."
Mr Jones denies that he and his wife are bent on the destruction of the
Clinton presidency, but said the case had escalated out of control
because of the media campaign orchestrated by the White House to destroy
Paula's credibility. Now it is a matter of southern pride and honour to
achieve total vindication.
He singles out Mr Clinton's $500-an-hour Washington lawyer as the man
who brought disaster on his client. "If it had not been for Bob Bennett
coming out on TV and saying that Paula's story was 'tabloid trash for
cash' . . . this whole thing could have been settled a long time ago
with a quiet apology," he says.
"He chose the wrong girl to pick a fight with, didn't he? And now he's
brought the President to the brink of impeachment. If I could give one
piece of advice to Bill Clinton, it's get rid of Bob Bennett. Fast."
Their witness list includes more than 100 women who allegedly had sexual
encounters with the President in circumstances that are relevant to the
case, either because they were government employees working under Mr
Clinton when the alleged incident took place, or because they were
allegedly solicited for him by police officers, or were victims of
coercive and predatory behaviour.
"There are so many, it's impossible to investigate them all. We don't
have the time," says Mr Jones. "It's better to get between six and 12
solid cases we can use in court, and lock them in, and we've done that
now".
If Mr Clinton survives the scandal over Monica Lewinsky - a big "if" -
he will have to deal with the stack of depositions collected by the
Jones lawsuit, some of them describing incidents that, it is said,
border on sexual assault. "It's over for Bill Clinton," Mr Jones says
solemnly. "It's over."
24 January 1998: The clerk who has Clinton by the throat
18 January 1998: Clinton squares up to sex accuser
20 April 1997: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard archive [coverage of Whitewater
and other Clinton scandals]
© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 1998.