A Vast Conspiracy (32 page)

So what? What difference does the timing make? It means that Paula Corbin, far from being immediately horrified, waited all afternoon before she complained to her friends about the incident. She had hours to think about what effect the encounter might have on her then new relationship with the jealous Stephen Jones. It was only after she had a chance to worry about Steve that she decided to complain—to her friends, her sister, her mother.

But in the days immediately after the conference, Paula did not complain about Clinton—just the opposite, in fact. Several colleagues from the AIDC testified that she was very happy to have met the governor. According to Pennington, Paula “specifically told me that she was excited that she had met the governor, held her hand out to say that he had shaken hands with her, and that he liked what she had on, and he liked her hair, and she was … thrilled she met the governor.” Paula told her boss she wanted to work for the governor and on his campaign for president. Cherry Duckett, the deputy director of AIDC, heard the same enthusiasm from Paula.

Even before the conference, Paula had hung around Clinton’s office in the capitol building, routinely spending a half hour there twice a day when she made deliveries from the AIDC offices across the street. On the day after the conference, Paula told Carol Phillips, who was Clinton’s lead receptionist at the capitol, that a trooper had arranged for her to meet the
governor at the hotel. Paula said he had been “nice” and “gentle” and “sweet.” Paula took to calling Phillips, asking about Clinton’s schedule and when he might be in the office (behavior that roughly paralleled Lewinsky’s calls to Betty Currie). Once Clinton did run into Paula in the hallway of the capitol, and he put his arm around her and said, “Don’t we make a great couple—the beauty and the beast?” But other than this harmless banter, there was no further contact between them.

About a week after the conference, Danny Ferguson ran into Paula at the capitol. “She asked me if the governor had asked about her,” Ferguson testified. “I said, ‘No.’ She asked me for a piece of paper. She wrote her phone number down and said, ‘If he wants to talk to me, he can call me at this number. If my boyfriend answers, either hang up or tell him you’ve got the wrong number.’ ” Ferguson said he threw the paper away. Clinton never called. (Paula asserted that Ferguson asked her for her phone number, which she refused to give him.)

So where does all the evidence lead? All in all, the record suggests that Clinton and Paula Corbin had a consensual sexual encounter in the room at the Excelsior Hotel. Clinton, it seems, lied about it from the start. When Ferguson returned to the hotel room after Paula left, the trooper testified, the governor recounted, “Nothing happened. We just talked.” As for the president’s subsequent claims that he had no memory of the incident, that seems unlikely, no matter how eventful a life he has led. Clinton denied making the approach because he always denied these accusations—and because, with some justification, he thought that his sex life was his own business.

In this scenario, Paula’s motives seem more complex. She may have had a fling that she quickly regretted, and then, as Clinton ignored her, her resentments simmered. When the
Spectator
article ran, almost three years later, she took it as an opportunity to settle an old score—as long as she could do so without enraging her jealous husband. The best clue to her motives may have come out in a chance encounter in the ever-small world of Arkansas. Just after the
Spectator
article was published, in December 1993, Paula came home from California to visit Arkansas with her baby son. Her friend Debra Ballentine had heard about the story in
The American Spectator
and asked her out to dinner to discuss it. They took their toddlers to the Golden Corral steak house in North Little Rock, and Paula spied a familiar face at a nearby table—Danny Ferguson. Ferguson’s wife noticed that an unfamiliar woman was staring at him, so he turned to face her. After she
passed by on a visit to the salad bar, Paula motioned Ferguson to come talk to her.

In testimony and interviews, Jones, Ballentine, and Ferguson remembered their conversation much the same way. Ferguson began by apologizing. He said he didn’t know Brock was going to use her name—and he added that Clinton had told him nothing had happened between them. Then he explained a little about how the troopers’ plans for a book had fallen apart. “I got screwed,” Ferguson said.

Then—as so often happened in the many-tentacled Paula Jones case—the subject turned to money. There were differences in recollections about who brought the subject up first, but Jones wondered how much money the tabloids would pay for an account of her encounter with the president. Ferguson said that Roger Perry had told him the
Enquirer
would pay $500,000. Ferguson warned her about the consequences. “You better think about your family,” he said, “because I’ve been through it, and they start to dig up dirt.”

Paula was torn. She wasn’t worried about dirt from her past, but she was concerned about Steve—how he would react to hearing “the whole truth.” Toward the end of Ferguson’s visit to Paula’s table, she mused, “Five hundred thousand dollars would last me a long time.” Here, it seems, was planted the idea that the
Spectator
article might mean money for Paula and Steve Jones.

A few days later, Ballentine decided to call the lawyer who had handled her divorce—Danny Traylor. “This is Danny,” he answered. And so the Paula Jones case began.

Through the fall of 1997, the depositions proceeded in an increasingly rancorous atmosphere. The ideologically motivated Dallas team remained obsessed with pursuing Clinton’s alleged girlfriends, and the Clinton team, in turn, focused on Jones’s commercial motives in filing the lawsuit. There was an antic session with Lydia Cathey, Paula’s corroborating sister, when Bill Bristow sought to draw her out on the distinguishing-characteristic issue. (Q: “Did Paula tell you that there were distinguishing characteristics of the president’s penis?” A: “Yes,… she worded it as, ‘His dick was crooked.…’ ” Q: “Any more description than that?… Did it have a U-turn in it?” A: “No,… It was hard and crooked and gross. You know. That was the word she used.…”)

On November 12, though, the case reached an important turning point. On that day, the lawyers all converged on Little Rock for a two-day deposition of the plaintiff herself. Bennett was well prepared. He began with a promising subject for the defense—Jones’s employment record. This was, after all, an employment discrimination case, and one of the plaintiff’s claims was that she had been denied promotions and raises because of Clinton’s sexual harassment. Her prior record might offer some clue to her potential at AIDC.

When Paula Corbin was hired at AIDC, she had been out of high school for less than four years, but she had already held several different jobs (and dropped out of secretarial school as well). She sold shoes, which she quit to work at J. B. Hunt Transport, where she was fired for “talking too much,” according to Paula. From there she went to Dillard’s department store, where she was fired for lateness. Then on to Hertz, where she was fired for undetermined reasons—and so on to Crown Rental, Pest-masters, Holliday’s Fashions, and finally AIDC. All in all, she had been fired from five of the seven jobs she had held before going to work for state government. It was an extraordinarily damning recitation of failure in the workplace.

From there, Bennett moved to a handful of other topics, starting with the incident itself. In this telling, Jones added a new, sinister detail—that, after she rejected his advances, Clinton “put his hand on the door to where I could not open it up any further, and he stopped me and he says, ‘You’re a smart girl. Let’s keep this between ourselves.’ ” Had there been a trial, Jones would no doubt have been asked how she came to forget the detail of her false imprisonment in her earlier tellings of the incident. As her question to her husband on the outtake from the Matrisciana film illustrated—“Isn’t that what happened?”—Paula’s recollections were always a work in progress.

But the Clinton team felt it wasn’t enough simply to show that Paula Jones’s employment history was dismal and her story inconsistent—which were both perfectly appropriate subjects to explore in a deposition in a case of this kind. The next moments in the deposition show how grotesque this case became. Bennett’s promises notwithstanding, the next portion of the deposition reads more like a verbal sexual assault than a legal proceeding. Clinton may indeed have “done more for women than any president,” as Bennett once said, but these questions form part of his legacy as well.

At first the queries were simply embarrassing. Bennett called Jones’s attention
to her “distinguishing characteristic” affidavit. “All right,” Bennett said. “Now you say in paragraph five, ‘The shaft of the penis was bent or crooked.’ Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Could you sort of just show me what you mean on that piece of paper? Draw the penis for me. Show me what you mean by the shaft was bent or crooked.”

“I have to draw it?” Jones asked.

“Yes,” replied the president’s lawyer.

“(Whereupon, witness complied),” the court reporter dryly noted.

But the true cruelty began when Bennett turned the questioning over to Bill Bristow. First question: “You made a statement at one forty-two this afternoon that you were not a bimbo. Would you tell me what your definition of the word ‘bimbo’ is?”

“Whoa, whoa,” her lawyer Donovan Campbell sputtered, but there was little he could do. Judge Wright was going to rule on objections after the deposition, so Jones had to answer every question, no matter how outrageous. If the case came to trial, then Judge Wright would make her rulings on the admissibility of the disputed questions. Paula stammered a brief answer—“trailer park white trash,” among other things.

“Now, Mrs. Jones, when you make a statement that the president’s penis looks small to you,” Bristow continued, “that implies a certain familiarity with the male anatomy—in other words, that you would be in a position to make comparative studies. Have you ever taken any anatomy courses …?”

“No.…”

“So I would gather then that your ability to discern distinctive characteristics about a male penis would be based on experience that you have had in your life where you have had the opportunity to view other male penises, is that correct?”

“It—very few, if there were. Yeah, I made it probably on that assumption and plus he was a really big man and really overweight and it seemed like it was real little compared to his weight.”

Bristow used these questions as an introduction to an extended tour of Paula Jones’s sex life. He started with her husband, Stephen. “So you dated for three weeks and then began having sexual intercourse?”

“That’s correct.”

“And then, about a week later, according to your prior testimony, you moved in together, correct?”

“Correct.…”

“In fact, you had been pregnant for some period of time before you and Mr. Jones got married, is that not true?”

“That’s true.”

All of this was entirely irrelevant—as Jones’s lawyers tried forlornly to point out. But Bristow was relentless. He asked about her high school boyfriend: “Is that who you lost your virginity to?” And her drinking habits: Was it ever “necessary for you to, quote, sleep off a drunk?” No, said Jones. He went on to ask about other boyfriends—Glenn Cope, Carl Fulkerson. The background check on Jones had been extensive. Next Bristow turned to Mike Turner, the noble soul who had sold his seminude photographs of Paula to
Penthouse
magazine.

Turner, it turned out, had saved several of the notes that Jones had written to him during their brief relationship—some had been quoted in the magazine article that went with the pictures—and Bristow now began confronting her with them. “Mike, gorgeous, thanks for letting me sleep with you and I love to snuggle up to your sexy soft body and wonderful butt.… Mike, thanks for a wonderful time I had last time. Your [
sic
] great in bed.… Mike, thanks for letting me sleep my drunk off over here. You’re a real sweetheart. Let’s do something soon, okay?… Love you, babe. Paula.”

“Okay,” Bristow resumed, “you do agree that you apparently had to sleep a drunk off?”

“Yeah,” Jones conceded. “Probably so.”

Ultimately, the responsibility for these questions belongs not with the lawyers who asked them but with the client who mattered, Bill Clinton. Bennett knew the political risks of this kind of strategy. So at each step in the case, he was especially careful to get approval for these personal assaults from the client himself—and from the first lady. Bennett always received the same message: Don’t hold back.

For the few hours when Bennett and Bristow were haranguing their client in Little Rock, Donovan Campbell and his colleagues had little choice but to suffer in silence. At the very moment of Jones’s deposition, however, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg were preparing to transform the case very much to the plaintiff’s advantage.