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Jones vs. Clinton: settled for $850,000 and no apology
Attorney Bill McMillan said his client Paula Jones is very pleased her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton is finally over. And McMillan said she considers the payment she'll receive a victory. Jones settled Friday. The terms of the agreement call for her to get $850,000 but not the apology she originally sought from the president. Nor will the president make any admission of guilt. But Clinton will never escape the case. It will follow him through history as a scandal that tarnished his presidency. And portions of his testimony in the case may be used against him in an impeachment inquiry.
Settling the case took on new urgency for the Clinton legal team recently because allegations that the president lied under oath about Monica Lewinsky during his sworn testimony in the Jones case became a major element of the congressional impeachment debate. Clinton's attorney, Robert Bennett, said the president "remains certain the Jones allegations were baseless" but said the president does not want to "spend one more hour on this matter."
Bennett also told reporters Jones' new counsel assured him in writing that any money from a New York real estate businessman was off the table and not part of her settlement deal with the president. Abe Hirschfeld promised to give Jones $1 million if she would settle the case. Bennett also said he doesn't know how the $850,000 will be distributed within 60 days, but he believes Jones owes $3 million to $4 million in legal fees. McMillan took over negotiations after Jones' legal team at the Dallas firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher and Pyke last week said they would soon quit the case.
Just weeks earlier, on October 20, three judges of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had heard arguments in Jones' appeal for reinstatement of her lawsuit. It had been thrown out by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright the previous April 1.
Wright's decision came as Clinton was nearing the end of an 11-day trip to Africa. Wright ruled that even if Clinton did what Jones claimed, it was "offensive and boorish," but it was not sexual assault. There was no evidence Jones suffered on the job because of the alleged incident, the judge ruled. The White House offered an understated reaction, saying Clinton was pleased at the news. But later that night, Clinton was captured by a Fox News camera dancing while playing an African drum and chewing on a cigar in a hotel room in Dakar, Senegal. Neither the president nor his supporters had long to celebrate Wright's decision. A teary-eyed Jones, flanked by her attorneys and husband, announced April 16 that "despite the personal strain" on her family, she would appeal the ruling, meaning the four-year-old case wasn't over yet. Jones said she was shocked at the dismissal "because I believed that what Mr. Clinton did to me was wrong and that the law protects women who are subjected to that kind of abuse of power." That wasn't the view of Judge Wright. In her ruling that surprised both sides, the judge said there were no "genuine issues" worthy of trial.
The judge's decision came just weeks after Jones' attorneys had filed documents March 13 with the court alleging Clinton made sexual advances against several women and took part in a "vast enterprise to suppress evidence." Jones' attorneys also asked a federal appeals court for permission to use evidence from the Lewinsky investigation in Jones' lawsuit against Clinton. In January, Independent Counsel Ken Starr also won permission from a three-judge federal panel to look into whether an effort was made to suborn a false statement from Lewinsky. She had signed an affidavit for Jones' attorneys saying she had had a sexual relationship with the president. Jones' original complaint was based on an incident that she said happened May 8, 1991. She kept quiet about it for more than two years because, she said, she was afraid that nobody would believe her story that Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, noticed her at a desk in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, where she was handing out name tags for a conference, and had a state trooper bring her to a private room. There, she claimed, Clinton made a crude request for oral sex, in the process giving her a look at what she would later call the "distinguishing characteristics" of his genital area. Her lawsuit also claimed that her rejection of Clinton's advances hurt her job opportunities. What broke Jones' silence about the alleged encounter was an article in the January 1994 issue of American Spectator magazine that implied that someone called "Paula" had been a willing sexual conquest of Clinton's. Jones hired Daniel Traylor, a Little Rock lawyer who had specialized in real estate and was clearly out of his depth. Traylor had Jones tell her story for the first time in public at a February 11, 1994, news conference in Washington where she shared a stage with Clinton bashers, which helped to convince many that Jones was a tool, witting or unwitting, of Clinton haters. Though Jones is said by partisans to be oblivious to politics, Susan Carpenter McMillan, a friend and now Jones' chief spokesperson, says Jones was indeed used by extreme rightists and was too naive to realize it. Jones hired new attorneys, Gil Davis and Joseph Cammarata (who later removed themselves from the case), both in the Washington area, and pressed ahead with preparations for a sexual harassment lawsuit. Clinton responded by hiring Washington super-lawyer Robert Bennett, which to some was a signal that the White House was more concerned by Jones' story than it had let on.
The two sides came close to a settlement that would have headed off the lawsuit. Bennett faxed Jones' lawyers a statement that the president was to make publicly. Clinton was to say that he had "no recollection" of meeting Jones in a hotel room, but "I do not challenge her claim that we met there," and that in any event "she did not engage in any improper or sexual conduct." Then some overeager spinner at the White House leaked word that Jones was about to drop her suit because she knew she had no case. That tore it. The suit was filed May 6, 1994, almost exactly three years after the alleged encounter, and at the last possible moment under the statutes of limitations. When chances of a settlement fell through, Bennett, in an argument that made it all the way to the Supreme Court, pushed to have the case put off until Clinton left office, saying that, given the demands of his office, the president should not be required to answer to civil claims. The justices were unmoved. On May 27, 1997, in a stunning 9-0 verdict, they ruled the case could proceed. |
