Paula Corbin Jones (born
Paula Rosalee Corbin on September 17, 1966, in
Lonoke,
Arkansas
) is a former
Arkansas
state
employee who sued President Bill
Clinton for sexual
harassment. Eventually, the court
dismissed the
lawsuit,
before
trial, on the grounds that Jones
failed to demonstrate any damages. However, while the dismissal was
on appeal, Clinton entered into an out-of-court
settlement by agreeing to pay Jones
$850,000.
The impeachment trial of President Clinton on perjury and
obstruction of justice charges was based on statements he made
during the depositions for the Paula Jones lawsuit. The specific
statements were about the nature of his relationship with White
House intern
Monica Lewinsky, with
whom he denied having a sexual relationship.
Biography
She was raised a member of the
Church of the Nazarene, the daughter
of a minister of that
church.http://www.adherents.com/largecom/fam_nazarene.html
Jones v. Clinton
Background
According
to Jones' account, on May 8, 1991, Paula Jones was escorted to the
room of Clinton, then governor of
Arkansas, in the Excelsior (now Peabody) Hotel in Little Rock,
Arkansas
, where he propositioned her. She claimed she
kept quiet about the incident until 1994, when a
David Brock story in
American Spectator told a lurid
account, sometimes referred to as
Troopergate, about an Arkansas
employee named "Paula" offering to be Clinton's girlfriend. Jones
filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton on May 6, 1994, two
days prior to the 3-year
statute
of limitations, and sought $750,000.00 in damages
Arkansas state trooper Danny Ferguson was named as a co-defendant
in Jones's lawsuit. According to Brock, Ferguson told Jones that
[then] Governor Clinton would like to meet with her in his room.
Ferguson then escorted Jones up to Clinton's room and stood outside
the room until Jones came out. According to Ferguson, when Jones
came out she said that she would not mind being Clinton's
girlfriend. Jones denied Ferguson's version of the story, and
subsequently named Ferguson as a co-defendant.
While there were no eye-witnesses to back up Jones's account, Jones
told a friend contemporaneously of the harassment and many other
women were willing to testify to similar behavior by Clinton. In
late 1997, Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled Jones was "entitled to
information regarding any individuals with whom President Clinton
had sexual relations or proposed to or sought to have sexual
relations and who were, during the relevant time frame, state or
federal employees."
Initial lawsuit
Jones began to be represented by
Gilbert
Davis and
Joseph Cammarata, two
Washington, D.C.-area lawyers. Later she befriended
Susan Carpenter-McMillan, a
California woman and a very conservative commentator, who became
her press spokesperson. Carpenter-McMillan wasted no time in using
the press to attack Clinton to a much greater degree, calling him
"un-American," a "liar," and a "philanderer" on
Meet the Press,
Crossfire,
Equal
Time,
Larry King
Live,
Today,
The Geraldo Rivera Show,
Burden of Proof,
Hannity & Colmes,
Talkback Live, and other
shows. "I do not respect a man who
cheats
on his wife, and exposes his penis to a stranger," she said.
Clinton and his defense team challenged Jones's right to bring a
civil lawsuit against a sitting president for an incident that
occurred prior to the defendant's becoming president. The Clinton
defense team took the position that the trial should be delayed
until the president was no longer in office, because the job of the
president is unique and does not allow him to take time away from
it to deal with a private civil lawsuit.
The case wound its way
through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme
Court
on January 13, 1997. On May ]], the Supreme
Court unanimously ruled against Clinton, and allowed the lawsuit to
proceed. Clinton dismissed Jones' story and agreed to move on with
the lawsuit.
Change in counsel
On August 29, 1997, Jones' attorneys Gilbert Davis and Joseph
Cammarata asked to resign from the case believing the settlement
offer they had secured, and Jones refused, was the appropriate way
to end the case.In September, Judge Wright accepted their request.
Jones was then represented by the
Rutherford Institute, a conservative
legal organization, and by a Dallas law firm. Carpenter-McMillan
continued to serve as Jones' spokesperson. In December of 1997,
Jones agreed to lower her settlement to $525,000.00 and agreed to
no longer try Danny Ferguson as a co-defendant.
Paula Jones' declaration
Under penalty of perjury, Paula Jones declared that Clinton had
Trooper Danny Ferguson escort her to Clinton's hotel room where
Clinton made sexual advances that Jones rejected. Clinton
eventually dropped both his trousers and his underwear and exposed
himself to Jones, at which time Jones said she had to go.
Conclusion of case
Before the case reached trial, Judge
Susan Webber Wright granted President
Clinton's motion for summary judgment, ruling that Jones could not
show that she had suffered any damages—according to Arkansas state
law standards of outrage and intentional infliction of emotional
distress—even if her claim of sexual harassment were otherwise
proven. Jones appealed the dismissal to a panel of the United
States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where, at oral
argument, two of the three judges on the panel appeared sympathetic
to her arguments. On November 13, 1998, Clinton settled with Jones
for $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an
apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop the appeal. Robert S
Bennett, Clinton's attorney, still maintained that Jones' claim was
baseless and that Clinton only settled so he could end the lawsuit
and move on with his life. In March 1999, Judge Wright ruled that
Jones would only get $200,000 from the settlement and that the rest
of the money would pay for her legal expenses. Before the end of
the entire litigation, her marriage broke apart and she appeared in
the news media to show the results of a nose job paid for by a
donor.
Paula Jones' New Nose.
In April 1999, Judge Wright found President Clinton in
civil contempt of court for misleading testimony
in the Jones case. She ordered Clinton to pay $1,202 to the court
and an additional $90,000 to Jones' lawyers for expenses incurred
as the result of Clinton's dishonest and misleading answers about
his alleged affair with Monica
Lewinsky.http://www.thefreelibrary.com/CLINTON+MUST+PAY+$90,000+TO+PAULA+JONES'+LAWYERS.(News)-a083618563
This amount, however, was far less than the $496,000 that the
lawyers originally requested from Clinton after he was found in
contempt of court.
Wright then referred Clinton's conduct to the Arkansas Bar for
disciplinary action, and on January 19, 2001, the day before
President Clinton left the White House, Clinton entered into an
agreement with the Arkansas Bar and Independent Counsel Robert Ray
under which Clinton was stripped of his license to practice law for
a period of five years. His fine was paid from a fund raised for
his legal expenses.
Perjury - Lewinsky scandal connection
Jones's lawyers decided to show to the court a pattern of behavior
by Clinton that involved his allegedly repeatedly becoming sexually
involved with state or government employees. Jones's lawyers
therefore subpoenaed women they suspected Clinton had had affairs
with, one of whom was
Monica
Lewinsky. In his deposition for the Jones lawsuit, Clinton
denied having "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky. Based on
evidence provided by
Linda Tripp, which
identified the existence of a blue dress with Clinton's semen,
Kenneth Starr concluded that this
sworn testimony was false and perjurious.
During the deposition in the Jones case, Clinton was asked, "Have
you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is
defined in Deposition Exhibit 1, as modified by the Court?" The
judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the
definition. It included contact with the genitalia, anus, groin,
breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of a person with an intent to
arouse or gratify the sexual desire of that person, any contact of
the genitals or anus of another person, or contact of one's
genitals or anus with any part of another person's body either
directly or through clothing. Clinton flatly denied having sexual
relations with Ms. Lewinsky. Later, at the Starr Grand Jury,
Clinton stated that he believed the definition of sexual relations
agreed upon for the Jones deposition excluded his receiving oral
sex. It was upon the basis of this statement that the perjury
charges in his impeachment were drawn up. Clinton was
impeached by the
House of
Representatives on December 19, 1998, on charges of
perjury and
obstruction of justice. But despite
Republican control of the Senate, Republicans were unable to muster
the required two-thirds supermajority to convict.
Life following the Clinton lawsuit
Jones now claims she was victimized by both Clinton and his
Republican opponents.
Her legal fund did not cover the attorneys' fees, and Jones's
personal life was disrupted during the controversy: she was
divorced by her husband, purchased a house after the settlement,
and incurred a large tax bill, then posed nude for
Penthouse magazine, claiming that she
would use the money to pay the tax and fund her two
grade-school-aged children's college education. This caused her to
be publicly denounced as "trailer-park trash" by author
Ann Coulter, who said, "I totally believed she
was the good Christian girl who had suffered sexual harassment.
That is what she made herself out to be.... [N]ow it turns out
she's a fraud, at least to the extent of pretending to be an
honorable and moral person." Jones attempted to defend herself on
Larry King Live, stating, "I haven't been out doing
anything and trying to make a lot of money. I haven't been offered
a book deal like everybody else in this huge thing has done. Ann
Coulter's done books. I haven't seen her call me up and say:
'Paula, would you like for me to help you write a book, a really
nice, decent book?' I haven't had any help from anybody
whatsoever."
Jones subsequently appeared in a boxing match against
Tonya Harding in
Fox
TV's
Celebrity Boxing
in 2002, filling in for
Amy Fisher; Jones
lost the match.
In March 2005, Paula Jones appeared on the debut show of
Lie Detector on
Pax TV, produced by Mark Phillips Philms
& Telephision, and was given a
polygraph exam. She was asked if then Governor
Bill Clinton had—in a hotel room in 1991—dropped his pants, exposed
himself, and asked for sexual favors from her. Jones said yes and
the polygraph operator determined she was telling the truth. Lie
Detector offered to test Clinton, but he did not respond to the
request. No American mainstream news sources commented on the
polygraph test results, with the exception of
Hannity and Colmes, who dedicated a
couple of segments to it, and Sean Hannity's radio show.
In Fall 2009, Jones will appear as herself in 'The Blue Dress', a
movie about the
Lewinsky
scandal.
See also
Further reading
- Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN
1-4000-3003-X.
References
- http://www.newsnet5.com/news/327689/detail.html
- http://www.ardemgaz.com/Prev/clinton/aaxclinton041399.html
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