Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [120]
Bob Bennett was also sitting atop a box full of surprise evidence that would create massive problems for Paula Jones if her case ever made it to a jury. Chief among these was a forty-five-minute piece of raw film footage, capturing Paula and Steve discussing her allegations against Clinton before her case had attracted national attention. Shot some time in 1994, the footage was obtained by Bob Bennett—unbeknownst to his opponents—amid a pile of material turned over by a fundamentalist Christian film company in response to a subpoena. Director Pat Matrisciana and Jeremiah Films had teamed up with the Reverend Jerry Falwell to produce the anti-Clinton video The Clinton Chronicles (subtitled An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton), and this raw footage had survived that project. According to those close to Bennett, this uncensored interview with Paula and Steve Jones would have been Exhibit A at trial.
This remarkable footage, shot in California with the Pacific Ocean roaring in the background, would have provided an eye-opening snapshot of the plaintiff for jurors. In the lengthy segment, Paula Jones appeared more like an irreverent cabaret dancer than a traumatized victim of sexual harassment. Dressed in a low-cut blue-flowered dress that repeatedly slipped down from her shoulders and wearing long dangly earrings, bright red lipstick, and a huge purple bow in her hair (she had been nicknamed “Minnie Mouse” by security guards at the state capitol), Jones was captured recounting her not-yet-famous story with a mixture of tentativeness, sarcasm, and ribald humor. As the wind whipped her hair around, requiring Jones to clutch it against her bosom while securing the straps of her dress, she preserved her true story for posterity.
At times giggling, at times wrestling down her hair, Jones repeatedly tried to describe the alleged incident with Clinton inside the Excelsior Hotel, stumbling over her sentences and waving at the director to do numerous takes and retakes. At one point, she stopped and spoke directly into the camera: “Am I doing okay, Stephen?”
“Oh, you’re doing great,” her husband chimed in from the sidelines, like an acting coach.
On film, Paula described the meeting in Clinton’s hotel room as if she had been captured in a revolving door—she was moving around the room as the governor tried to touch her leg, kiss her neck, and pull her toward him. When it came to the ultimate act, Jones recounted Clinton’s advance with annoyance: “Before I knew it he had pulled his pants down and he had set down beside me nude,” she said with disgust. Jones adjusted her hair and stared into the camera: “And he asked me to ‘kiss it.…’
“I was so shocked. I said, ‘I’m not that type of girl.’”
With a mixture of sarcasm and triumph, the would-be plaintiff told the camera that she had gotten the last word on Clinton: “I turned around, I was very, very angry and I asked him, ‘Does Hillary ever give [you] any?’”
Referring to Trooper Danny Ferguson’s version of the story and sounding particularly defensive, Jones went on: “He said that I wanted to be Clinton’s full-time girlfriend, which is definitely a big lie.” At that point, Paula looked up at Steve: “Isn’t that what happened?”
Her husband, apparently none too happy with this segment of the epic drama, replied off camera, “Yeh, honey.”
If Paula Jones’s lawyers had hoped to portray their client as a sympathetic, aggrieved plaintiff, this film segment was likely to accomplish just the opposite. Paula called out “cut” to the cameraman repeatedly; fixed her dress as it blew off her shoulders; and, at one point, flubbed a line in which she alleged Clinton had told her that he “liked the way my curves are.” This caused Paula to begin laughing loudly. She looked up and blew loud raspberries into the camera.
Next, Paula was given a cue to introduce her husband.