Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [210]
Campbell’s partners were enthused about handling this case. “Well, to state the incredibly obvious, the defendant was the president of the United States,” Jim Fisher later explained. Wes Holmes was even more fired up. A Republican from Arkansas, he had long known of Clinton’s reputation as a party boy and womanizer. Here was a chance to knock the president down a peg while gaining exposure for the firm. “Don, we gotta get that case,” he said to Campbell. “I mean, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We’ve got to get that case.”
The Dallas lawyers concluded that the Jones litigation could be handled with a relatively modest investment of time. There would probably be five or ten witnesses, tops. “They’ll file a motion for summary judgment; we’ll do a response,” they told each other. “How hard can in really be?” Wes Holmes would later reflect, looking back on the case that nearly ate up their lives and stretched the small firm to its breaking point, “How naive we were.”
The Dallas lawyers first met with Paula and Steve Jones in the picturesque hills of San Marino, California, at the home of Susan Carpenter-McMillan and her husband, Bill (a prosperous trial attorney from whom she would soon be divorced). The group gathered for iced tea on the patio, instantly hitting it off. Paula struck the Dallas lawyers as “clean and well-dressed and presentable.” Her general theme was, “I just want my life back. I’m just a mom, and I just want to go back to being a mom.” She told the prospective lawyers, “I felt like my reputation had been hurt, and I just want everybody to know that I didn’t do the things that some of those troopers are saying I was doing.”
The Dallas team explained to Paula that an apology from Clinton probably wouldn’t be in the cards. The best they could hope for, under the law, was a watered-down statement of “regret.” Still, the lawyers explained, settlement might not be a bad thing. “Most of the time, both parties are better off if there’s a settlement,” they advised her.
Paula seemed receptive to some form of resolution. “Oh, that’s what I want,” she told the Dallas attorneys. “I want my life back.”
Jim Fisher later noted that he liked Paula from the start—although they parted company on less-than-rosy terms. “Among her good qualities are the fact that she really, really wants to be a good mother to her sons and really tries to the best of her ability,” he said, shedding the best possible light on the situation. “She’s got some problems she was dealing with. I mean, she grew up in a strange environment, extreme poverty, and she had a poor education. And I think her parents were extremely repressive in the name of religion. As so often happens, that makes people overreact in the other direction. She boomeranged out into some pretty wild behavior and has never quite found her moral bearings. But I think she’s got a good heart and she wants to do what’s right.”
“That’s not true of her [ex-]husband,” Fisher quickly added.
Steve Jones soon became a sharp nail in the shoe of the Dallas litigators, just as he had become a pain for Davis and Cammarata. He proposed plenty of “bad ideas,” such as demanding that First Lady Hillary Clinton and the president’s stepbrother, Roger Clinton, be put under oath and asked questions about Clinton’s sexual proclivities. Steve also insisted that Paula’s lawyers should join forces with Kathleen Willey to wage “some sort of parallel litigation,” an idea that caused Holmes and Fisher to shudder.
At first, the Dallas lawyers gave Paula’s overly aggressive, needy husband some slack. They knew that the couple “had been treated badly” since Paula had first made the accusation against Clinton. They also knew the pair had endured the humiliating publication of seminude pictures of Paula, after she went public with her story. Fisher understood that Paula and Steve believed that Clinton “orchestrated” this slime attack, probably “paying off” Paula’s ex-boyfriend to go to Penthouse.
Fisher, Holmes, and Campbell were all devout Christians. Smut peddling repulsed them. They accepted