• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1799 0

” in the article, was engaged to be married to one Stephen Jones at the time of her alleged tryst with the governor in the Excelsior Hotel; they had married in December 1991. This meant that Stephen and Paula were husband and wife at the time the titillating Spectator story came out. Another factor was that Steve Jones, a thirty-three-year-old Northwest Airlines ticket agent in Little Rock, was growing increasingly frustrated with his life in Arkansas. An aspiring movie actor, he had played a bit part as Elvis Presley’s ghost in the 1989 film Mystery Train, which had flopped. He was feeling trapped in small-town America. He was also a man with a volatile temper and despised Bill Clinton. Steve, learning of the Spectator article through Paula’s sisters, had become enraged. Finally, Bill Clinton had become president, making an otherwise dubious case more enticing to attorneys who, in the real world of deciding how to spend precious time, would probably not have touched it.

Due to the convergence of these unusual forces, Paula Corbin Jones took the action she took next: She contacted a small-time Little Rock lawyer named Danny Traylor and asked to set up an appointment.

PAULA Jones, seated in an Italian restaurant in North Little Rock years after the case had been settled, sipped a Diet Coke and relived some of these unpleasant memories with her good friend Debra Ballentine. Having become internationally famous (or infamous) for her role in these events, having posed unclothed for Penthouse magazine, having divorced Stephen Jones, having reached celebrity status, and then having receded back into relative anonymity in Cabot, Arkansas, Jones insisted that her case had nothing to do with making money or trying to embarrass President Clinton to weaken him politically. “He’d embarrassed hisself [sic] by doing what he did,” she said. “And it has nothing to do with me, or my attorneys and what they were doing. They were doing their jobs. And he [Clinton] just messed up. And he was getting caught. And a lot of people wanted to say, ‘Well, they’re dragging the president through the mud.’ He drug his own self through the mud, by doing what he did.”

Settling back to munch on fried provolone sticks dipped in ranch dressing—a compromise lunch that was unhealthy but sufficiently small in quantity—Jones recalled the events of 1994 with mixed emotions. Granted, she had achieved a sort of celebrity status: For this interview session in 2001, she was dressed in a low-cut lime green top and was wearing hoop earrings. Her face was decidedly pretty, revealing no signs of the plastic surgery that had softened the contours of her once aquiline nose. She was surprisingly petite (5 feet 2½ inches in bare feet). She appeared comfortable speaking into microphones. Yet none of her fifteen (or maybe thirty) minutes of fame, she made clear, was worth the hell she had endured in trying to extract justice from President Bill Clinton.

The attorney with whom Paula Jones initially consulted in the winter of 1994 was the last person one would have expected to file a sexual harassment suit against the most powerful man in the United States. Daniel Murray Traylor was a likable solo practitioner, an offbeat character who frequently described himself as a “yellow dog Democrat,” meaning a person who would vote for a yellow dog providing it was a Democrat. Traylor was hardly known for handling high-profile cases. He was a real estate lawyer who dabbled in divorces and “whatever came in the door.” His office was furnished with knickknacks befitting a secondhand curiosity shop. These included a psychedelic peace sign from the 1960s; a lighted “Jesus head” with butterfly wings around it, which had once belonged to his grandmother circa 1920; and an eclectic assortment of Civil War memorabilia (including a picture of his great-grandpa Traylor, who had fought as a Confederate soldier with General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest).

Traylor was a lawyer who wore large plastic glasses and who probably should have been born in a different era; but God had plopped him down in