Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [76]
Ballentine had been the person who first spotted the article in the Spectator, and had insisted that Jones redeem her good name. Specifically, Ballentine had told Paula—who had moved to California in mid-1993 with her husband, Steve, and their new baby—that she needed to correct the scurrilous notion that Paula had been a willing participant in a sexual fling with that skirt-chaser Bill Clinton.
Swirling a glass of iced tea, Ballentine recalled how she had pressed Jones to take the story to the authorities or to go public with it from the start. Jones had waved the notion off with embarrassment, instructing her friend, “Never talk about it again.” When the Gennifer Flowers story blew up during the presidential campaign of 1992, Ballentine had pushed harder, insisting, “Now’s a good time to let people know what happened to you.” But Jones had been adamant. “No, no, no,” she had repeated. “I don’t ever want anybody to know.” According to Ballentine, it was only because God had intervened in the form of David Brock’s story that Bill Clinton was ensnared. “If it hadn’t come out in the American Spectator,” she said, “to this day, no one would ever know.”
The Spectator story led to a phone call from Ballentine to Traylor on January 13, 1994. Traylor remembered the precise date, because it happened to be his birthday. As he prepared to cut out early for a birthday celebration and cake, Ballentine briefed her former divorce lawyer on the tabloid article. She said that the woman “Paula” mentioned in the story was her friend, now married and the mother of a little boy. She added that the report of the Clinton incident “had been the cause of marital problems for [Paula], and embarrassment, and she was upset.” Ballentine drew upon her own good standing as a former paying client and asked Traylor if he “would meet with the woman to see if there was a legal wrong.”
Traylor agreed to call Jones in the next few days, at his earliest convenience. At the time, he did not consider it a priority.
Paula Corbin Jones did not exactly fit the profile of a client whom lawyers would be clamoring to represent. Born in 1966 in the slow-moving town of Lonoke, Arkansas, she had lived a life that until this point had been entirely unremarkable. Her high school English teacher, Judy King, would tell People magazine that Paula “was not an exceptional student.” King added, “But the world’s made up of people who are average.” Paula’s father, Bobby Gene Corbin, had been a lay Nazarene preacher who earned a living laboring at a local clothing factory. Her mother, Delmer, hemmed dresses out of fabric scraps her husband brought home to make sure that their three girls were properly clothed. When Paula’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1985—he was stricken while playing the piano at church—the life of the Corbin girls changed dramatically. Among other things, the strict Christian rules of the house hold eased up. One classmate of Paula’s told People: “The day he died, boy, those skirts went up ten inches.”
After the family home burned to the ground in 1986, Delmer Corbin’s two youngest daughters, Lydia and Paula, moved into a trailer with Paula’s sister Charlotte Corbin Brown and her husband, Mark. During this period of experimenting with men, Paula eventually met Steve Jones and moved in with him in a “two-bedroom saltbox home” in Valonia, just north of Little Rock. She told her coworkers proudly, in describing Steve, that he looked “just like Elvis.” Paula had been working a series of part-time and clerical positions. In March 1991, she landed a job as a documents examiner at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (AIDC). It was in this position that her fateful encounter with Governor Bill Clinton took place.
Traylor scheduled