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By Root 1696 0

a meeting with the potential new client a week after her call, because Jones was flying home to visit her family in Little Rock. With Debbie Ballentine at her side to provide moral support, Jones met in Traylor’s modest law office near the court house, where Traylor was pouring his fifth cup of coffee for the day. Here, Jones would recount a story that made Traylor’s glasses slide down on his nose as he listened. In 1991, then-Governor Clinton, she told him, had made lewd and unwanted sexual advances toward her at the AIDC conference at the Excelsior Hotel and had solicited oral sex from her. As Traylor recalled the question that immediately popped into his mind as Jones shared her version of events was, “So what do you (as a lawyer) do with that? What would Jesus do? I’m not sure.” Traylor did some quick legal research, enough to conclude that “it appeared to me that the woman had a cause of action, perhaps a colorable cause of action, against various persons: the troopers … probably Bill Clinton.” There might also be a claim against the Spectator, he surmised, for printing a false or libelous story.

At the same time, Traylor was frank with Jones. He told her, “I ain’t tough enough to sue the president of the United States for something like this.… I just ain’t got it in me. I’m a Democrat, and I voted for Bill Clinton numerous times.” Moreover, Traylor brainstormed out loud, even if the allegations were true, what could the president realistically do here? Any effort to settle the case would be “hampered and constrained by the politics” of the situation. Bill Clinton was now “leader of the free world.” The president could certainly issue a public statement that Jones had not engaged in an inappropriate liaison with him at the Excelsior Hotel, if that would help to settle down her husband. But a colossal settlement most likely wasn’t in the cards. “Realistically,” Traylor told his would-be client, “what we could accomplish would be to get public or private apologies from the parties involved and have your legal fees paid by these people.” The real question in the back of Traylor’s mind was “How am I going to get paid for all this?”

Paula Jones, Danny Traylor would later confess, was not someone he would expect to be the subject of the president’s amorous advances. “I never quite frankly found Miss Jones to be attractive,” Traylor said. As he met with Jones in his office, he observed that “she needed some nose and teeth work.” Yet he found the new client straightforward and credible. He had done his “due diligence,” questioning Debbie Ballentine and a second friend, Pam Blackard, both of whom had both corroborated key details of Jones’s encounter with Clinton. He was satisfied that the story checked out.

Traylor was equally satisfied that Jones had no ulterior motive other than to correct the record. “Paula had told me,” Traylor recalled, that all she wanted “would be something that would clear her name, particularly with reference to her husband and her family.” Traylor warned the twenty-seven-year-old that he would not participate in any effort to turn this into a salacious money-making venture. He lectured Jones that there would doubtless be offers from “skin magazines” and other sycophants interested in profiting from a potentially juicy scandal. Traylor told the frizzy-haired young woman, “If you’re interested in Playboy or Penthouse or the notoriety or doing political damage to somebody, I ain’t your guy. I ain’t interested in it.”

Jones replied that she had no plan to reap such tawdry benefits from the suit. First, she told Traylor, she was “a nice Christian girl.” Moreover, she simply wanted to make clear that she “didn’t know what oral sex was, and that wasn’t in her repertoire.” Traylor rapidly paced around his desk, gulping down coffee and listening to his new potential client carefully. Clearing up this bogus story, it seemed, was very important to Jones. She reiterated, in her charming but squeaky voice, that her husband, Stephen, had not taken it well. “It caused a lot of problems” for their marriage, she