Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [91]
The amount of money demanded by Paula Jones—$700,000—was a number that had been plucked out of the sky by Davis and Cammarata. The $3 million figure that Danny Traylor had originally planned to demand seemed far too high; it would make the lawsuit look like “a publicity stunt.” They needed some peg on which to hang their monetary claim, so they decided on $100,000 for each compensatory count, and $75,000 for each punitive damage claim, producing a grand total of $700,000. As Cammarata later explained, the key consideration was, “How much is going to pass the laugh test?”
The next morning, complaint in hand, the Virginia lawyers took a circuitous route to the court house, through an alley. They had called the clerk’s office and arranged to enter the building through a rear door, to bypass the throng of reporters. For Cammarata, it was an incredible moment: Here they were, two “ordinary lawyers” walking over to the federal court house to file a complaint against the president. None of the media knew what Cammarata and Davis looked like, so they were able to walk through the line of media folk “like Moses parting the Dead Sea.”
The court house, a five-story limestone edifice built in 1932, was a grand tribute to the Depression-era federal buildings program. Constructed along the same axis as the state capitol building where Bill Clinton had presided as governor, the historic court house featured Art Deco light standards and floors made of shiny brown-and-white marble and polychrome tiles, over which Paula Jones’s new lawyers now walked briskly.
They took an elevator to the clerk’s office on the fourth floor, paid their filing fee, and made sure the document was stamped with the correct date: May 6, 1994. The clerk assigned the case randomly and scribbled down that it would be handled by “U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright.” By now, reporters had figured out that these were the long-awaited Jones lawyers. Journalists jumped into the elevator with Davis and Cammarata, shouting questions and jamming lenses into their faces. For fun, Cammarata handed one lucky reporter a spare copy of the complaint and said with a mischievous Brooklyn grin, “Read paragraph twenty-two”—it was the paragraph dealing with the alleged “distinguishing characteristic.” The journalists scrambled back to their offices in the capitol, pumping out news stories that swiftly moved across the wire services.
Looking back on that fateful day, Cammarata believed that the White House overplayed its hand. Above all, he said, it was a huge mistake for the White House to name Bob Bennett so early. “You name a Babe Ruth, a slugger, before the game starts?” From the opponents’ perspective, it was like announcing, “I’m here to kill you. I’m here to lop your head off!” For aggressive litigators like Davis and Cammarata, this amounted to a call to battle.
Davis and Cammarata exited the federal court house. Outside, the temperature had already soared to eighty-two degrees. A thick humidity hung in the air like setting gelatin, a typical May day in Arkansas. As their client watched from Danny Traylor’s office seventeen stories above them, the Virginia lawyers read a brief statement.
“I do not seek publicity in this matter,” they stated on behalf of Jones. “I want a jury of ordinary citizens in