In cases of alleged sexual harassment--so painful, so private, so often unknowable--Americans have grown accustomed to weighing the word of one defendant against that of one plaintiff, the steadfast denial against the angry accusation: he said, she said. But last week, in the matter of Jones v. Clinton, the accusers avalanched on the accused. Once, twice, three times now, a woman has sworn under oath that she had one or more sexual encounters with Bill Clinton and then got pressured to cover it up; each time the President has denied the charge. In each case someone is lying and someone is not. He said, they said.
Amid the allegations and denials swirling around the President--and there were almost too many to count in the 700 pages of documents and depositions that lawyers for Paula Corbin Jones filed last Friday--there was one assertion both sides could agree on. "I have done everything I could," the President told Jones' lawyers in his Jan. 17 deposition, "to avoid the kind of questions you are asking me here today."
The issue is what "everything" includes. As Clinton tells it, he has been beyond reproach: "In my lifetime," he testified, "I've never sexually harassed a woman...I never have, and I wouldn't." Because he has been the subject of so many lies--"the far right tried to convince the American people that I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother's bed with four prostitutes," he said--Clinton developed what he calls "a high level of paranoia." So high, in fact, that he instructs his staff to put up no window treatments in the Oval Office or his private study, "no curtains or blinds that can close the windows in my private dining room." When asked whether he had used his power as Governor to suppress damaging stories about his personal conduct, the President replied, "I took action to try to prevent erroneous rumors from becoming public news."
But when the women do the talking, the "everything" Clinton and his aides did to avoid a sexual interrogation takes on a more ominous cast. By using the testimony of people close to Clinton during his days as Governor--women who claim to have slept with him and state troopers who claim to have shadowed him everywhere--the Jones team tried to demonstrate a historic pattern of inducement and intimidation: rewards for women who cooperated sexually and then kept it quiet; punishments for those who said no or talked about it later. The Jones documents allege that Clinton's longtime allies--aide Bruce Lindsey, former aide Betsey Wright, old friend Skip Rutherford and former security chief Buddy Young--used sweet persuasion, ugly threats or the promise of state and federal jobs to squelch what Wright has famously called "bimbo eruptions."