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The alleged pattern is meant to buttress Jones' claim that after she refused Clinton's sexual advances at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel in 1991, her career with the state of Arkansas was roadblocked. But the filing may do even more to help explain the leads independent counsel Kenneth Starr is pursuing as he tries to build a broader obstruction case against Clinton in the matter of Monica Lewinsky. For a scandal-weary public trying to make sense of it all, the Clinton depicted in these documents is a chilling character indeed: not the charming rogue of Primary Colors, but a clumsy and compulsive sexual operator who gropes women like Kathleen Willey when they come to him in distress, who feels free to use women as playthings and then deploys a taxpayer-funded machine to keep them quiet. Last Sunday on 60 Minutes Willey was expected to describe her encounter with Clinton in gut-wrenching detail; it could prove more damaging to the President than anything in the Jones documents.
Her filing is an accomplished hatchet job but also, harassment-law experts say, a flawed legal document, with assertions not backed up by sworn statements and allegations that will never make it into the Jones trial. Many of its revelations have been alleged or leaked before, and it contains no single blockbuster charge that will alter the outcome of the scandal. The President's lawyer Robert Bennett calls it "a pack of lies." It would be comforting to believe the matter is really that simple.
But nothing here is simple or comforting. Take the testimony of Dolly Kyle Browning, a Texas real estate lawyer who has known Clinton since childhood and claims to have had an on-again, off-again sexual relationship with him from the mid-1970s until 1992. In January of that year, while Clinton was weathering the Gennifer Flowers storm, Browning says she got her first taste of intimidation from the candidate's camp. When the Star tabloid was preparing an article on her relationship with Clinton and called her for comment, Browning said in a declaration released by the Jones team, she informed Clinton's secretary and asked her to have him call. Instead, Browning alleged, she got a call from her brother, who was working in Clinton's campaign. He told her that "Billy was afraid to talk to me" because he thought she might record the conversation, as Flowers had. "He said, 'We think you should deny the story... If you cooperate with the media, we will destroy you.'"
In 1994, Browning saw Clinton again at their high school reunion in Hot Springs. "I reminded him that he had threatened to destroy me, and he said he was sorry." Then, she claimed, he offered a carrot to go with that stick. "He asked me to come to Washington. He said, 'You can live on the Hill. I can find you a job.'" Clinton offered a sharply different account in his deposition, denying there was a relationship and saying that at the reunion Browning threatened to publish a "fantasy" roman a clef about Clinton, simply because she needed the money.