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Paula Jones too is asserting that Clinton's alleged pass at her created a hostile environment, but she may have a hard time proving it. The judge in the case has ruled that a single incident of harassment could be enough to create a hostile environment. But most experts agree that such an incident would have to be especially outrageous. "From what I've seen, [Jones] clearly doesn't have pervasiveness--it was just one incident--so she has to prove severity," says Deborah Epstein, who teaches law at Georgetown University. "And there are lots of things worse than this incident that the courts have said are not severe enough." Epstein cites the plight of Kimberly Weinsheimer. In the mid-'80s Weinsheimer was a Rockwell International Corp. employee who inspected parts used to build spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center. In her suit, Weinsheimer said that over an eight-month period, a co-worker frequently asked that she "suck him," grabbed her crotch and breasts and once held a knife to her throat. Another colleague allegedly touched his penis to her hand when she was looking away. Even so, a federal court ruled against her, in part because the judge thought the harassment wasn't severe enough. "The comments, in both their nature and their causes, were apparently commonplace and routine," the judge wrote, as if frequency somehow diminished severity.
To avoid the same fate, Jones' lawyers now argue that Clinton was more aggressive in the hotel room than Jones said in her original 1994 complaint. In her recent deposition, Jones said that Clinton in fact tried to grab her crotch and kiss her and that he briefly blocked her way--not simply that he had lightly touched her, as Jones first said. These elements make the incident sound much more "severe," especially coming from her ultimate boss. (Courts are tougher on accused CEOs than accused co-workers.) Clinton's attorneys, who contend that the new details are lawyer-induced embellishments, will doubtless want jurors to compare Jones' original complaint with her current story. Just on Friday she added several charges, including an expert's testimony that the alleged incident left her with symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jones' team is employing a legal strategy that most sexual-harassment plaintiffs can't afford--a search through the garbage bin of Clinton's sexual history. Specifically, her lawyers hope to present "a pattern and practice" by the President of sexually harassing other women, bolstering Jones' broader claim of sexual discrimination. (The courts have said such patterns are relevant in discrimination cases.) Jones and her lawyers figured that if they could find as yet undetonated "bimbo eruptions" in Clinton's past, they could show this damning pattern: that again and again Clinton hits on women with less power than he. It was this investigation that yielded Monica Lewinsky, not to mention Kathleen Willey and dozens of others tracked down by the Jones team. Today Willey could be Jones' best shot at showing the pattern. When she was a White House volunteer, Willey says she went to the Oval Office to ask the President for a paying job. Before she left, she says, Clinton hugged her, felt her breasts and then placed her hand on his aroused genitals. In his own deposition, Clinton denied each of these charges.