A Vast Conspiracy Read online

  In the formal complaint, Jones had demanded $700,000. In the conversation with Davis and Cammarata, Bennett said there was a possibility that the president could agree to that figure. Both in public and in private, Bennett had said that he would never agree to a settlement that the president would have to pay out of his own pocket. But Bill Clinton owned a pair of general-liability insurance policies—one with a subsidiary of Chubb and the other with State Farm—and Chubb had implied that it would pay as much as $350,000, as half of any settlement, to resolve the case. State Farm was balking at paying anything, but Bennett thought he might find a way to fund the other half. (Bennett had explored the possibility of raising money for a settlement with a close friend of the president’s—Vernon Jordan.)

  But there was one more thing. In her complaint, Jones had asserted that she had seen “distinguishing characteristics in Clinton’s genital area” when he purportedly exposed himself to her. Jones had signed a secret affidavit describing the characteristics. As the meeting wound down, Bennett told his adversaries, “I gotta have the affidavit. I think it’s horseshit, and I want it.” Bennett felt that if he could discredit the accusation about Clinton’s anatomy—a subject that had drawn a great deal of amused public attention—he could cast doubt on Jones’s entire case. He believed that if he could prove that there were no “characteristics” he could deny that his client had admitted anything by settling.

  Bennett subsequently tried an enticement for his adversaries to produce the affidavit. “We’ll show you our best evidence,” he promised. Bennett was talking about the blow-job boys. He figured if Jones knew that he had unearthed Dennis Kirkland and his friends, that would spur her to settle. Bennett thought of the sex evidence as a kind of nuclear deterrent. The potential effect of its disclosure on both sides would lead both of them to the bargaining table. In a narrow sense, Bennett’s strategy was sound, and it appeared to work. But in the history of the American presidency, the moment when Bill Clinton’s lawyer threatened this young woman with the public airing of her alleged serial fellatio with strangers will surely rank among the less admirable chapters.

  Davis said it sounded as if they were making progress. Cammarata—wiry, intense, the younger and more detail-oriented of the lawyers for Jones—said there were other conditions that had to be satisfied. Jones, he said, still wanted an apology from the president for his behavior in 1991. Never, Bennett said: “If you want ten dollars and an apology, you’re not going to get it.” Jones’s lawyers said that they would have to check with their client but thought they might have the outline of a deal: a $700,000 payment, and a statement in which Clinton acknowledged no improper conduct by Jones, giving her a chance to accomplish her stated goal of “clearing her name.”

  Cammarata and Ettinger went downstairs to Ettinger’s office, where they sat at his word processor and typed up the mutually acceptable language for the statement. In the key passage, the settlement said that “the parties agree that Paula Corbin Jones did not engage in any improper or sexual conduct on May 8, 1991, and that the allegations and the inferences about her published in … the American Spectator are false and their adverse effects on her character and reputation regrettable.” The statement said Jones had done nothing wrong; thus, by omission, the lawyers fudged the issue of what Clinton had done on that day. At Ettinger’s insistence, the statement also noted pointedly that “the insurers for President Clinton” would be paying the money. Close to midnight, the four men reconvened and agreed that progress had been made. Cammarata and Davis said they would call Jones for her approval in the morning.

  The Jones lawyers left Bennett’s office thinking the case was as good as over. They had not figured on Paula Jones’s new best friend.

  As their case made its way through the courts, Paula and Stephen Jones lived a secluded and lonely existence on the other side of the country from their lawyers. On most mornings, Steve took the one family car from their home in Long Beach to his job behind the Northwest Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport. Paula spent most days alone in their one-bedroom apartment with their two young sons. Now and then she would take the boys to a local playground. She was lonely for home in Arkansas.

  Not long after the case was filed, Cindy Hays tried to get a California-based antiabortion activist named Jane Chastain to attend an event with Paula. Chastain couldn’t make it, so she invited a friend of hers to take her place: Susan Carpenter-McMillan.

  McMillan had a grand helmet of immobile blond hair, a bombastic manner, and a life story that seemed like a petri dish of California eccentricity. She had been born approximately fifty years before she met Paula, into the family of a Los Angeles land developer. Both her mother and her grandmother were ordained ministers in the church of Aimee Semple McPherson, the charismatic revivalist (and huckster) of prewar Southern California. McMillan had become a public figure largely though the route of confessions about her own traumas. For example, she had announced that when she was six she was sexually molested by a gang member who was staying with her parents. A longtime antiabortion crusader, McMillan also disclosed in a tearful interview with the Los Angeles Times that she had had an abortion when she was twenty-one and was a student at the University of Southern California. (A clip of the news story hung framed above her desk.) She also had another abortion many years later.

  Starting in about 1980, McMillan helped to create a new form of political activism. According to her business card, she was the “Media Spokes Woman” of “The Women’s Coalition,” which consisted entirely of herself. Her labors were underwritten by her husband, Bill McMillan, a personal-injury attorney, and she used their palatial home, in the Republican stronghold of San Marino, as her base of operations. In earlier days, political leaders came to prominence because of their leadership of or affiliations with organizations—political parties, say, or churches or labor unions. McMillan, in contrast, took a postmodern approach to political influence and her own celebrity. Solely because she was energetic and effective on television, and because her name appeared on the Rolodexes of talk-show bookers, McMillan became a prominent public voice on such issues as abortion, chemical castration for child molesters, and conservative causes generally. Her métier was speaking, not doing. She simply had opinions on things, and she was skilled at expressing them. (The Reverend Al Sharpton, in New York, posed an ideological contrast to McMillan, but they developed similar styles of media ambulance-chasing.) McMillan kept a yellow Post-it note near the glass door to her office so that she could tell visitors when she was not to be disturbed. “I am on the air,” the note said. Thanks to the Jones case, she was on the air a lot.

  Each room of the McMillan manse was decorated in a different color scheme: peach living room, white dining room, green den, and a hand-carved mahogany study for Bill. Statues of cherubs abounded. To be sure, it was a long way from Paula and Steve’s one-bedroom in Long Beach, and after their victory in the Supreme Court, McMillan more or less adopted the couple and their two boys. McMillan wrested control of the legal fund from Cindy Hays, and she used it to start paying personal expenses for Paula and Steve—airplane tickets, boarding for their dog. McMillan got the legal fund to pay for a cellular phone for Paula, and the two women spoke up to a dozen times a day. I spent time with McMillan during this period in 1997, and I overheard her side of many of her conversations with Paula. McMillan often spoke to Jones in baby talk. “Hi, my Paula-poo,” she would begin in a singsong voice, and she would conclude the chats with the recitation “I dub-boo, I dub-boo, I dub-boo.” She called Paula “the little sister I never had.”

  McMillan reveled in her role as Jones’s “Media Spokes Woman,” and she realized that the key to her survival in that role was keeping Steve as well as Paula happy. (Davis and Cammarata, who did their best with the uphill task of portraying their case as nonpolitical, regarded McMillan as a menace. But they were thousands of miles away, and McMillan ignored them.) For McMillan, Paula was never a problem. The phone calls and
occasional shopping trips met all of her needs. But Steve had a different agenda. He wanted money. In the summer of 1997, McMillan had an answer for him—a book deal.

  Through a friendly Hollywood producer, McMillan made contact with Adrian Zackheim, an editor at HarperCollins in New York. Without telling Davis or Cammarata, McMillan invited Zackheim to meet with Paula and Steve in the restaurant of the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. On the appointed day, Zackheim arrived at the hotel, and McMillan introduced them to the couple. Paula, however, simply said hello, indicated that McMillan was authorized to speak on her behalf, and excused herself to the other room of the restaurant for the duration of Zackheim’s meeting with McMillan and Steve Jones. (This peculiar arrangement was McMillan’s attempt to allow Paula to answer in a deposition that she had never talked to a publisher about a book deal.) Zackheim then had the experience of listening to McMillan and Steve rage about Clinton for about three hours—without hearing a word from the putative author of the book. Not surprisingly, Zackheim and HarperCollins passed on the project.

  McMillan realized that she had to put together a more polished presentation if she was going to deliver for Paula and especially Steve Jones. So she spoke to Gary Thomas, a well-known ghostwriter in the Christian book market who also ran the Center for Evangelical Spirituality, in Washington State. Thomas and McMillan knew each other from their work in the pro-life movement. (He had just completed Norma McCorvey’s book, a chronicle of the born-again experience of “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade.) After speaking with McMillan, Thomas produced a full-fledged proposal for a book to be entitled Still Standing: The Inside Story of Paula Jones.

  “Paula Corbin Jones,” the proposal began. “Polls show that over 90% of the public recognize her name, but this book will provide the first true and detailed account of how a young, unknown woman from Arkansas was humiliated and abused.… It will be an inspiring message which leaves the reader with admiration for the grit, tenacity and perseverance of a modern-day Joan of Arc.” Over the nine double-spaced pages in the proposal, Thomas did his best to mine a book’s worth of material out of a ten-minute encounter in a hotel six years earlier. (“Chapter Two will take the reader, second by second, through Paula’s meeting with then-Governor Clinton. With candid yet respectful language, Paula will explain the governor’s conduct.”) McMillan loved the proposal and called Thomas’s literary agent in New York to talk strategy.

  The whole book project underlined just how much Paula was a spectator to the tumult that her case produced. Steve wanted the book more than she did. McMillan wanted the case to go on more than she did. Behind Paula’s back, McMillan could be withering about her. She told Thomas’s literary agent, “This is not a smart cookie. There is not much going on upstairs.” But smart cookie or not, McMillan told the agent that Paula had real news to disclose in the book: “We know what it looks like,” McMillan said.

  What what looks like? the agent replied.

  The president’s penis! At first McMillan wouldn’t tell the agent precisely about the famous distinguishing characteristic, but at last she explained, “Well, you know, his penis isn’t necessarily straight.” With this kind of material, McMillan and the agent agreed that they should shoot for a $1 million advance. (Notably, many of Clinton’s enemies were obsessed with the appearance of his penis. Right around this time, the elf George Conway, who had tipped Matt Drudge to the Willey story, sent an e-mail message to Drudge saying that “the distinguishing physical characteristic that Paula Jones says she believes she saw is that Clinton’s penis is curved when it is erect.” Drudge didn’t use the item.)

  Cammarata and Davis knew nothing of the negotiations for a book by their client, and they were astonished when Paula rejected the settlement offer they had extracted from Bennett and Ettinger. Actually, Steve did most of the talking to the lawyers—and McMillan orchestrated his response. The money was acceptable, Steve said, but the language in the proposed settlement agreement was not. Steve and McMillan had two objections to the “stipulation of settlement” that Cammarata and Ettinger had written out on August 5. First, it did not include an “explicit” admission by Clinton that he was in the room with Paula at the Excelsior. Second, the settlement did not include an “explicit” admission that he did what Paula said he did—that is, drop his pants and ask her to “kiss it.”

  Cammarata and Davis were apoplectic. In a series of phone calls over the next week, they made the same points over and over to Paula and Steve. The settlement was a victory for her. She would receive the full amount for which she had sued. Her demands were unreasonable. Clinton would never apologize—and there was a good chance that if the case went to trial, she would lose. Paula, Steve, and especially Susan Carpenter-McMillan wouldn’t budge.

  Finally, in desperation, on August 19, the two lawyers wrote an extraordinary twelve-page, single-spaced letter begging their client to accept the settlement. “We firmly believe it is the best we can ever obtain,” Davis and Cammarata wrote, “and delay in acceptance will be very harmful to your interests.… It is a complete victory for the interests you seek which are the redemption of your character and reputation.” The lawyers spoke with extraordinary candor about the weaknesses of her case—“Bear in mind defendant Clinton has persuaded millions of voters he is credible”—and about the real motivations behind the case.

  “You will lose all prospect of selling your sealed affidavit once that affidavit is disclosed, as it must be, to our opponents,” the letter stated. (Davis and Cammarata knew that Paula and Steve wanted to sell their story—and especially Paula’s assessment of the president’s penis—but they didn’t know the negotiations were ongoing.) “You will recall they seek its production from you now,” the letter went on, “and we believe they will be successful in getting it. Once disclosed to our opponents, it is more likely to become a matter of public knowledge.” In touting the secret about the president’s penis to the literary agent, McMillan had demonstrated her lack of understanding of the legal process. The Jones team would have to disclose it if the case went to trial. But McMillan was right about the book’s prospects if the case was settled. The market for a book from Paula would disappear—as would demand for McMillan herself on the talk-show circuit. As Davis and Cammarata were candid enough to admit, their fees already amounted to $759,870.40—more than the amount Clinton was prepared to pay. The lawyers would certainly discount their final bill, but still, the $700,000 was going to look a lot smaller after the lawyers took their cut. Not so a book deal—and that would vanish altogether if the case were to settle.

  Davis and Cammarata made a canny observation toward the end of their letter. Over three years, Paula had never before asked for an apology from Clinton. “Your focus has changed from proving that you are a good person, to proving Clinton is a bad person. That was never your objective in filing suit.” That was true. But destroying Clinton (and promoting herself) was Susan Carpenter-McMillan’s objective from the start. In a way, the two lawyers had isolated the difference between cases based on law and those based on politics. An apology wouldn’t help clear Paula’s name—it would only damage Clinton’s. But that was now the objective for the case.

  In the midst of these tense negotiations between the lawyers and their client, on August 22, both sides had to appear in front of Judge Wright in Little Rock. (Ironically, even though the lawsuit was ultimately pending for more than four years, this brief conference would be the only public court session before her in the entire matter.) Signs of tension between Jones and her lawyers were evident in the courtroom. Moments before Judge Wright took the bench, Jones was still seated in the second row of spectators, wedged between her husband and McMillan. The parties in civil cases rarely attend pretrial proceedings, especially routine conferences like this one, but the Joneses and McMillan had flown across the country from their homes for the forty-minute court session. McMillan said later that she had brought Paula and Steve to Little Rock as a signal that they, not the lawyers, were running the pl
aintiff’s case. McMillan also wanted the lawyers to know that she remained Paula’s closest adviser. When Davis and Cammarata took their seats at the counsel table, McMillan had to nudge Paula to go sit with them.

  Wright ran the conference with relaxed confidence as she ticked off the matters that needed to be resolved before trial. In a written ruling issued that day, in response to a motion by the defense to throw the case out, Wright had dismissed only one of Jones’s counts. The judge ruled that the trial would go forward on Jones’s claim of conspiracy to deprive her of civil rights and on her claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but she dismissed Jones’s claim that Clinton had defamed her. Wright also let stand Jones’s defamation case against Danny Ferguson. Now, the judge asked, what about a schedule for trial?

  Bennett asked for an early trial date—in January 1998—as if to prove that Clinton had nothing to fear. The judge consulted her calendar and found that she wouldn’t have time for the trial until May. Looking morose and saying little, Cammarata consented. The defense asked for a jury of twelve, not six. A unanimous jury was required in cases such as this, and Bennett assumed that it would be difficult to put together a jury of a dozen Arkansans willing to rule against their most celebrated native son. When the hearing ended, Jones ignored her lawyers and rushed back to join her husband and McMillan.