The New York Times 5/8/1994 By FRANK RICH
Is it possible that the same right-wing journalist who tried to destroy the credibility of Anita Hill has destroyed the credibility of Paula Jones, the woman whom Clinton-haters now embrace as their own “Anita Hill”?
The journalist is David Brock, who first in the conservative magazine The American Spectator and then in his book “The Real Anita Hill” blended misogynist invective (“a bit nutty and a bit slutty”) with tabloid reportage to smear the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Mr. Brock’s role in the Paula Jones affair is curious indeed, so much so that some might take him for a Clinton mole in the conservative camp — the Aldrich Ames of The American Spectator.
Mrs. Jones is the former Arkansas state clerical worker who filed suit on Friday accusing Bill Clinton, then Governor, of “sexually harassing and assaulting” her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991. Her case is a pet cause of the anti-Clinton extremists of The American Spectator, The Wall Street Journal and Accuracy in Media, who have chastised the liberal press for hypocritically failing to pursue Mrs. Jones’s charges as strenuously as it did Ms. Hill’s.
Sexual harassment is an ugly crime, and Mrs. Jones, unlike Ms. Hill, will have her day in court, rather than in a mock tribunal presided over by some of the most conspicuous male dunderheads in the Senate.
But at least one ferocious Clinton-basher who purports to know everything about the President’s Little Rock sexual past has undermined Mrs. Jones’s account, and in The American Spectator: Mr. Brock.
The occasion was his original American Spectator story, published last Christmas, that bequeathed the revolting word “Troopergate” to the American language. Paula Jones made her first appearance in this 11,000-word treatise, in which Arkansas troopers gave their Peeping Tom accounts of alleged gubernatorial misadventures and Mr. Brock decried Hillary Clinton’s alleged use of troopers “to fetch feminine napkins.”
Known only as “Paula” in Mr. Brock’s article, she is alleged to have met Mr. Clinton in a Little Rock hotel room. Afterwards, Mr. Brock wrote, “the trooper said Paula told him she was available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend if he so desired.”
This account of the encounter contradicts the accusations Mrs. Jones makes in her public statements and court papers. There is no hint of sexual harassment — in fact Mrs. Jones comes across as a consenting adult — and there isn’t even any direct statement that a sexual advance, encouraged or angrily rejected, occurred behind closed doors.
It was not until February, seven weeks after the Brock “Troopergate” story was published, that Mrs. Jones held a Washington press conference detailing her case of sexual harassment. She said that she was the “Paula” in Mr. Brock’s story, but that the story was inaccurate. She added that she decided to make her charges public precisely because The American Spectator’s account was wrong, defaming her.
But the trooper in Mr. Brock’s account, Danny Ferguson, has not denied the original “Paula” anecdote as published by The American Spectator. Nor has he corroborated Mrs. Jones’ current version of events, being a conspicuous no-show among the sources The Washington Post cited in its lengthy front-page report on the case last week. Now Mrs. Jones is trying to trump the silent Mr. Ferguson by naming him a co-defendant in her suit against Mr. Clinton.
Was Mr. Brock inaccurate in his original story? If so, here’s yet another example of his sloppy and uncorroborated reporting, and another reason to discredit the larger Troopergate tale as well as his hatchet job on Anita Hill.
But what if Mr. Brock did have the story right the first time? If so, what happened between the December publication of The American Spectator story and Mrs. Jones’s contradiction of it in February? Is it possible that the Clinton bashers, belatedly realizing that Americans are sick of bimbo stories, decided to repackage one of those stories as a sexual-harassment case with the hope that a new angle would be more damaging to the President with both the public and the mainstream media?
Somewhere in this sleazy case, no doubt, there’s a smoking gun. Don’t be surprised if it shoots the Clinton haters right in the foot.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/opinion/journal-the-real-paula-jones.html