Clinton sexual assault case thrown out - 3 April 1998

It has not been from indifference or, Lord knows, forgetfulness that I have not talked about President Clinton's scandalous troubles for some time.

For four years now, we've been drenched with facts, half-truths, hearsay, fantasies, fabrications about what a Miss Jones said happened in a hotel room in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas, seven years ago, when Mr Clinton was Governor Clinton and one Miss Paula Jones was a state employee. It had seemed to me that, from time to time, a rest from brooding over this mess of scandal was called for.

But, suddenly late on Wednesday afternoon, the judge who was to preside at the trial of President Clinton – down in the docket for the end of May – suddenly Judge Susan Wright threw a hand grenade into this mountainous ash heap of truth and trash. She dismissed Miss Jones's charges of sexual assault and sexual harassment as too weak to go to a jury trial. We'd better see what the trial was to be about. What President Clinton was charged with, and what not.

To begin with, I ought to correct a misunderstanding that took hold among many Americans the moment the judge threw out Miss Jones's case. Because the judge thought there was not enough credible evidence to let Miss Jones's charges go to trial, many people have picked up the mistaken assumption that the judge, the court, was saying Governor Clinton did not make a sexual advance to Miss Jones in 1991 in that hotel room, that she was lying and he was telling the truth. Not so.

In the ruling, a mighty document of about 3,500 words which I'm not going to read to you, the judge is not particularly interested in the alleged sexual pass as there is no corroborating proof to what Miss Jones charged in her original accusation, which was that a policeman, a state trooper, had asked her to leave her desk downstairs (she was registering arrivals for a conference) and go up to the governor's hotel room where he subsequently exposed himself and asked her for oral sex. Yes! I myself reel at the passing thought at any time in the past 52 years that I might one day speak such a sentence aloud over a microphone. Well, the judge, in effect, said she didn't know whether that happened or not. "If true," she said, "it was certainly boorish and offensive but that conduct would not in the judgment of the court support the first charge of sexual assault".

It's now time to say what was the substance of Miss Jones's accusations that she wanted settled as a matter of law. I think I ought to throw in here an odd piece of information which we didn't know about until a week or so ago. Miss Jones brought up her case about a 1991 incident in 1994 and many people leapt to the defence of the president by asking the understandable question, if she was so offended, so hurt, so assaulted, so outraged, why did she wait three years to bring suit?

Her answer was swift and plausible. She had decided to keep the incident to herself, but in the spring of 1994 an article appeared in an American conservative magazine describing in detail the whole incident as if from a watching third party and mentioning the victim as one Paula. That article, in a magazine with an admittedly modest circulation, was picked up by the national press, radio, television and that started the blizzard of truth, half-truth, non-truth, rumour, hearsay that has pelted us ever since.

About a week ago, the author of that original article came out with a statement; very surprising, from an investigative reporter who had lit a national firestorm. He said he was disgusted with himself. He'd looked further into the whole story and began to disbelieve the two state troopers who had testified in the Jones case that they'd been regularly employed by Governor Clinton to fetch him attractive girls. In a word, to pimp for him.

The writer said now he thought the state troopers had been paid to lie. But this self-disgust came four years too late. Now what – apart from all the lurid colour of the alleged original incident and apart from the dragged-in testimony of other women who claim to have been sexually harassed by Mr Clinton when he was governor, or, when he was president – what are the legal charges that the judge thought not weighty enough to support a charge of sexual assault and sexual harassment?

Once Miss Jones decided on the very bold course of suing a serving President of the United States on a sex charge, she, or the lawyers she hired, went the whole hog. Well, not quite the whole hog. Even Miss Jones could not claim that the president's sexual approach was forceful or brutal enough to warrant a criminal charge. So it's important to note now that this was a civil suit. If she lost it, it would be all the harder to represent to the Congress as a high crime. And that is an impeachable offence.

However Miss Jones, having decided to report herself as the victim of an unwelcome – the judge said if it happened it was an odious sexual approach – she really laid it on in the legal charge. Namely, that as proof of the second legal offence, sexual harassment, she had suffered subsequent discrimination in the workplace, was now exposed to a hostile work environment, that she suffered emotional distress and outrage, that on Secretaries' Day in 1992 she was alone in not receiving flowers. The judge's deadpan comment on this outrage was, "Such an omission does not give rise to a federal law suit". Miss Jones also threw in a plea for sympathy in claiming that ever since the hotel incident she had suffered something called "sexual aversion". Miss Jones added this charge to her suit after she'd been examined for three and a half hours by what the judge called "a purported expert, a PhD in Education". The judge didn't enlarge on this disbelief, leaving it to us to gauge the cruel extent of Miss Jones's aversion to sex from the living facts of a new husband and two children.

You may wonder now what effect this judgment is going to have on the investigation of the special prosecutor who for three years has been looking into possible perjury and obstruction of justice (which are impeachable offences) during the Whitewater land deal case, the firing of the officials who handled travel arrangements at the White House and the White House's inexplicable searching of hundreds of FBI files. Mr Starr, the prosecutor, says the dismissal of the Paula Jones case will have no effect.

Well, few other people think so because Mr Starr, in his enthusiasm for building a thorough, foolproof case against the president, raided the Paula Jones case, so to speak, by hauling in other women who said they'd been sexually harassed by the president and Mr Starr certainly expected to use their depositions, never mind public confessions, to show in the president a pattern of chronic sexual harassment. But that behaviour is not Mr Starr's primary aim. He'd hoped to demonstrate that Mr Clinton lied about such encounters and, therefore, in the end hoped to show him guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in the weightier matters of Whitewater and so on.

But the Paula Jones dismissal has made the public recall and repeat that Mr Starr had already spent 40 millions of public – that's to say taxpayers' – money on his separate investigation. And it's about time he put up or shut up.

Anyway, back to the court in Arkansas and the startling ruling of Judge Wright. Without, of course, mentioning Mr Starr's investigation, she took account of the testimony of the other alleged presidential victims by saying, quote, "Whether other women may have been subjected to workplace harassment, and whether such evidence has allegedly been suppressed, does not change the fact that the plaintiff, in this case, has failed to demonstrate that she has a case worthy of submitting to a jury." In other, blunter words, Miss Jones did not suffer any job loss or discrimination, in fact she was promoted and got a larger wage. Her grief did not constitute outrage. The claim of aversion to sex is, quote, "not credible". And the offence, if it took place, was not forceful or hurtful enough to constitute sexual assault. End of Paula Jones's case. Her lawyers say, of course, they will go onwards and upwards with appeals, if need be, to the Supreme Court. A score of expert lawyers I've heard from say it is extremely unlikely that the first Appeals Court would reverse Judge Wright's decision.

And what was the effect of this bombshell on the public? Sixty-seven per cent think it was a right decision, 33 say nay. Mr Clinton's overall popularity rating on his conduct of the presidency remains at 69%. Which is as high a rating as any president in history has earned in his second term. As for the politicians, the Democrats are privately delighted and publicly professing just relief at having laid to rest a long and scandalous irrelevancy. The Republicans are simply baffled. They cannot charge party prejudice: Judge Wright was appointed by Mr Bush, a Republican. And this year, a Congressional election year, they prefer not to attack Mr Clinton in case, just in case, the very worst for them happened. Like, for instance, the judge's dismissal of the Paula Jones case, which not one politician in a score expected.

And how about the likelihood of impeachment? Well, as I say, nobody can predict that likelihood until Mr Starr has finished his investigation and sent his report on possible perjury and/or obstruction of justice to the House Judiciary Committee, which would then have to find articles of impeachment and pass them, along with the president, on to the Senate which then sits as a trial court. For the moment, a pack or wiggery of constitutional law experts agree that the prospect of discovering, of deriving, criminal charges out of a civil suit that was not worth a jury's attention is unlikely in the extreme.

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