WASHINGTON, January 17: In what was surely a humbling, if not altogether a humiliating, moment for the world's most powerful man, President Bill Clinton drove two blocks from the White House to his lawyer's office on Saturday to answer questions about his sex life from attorneys representing Paula Corbin Jones, a workaday American woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct.Shortly after 10 a m local time, a 20-vehicle Presidential motorcade, scanned continually by hundreds of television cameras, started out of the White House and glided into a basement garage of a building on New York Avenue housing the offices of his attorney Robert Bennett. Paula Jones arrived a little earlier, setting off a stampede among the hundreds of media people gathered there. Faced with the jostling hack pack and a chorus of questions, Jones smiled weakly and fled the scene.
The President and his accuser will come face to face in a 11th floor conference room where Jones' lawyers will grill Clinton under oath about his
alleged peccadilloes and indiscretions in the discovery phase of the trial. The deposition was originally slated to be taken in the White House, but the President's lawyers changed the venue after Jones' attorneys made it known that their client would use the privilege of attending the event. Despite White House efforts to play down today's deposition, media camped outside the White House and Bennett's office, waiting for pictures and sound bites to be relayed.
Clinton will suffer from the infamy of being the first US President to have to depose under oath in a court trial, involving alleged sexual misconduct. Jones has accused him of inviting her to a hotel room in Little Rock, dropping his trousers, and propositioning her.
Polls show most Americans do not believe Jones. Yet, Clinton's popularity ratings are in the high 60s. But that still does not prevent the wheels of justice from grinding in a country that prides itself on a sense of fair play. "Of course, it is humiliating for the President and I
feel sorry about that. But Paula Jones deserves a hearing and I am happy that the American system of justice offers her that despite the fact that she is up against the most powerful office. I am proud to be an American today," Cynthia Paddock, an NGO administrator, said. The President's deposition, will be videotaped, and unless the President chooses to appear again at the trial slated to begin on May 27, this tape will constitute his version. Jones' lawyers will try and portray the President as a promiscuous womaniser in an effort to sway the jury.
The videotape will be under heavy security, but the general belief is that Jones' side will be only too happy to leak the more incriminating parts of the Clinton deposition within days, if not hours, of the event. The trial in Little Rock will be heard by Susan Wright Webber, a judge who was once a student of Bill Clinton when he briefly taught law at the University of Arkansas.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
