PAULA, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

By MARGARET CARLSON

Minutes before the Federal courthouse in Little Rock, Ark., closed for the Fourth of July holiday, attorney Bob Bennett filed the defendant's answer in the matter of Jones v. Clinton. The President's lawyer is no longer out to bury the case, he says, but to win it. Smelling trouble for Jones, Bennett is talking witnesses and affidavits these days, not negotiations or settlements. In his answer to Jones' complaint, he denied her charges and asked the court to dismiss the case. Failing that, he requested a conference to set a trial date. "There's no dragging this out," says Bennett, bouncing in his office chair, his suspenders not up to the task of containing his shirt. "I'm doing everything I can to speed it up. We want discovery. We want a fast resolution."

Is Bill Clinton suddenly demanding his day in court? Not quite. Bennett's new commitment to swift justice may be all for show; most observers still expect the case to be settled out of court. But Bennett's talk of a trial date is a clear sign that the ground is shifting beneath the Jones camp. The tremors began two weeks ago with another high-profile piece of reporting by Stuart Taylor in Legal Times. Taylor's story, and a follow-up article by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, attacks Jones' credibility by suggesting that her account of what happened when she visited Governor Clinton's hotel suite in 1991 has grown more lurid over time.

Taylor's reportage packed a special punch because it was his November 1996 article in the American Lawyer that made the first persuasive case for taking Jones seriously. (He called her case stronger than Anita Hill's and blamed the media's disdain for her on class bias.) What followed was a stampede to Jones' side as journalists--who would rather be called anything other than elitists--repented mentioning her big hair and laughing at James Carville's line about the result of dragging "a hundred dollars through a trailer park." Suddenly, Jones was no longer a gold digger backed by Clinton haters. Instead, she was a working woman harassed by a superior who didn't have the decency to grant her the apology she deserved.

But now the story line has shifted again: drag a few hundred dollars through state-police headquarters in Little Rock, it seems, and there's no telling what the troopers will say. The sources of the American Spectator's January 1994 "Troopergate" piece, who were operating under the tutelage of a Clinton hater named Cliff Jackson, hoped the expose--which they began working on soon after Clinton won the presidential nomination--would lead to a $2.5 million book advance. (According to the New Yorker, Jackson and a trooper, Danny Ferguson, parted company after Ferguson refused to let his name be used because Jackson wouldn't promise him $1 million.) The sources' motives and veracity have been called into question by Trooper Ronald Anderson, who says he was brought in to lend credibility to the proposed book since two other troopers were under attack for allegedly lying in another matter. In the end, according to his affidavit, Anderson refused to sign the contract with Jackson--who promised the troopers six-figure jobs--because the stories were "old fish tales with little, if any, basis in fact." The others went forward into print (never getting their book deal), and the rest is presidential--and tabloid--history.

Also damaging to Jones is the disillusionment of her first lawyer, Daniel Traylor, who is asking the court for leave to quit the case and thinking about giving up law practice altogether. Traylor interviewed Jones at great length, he says, but he does not recall her ever telling him about the most explosive piece of evidence--the "distinguishing characteristics" she allegedly saw on Clinton's genital area. The first Traylor heard of them was when he read a draft complaint by co-counsels Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert Davis nearly four months after Jones had hired him. Traylor also says that witness Pamela Blackard, who saw Jones after she returned from Clinton's suite, originally gave him a far less dramatic account of what Jones had told her--omitting all salacious details--than the one Blackard gave reporters.

In affidavits taken by Bennett, two former friends of Jones'--who claim to have been privy to the most intimate details of her life--cast doubt on her story. One says that far from being horrified by her encounter with Clinton, Jones was filled with "bubbly enthusiasm." The other, a former receptionist for the Governor, says Jones hung around the office hoping to see Clinton. Trooper Ferguson claims Jones gave him her home phone number to give to Clinton. (Jones denies these accounts.)

No wonder Bennett feels as if the case is moving his way. He has had to concede that Clinton may have met Jones (while holding on to the claim that Clinton doesn't remember her), but is now free to dissect her varying accounts of what happened in the suite. He should have no trouble exploiting the evidence that the troopers hoped to strike it rich and the picture of Jones as a lovesick puppy hoping to catch Clinton's eye. How will Jones counter that image? She and her handlers scheduled an interview with TIME last week, then canceled it. She may find another forum in which to repeat her tale of woe, or she may wait for her day in court. That could be coming sooner than anyone thought possible.