PAULA, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

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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.