Miss America 1982

Miss America 1982

Miss America 1982, AN ACTRESS who denies she has been trying to evade a subpoena by Paula Jones' lawyers said she came forward to rebut allegations that the president forced himself on her.

A former Miss America whose testimony is sought in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit against the president has told the New York Daily News she had sex with Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas, but she insisted it was consensual.

Elizabeth Ward Gracen - who previously denied any liaison with Clinton - said she came forward to rebut allegations that Clinton forced himself on her.

"I had sex with Bill Clinton, but the important part to me is that I was never pressured," she said. "We had an intimate evening. Nothing was ever forced. It was completely consensual."

Gracen, 37, a former Miss Arkansas, became Miss America in 1982. She posed for Playboy magazine and appeared in a few action movies before landing a role in the "Highlander" TV series.

She has become a target of Jones' lawyers, who have been unable to subpoena her because she has been traveling in the Caribbean, Canada and Paris for four months.

Gracen denied trying to duck the subpoena, noting she her family in Arkansas last month. She said she was "totally prepared" to tell her story under oath.

Jones' lawyers are trying to get Gracen to buttress their case by telling a jury he sexually assaulted her and then secured her silence with coercion or favors.

"The lies gain credibility every day that I don't address them. I had to put a stop to it. . . . It's become a three-ring circus," Gracen said. "This is something I don't want to talk about at all."

White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said, "All I know is that this is something that supposedly happened 15 years ago."

Gracen said in an interview that after the Gennifer Flowers scandal, Clinton's campaign asked Gracen to issue a statement in May 1992 denying she had had sex with Clinton. Gracen, who complied, insisted she was not pressured or cajoled into making the statement.

She said she began negotiating with Star magazine after being offered $1 million for her story but backed out, saying she wouldn't be able to live with herself. She said old boyfriends - "and there are some real slime buckets in the mix" - are peddling stories about her.

Gracen, who yesterday closed a deal to star in "Highlander: The Raven," scoffed at suggestions she kept quiet in exchange for Clinton's help in getting work in Hollywood.

"If the president of the United States was on the phone pulling strings for me, I'd be on `Seinfeld.' I'm not standing on the front of the Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio, am I?"

Gracen said she should not be dragged into Jones' case.

"I was never a government employee; he never acted improperly; he never asked me to lie; he never gave me a job," Gracen said.

A former friend of Gracen's, Judy Stokes, has given a sworn deposition saying Gracen tearfully told her in the mid-1980s that Clinton forced her into sex in a limousine in 1982.

"That never happened. It's completely false," Gracen said.

She added, "It's made me into the smoking gun, and I'm not that."

Stokes had no comment last night.

Gracen said the encounter took place in 1983. She was 22, married and studying acting in New York, but traveled to her home state to attend a benefit.