The 22-year-old daughter of new Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is making $60,000 a year as an aide to a congressman who lists a personal loan of at least $100,000 from Jones among his liabilities.
Less than a year out of Stanford, Charlotte Jones holds three titles on the staff of Rep. Tommy Robinson, D-Ark.Her father has been a friend of Robinson since childhood and a financial backer of the congressman's political career. Jones became a multimillionaire in the insurance, oil and gas businesses.
In February, he purchased the Cowboys football franchise for an estimated $140 million.
According to Robinson's 1987-88 financial disclosure form, he and Jones are partners in a farm in Arkansas. Robinson listed among his liabilities a personal loan from Jones of between $100,000 and $250,000.
Jones' daughter said Monday she did not know how much Robinson still owes her father but that monthly payments on the loan are being made.
She conceded in an interview that her father's relationship with Robinson was instrumental in getting her a job on the congressman's staff as a $31,000-a-year constituent caseworker after graduating from Stanford last June with a degree in human biology.
"I cannot deny that I'm here because of my father," she said. "But it's not the money, it's the motivation that he encouraged in me."
Ms. Jones described her meteoric rise since then to the three-title position she now holds - administrative assistant, office manager and press secretary - as more of her own doing.
"I have a different kind of access to him that makes it easier for me to interrupt him or intervene with him on behalf of somebody else," she said of Robinson. "I think he feels secure with me being here.
"We've had a close, honest friendship since I was in high school and did a paper on him when he was sheriff. He knows that when he's not here that I or somebody in the office is not going to go off and do something he doesn't approve of or that gets him in political trouble."
Robinson could not be reached Monday. But he has defended the arrangement earlier, saying Ms. Jones has performed her tasks "in an exemplary way" and adding, "You don't really expect me to hire one of my enemies, do you?"
"I like people with no experience because they're not opinionated and you can train them the way you want them to be trained," Robinson told The Arkansas Gazette, which first disclosed Ms. Jones' salary.
Ms. Jones said Monday she tried to discourage Robinson from boosting her pay from $51,300 to $60,000 in March after raising it from $31,000 just two months earlier.
"I knew how it was going to come out in the media and cause him political damage, and I didn't think it was worth it," she said. "So I held it back for three weeks until he bantered he'd fire me if I didn't put it through."