Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  It was a long—an interminable three hours—and brittle meeting, during which Linda Tripp took Monica through her affair with the President. Monica, as she had planned, took the opportunity to check Tripp’s bag for a hidden tape recorder when she went to the bathroom, but of course found nothing, for both microphone and transmitter were concealed on Tripp’s person. Once again Monica said what she thought Tripp wanted to hear, soft-pedaling her new job, bemusedly answering endless questions about Vernon Jordan and the President. At one stage she resorted to emotional blackmail, saying that her mother had taken her to the hospital for sedatives because she was so overwrought.

  It was in the course of this lunch, during which her conversation was largely a mixture of lies and exaggeration, that Monica unwittingly incriminated herself. Upstairs, the listening prosecutors realized at once that they had a good case to ask for permission to extend their investigation. Crucially, she repeated to Tripp her lie that she was not going to sign her affidavit until Vernon Jordan (whom she had seen that morning when she dropped off her “thank-you” gifts) got her a job. This, to the listening prosecutors, was evidence that the President had abused his position by involving Jordan on behalf of the woman with whom he was having an affair.

  Monica’s lie raises some vital questions. She told Tripp—and thus, albeit unwittingly, the OIC—that she had not yet signed her affidavit. How, therefore, could Starr’s team have known that it had, in fact, already been signed unless they had been told by a third party? Who was that third party? Was it Paula Jones’s legal team? By then, the Jones camp had certainly received by fax from Monica’s lawyer a copy of Monica’s false affidavit, which she had signed six days earlier (on January 7). Just how far the Jones legal team, whose fees were paid by the right-wing—and almost rabidly anti-Clinton—Rutherford Institute, collaborated with the Office of the Independent Council is a murky issue, raising the question of how “independent” the Independent Counsel really was.

  Monica found her lunch with Tripp as irritating as it was confusing. Far from being on her side, Tripp seemed to be backtracking, dancing around the subject of what Monica was going to say in her affidavit. For three hours she was friendly, conspiratorial and sympathetic; she must have known all along that she was steering Monica down a path that might lead to a prison cell.

  Unlike Lucianne Goldberg or Michael Isikoff, Linda Tripp had come to know Monica well and to enjoy her friendship. Yet she was prepared to throw this vulnerable, naive and trusting young woman to the legal wolves. Monica finds it hard to look back at this devastating period of her life without anger. She cannot understand, let alone forgive, Tripp’s betrayal—or the manner of it. She says, “I had been good to her as a person. She knew my weaknesses as a person and I had trusted her absolutely. Yet she betrayed me for no other reason than malice and spite. I don’t know how she sleeps at nights or looks at herself in the mirror. She is just a disgusting, despicable, venomous and evil human being.”

  Early on Wednesday, January 14, the day after that fateful lunch, the two women spoke again, and Monica told Tripp that she planned to sign her affidavit. For her part, Tripp said that she was thinking about getting a new lawyer, as her present attorney was too “neutral.” Neither was being truthful.

  They spoke several more times that morning, Monica maintaining the fiction that she was getting ready to sign her affidavit. Tripp then asked if Monica would drive her to her lawyer’s office for moral support, and, good-hearted as ever, the girl agreed. Before she did so, however, Monica suggested that it would be a good idea if she drafted a few notes—based on their previous conversations and on what she herself had learned in the process of writing her own affidavit—about what Tripp could say in her own testimony. It took her a couple of hours to sketch out the areas that she felt Tripp should cover, arguments that later became famous as the “Talking Points.” Moreover, she wrote two versions, one for Tripp to read in the car, the other for her to give to her lawyer as though she herself had written it.

  The document focused almost entirely on the issue of Kathleen Willey, as Monica had been arguing for the last month that it should. There was only a passing reference to another woman, someone who, at one time, Tripp had thought was significant, but who turned out to be a “huge liar” who stalked the President. In essence, the three-page brief reflected what Monica had understood Tripp to have been saying about Willey over the last few months, both in relation to her comments in the original Newsweek article and in her private conversations. At the same time, by concentrating on Willey, it took Monica out of the firing line.

  When the scandal broke, Tripp publicly doubted that Monica herself had written this brief, reasoning—insultingly—that the thinking behind it was too subtle and organized. All kinds of authors were mooted, from the President’s lawyer, Bob Bennett, to Deputy White House Counsel Bruce Lindsey, to Vernon Jordan and even to the President himself. “If Monica Lewinsky wrote it, she is one sharp lawyer!” one commentator remarked.

  Yet even a cursory glance through the transcripts of the Tripp tapes, a reading of the Newsweek article, and a knowledge of the structure of Monica’s recently signed affidavit, show that only Monica could have been the author. Indeed, the fact that there were only a couple of hours between her suggestion and the finished document proves her authorship, for there was no one else with the background knowledge to have even attempted so comprehensive a document in such a very short time. This was yet another canard aimed at Monica, and one which it took months to disprove.

  When Tripp saw the “Talking Points,” she told Monica that she thought the document was “brilliant.” She read through each point, murmuring, “True, true.” Then she told Monica that she had fired her attorney, Kirbe Behre, and had engaged another who was a family friend. In fact, as we have seen, her new lawyer, Jim Moody, came courtesy of Lucianne Goldberg’s contacts.

  Later that day Tripp and Monica spoke again, Tripp, now under the umbrella of the OIC, once more trying to get her friend to incriminate herself. She made comments which, given what she knew, seemed ludicrous to Monica. For example, she suggested that Monica had full sex with the President, a bizarre assertion from someone who knew every wrinkle of their relationship.

  Exasperated and tired by Tripp’s behavior, Monica had at last decided how she would deal with her erratic friend. If Tripp’s testimony incriminated her, she would either deny that she had ever made any remarks about her relationship with the President, or else say that she had made them up—and take the rap.

  It was too late. On the following day, January 15, it emerged that Paula Jones’s lawyers had subpoenaed records from the courier company owned by the Goldberg family, the very company that Tripp had recommended to Monica. The legal document referred to the packages Monica had sent to the White House. At the same time, Michael Isikoff called Betty Currie and pestered her for information about the contents of these mystery packages.

  Over the last few months Linda Tripp and her fellow conspirators had braided the rope, and in the last weeks Tripp had fashioned the knot. In just a matter of hours, on Friday, January 16, 1998, in Room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, she would see officers of the FBI and the Office of the Independent Counsel place the noose around Monica’s neck.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Terror in Room 1012

  ALTHOUGH SHE WAS DRESSED FOR ACTION—she was still in her gym gear after her morning workout—Monica Lewinsky, at five foot six inches, looked small and frail compared to the two armed FBI agents and the cold-eyed prosecutor facing her. She was fierce in her demands, however. “Make her stay and watch,” she hissed. “I want that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me.”

  So for the next forty-five minutes Linda Tripp sat silently in Room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Arlington, Virginia, and watched as Monica’s world collapsed around her. As the time passed Tripp remained motionless, her hands clasped across the pants of her brown suit, a look of cold indifferen
ce on her face, as though she were quietly congratulating herself on her own fortitude, courage and wisdom. A good citizen doing her duty in painful but necessary circumstances.

  Just how painful was quickly apparent to everyone in the room. Monica was by turns bewildered and angry about how she came to be in this tenth-floor room of the Ritz-Carlton. The hostility she felt towards the two stony-faced FBI agents who had approached her in the food court at Pentagon City Mall a few minutes earlier was exceeded only by the loathing she felt for Linda Tripp.

  It was Tripp who had enticed her to the meeting, as part of an elaborate “sting” operation to trap her friend. The consequences of her treachery were made clear to Monica the moment Mike Emmick, one of Kenneth Starr’s legal deputies, walked into the room. Although he was a darkhaired, blue-eyed six-footer with a soft, even voice, she came to view him as a revolting specimen of humanity.

  There was, she noticed through her rage and distress, a trace of nervousness in his voice as he talked to her, outlining what had happened over the last few weeks and days. Most of it was mumbo jumbo: “Attorney General Janet Reno . . Independent Counsel . . federal crimes . . detailed investigation . . Kenneth Starr.” At that last name she mentally shook herself. “What on earth has he got to do with me?” she thought. “All I’m trying to do is cover up my affair with the President—what’s my little relationship got to do with him?”

  She soon found out. Emmick told her they had evidence that she had committed a number of crimes. “We are prepared to charge you with perjury, obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury, witness tampering and conspiracy,” he said bleakly. “You could spend up to twenty-seven years in jail.”

  He went on say that they were prepared to prosecute her unless she agreed to cooperate with the OIC’s investigation then and there. Monica collapsed into hysterical tears not even knowing what most of these crimes were. The pain and terror of that day haunt her to this day: “I find it difficult to describe the raw openness, the fear I felt. It was as if my stomach had been cut open and someone had poured acid onto my wound. I just felt an intense stinging pain and overriding terror. It was surreal. I couldn’t understand how all this was happening.”

  The chain of events that had led Monica to Room 1012 had begun with Tripp handing over her illegal tapes of their conversations to Starr’s deputies earlier that week, had continued with the lunchtime meeting with Monica when she had worn a body wire, so that OIC prosecutors could listen in to their chatter, and had culminated on the afternoon of Friday, January 16, 1998, when a panel of three judges approved Attorney General Janet Reno’s request to extend Starr’s investigation from the Whitewater land scandal to cover the President’s secret relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

  The link between Whitewater and Monica was the presence of the President’s friend Vernon Jordan in both affairs. Starr argued that Jordan and the President had conspired to pervert the course of justice by offering Monica a job in return for her false affidavit in the Jones case (in fact, Jordan had begun helping Monica before either of them had the faintest idea that she might become involved in the Paula Jones case). As far as Starr was concerned, here were the ingredients of a case against the President, and Monica’s agreement to cooperate, like Tripp’s, was a key constituent in amassing evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

  In Room 1012, as the harsh reality of her predicament began to sink in, Monica’s moods swung from hostility to an indignant acceptance of her fate, interspersed with long periods when she just cried and hugged herself. “If I have to go to jail I will do so to protect the President,” she thought. “I can’t do this to him. I can’t turn him in.” She felt overwhelmed by guilt, knowing that she might ruin the life of the man she adored.

  At first, the only means she could think of that would both prevent her going to jail and protect her “Handsome” was suicide. “I couldn’t bear to go to jail,” she says. “I would come out an old lady and no one would ever want to marry me. I would never have the joy of getting married and starting a family. My life would be over. So I thought there is no way out other than killing myself. If I killed myself, then there would be no information and I wouldn’t have to deal with the hurt and trouble I had caused the President.”

  The room had sliding windows, and she considered throwing herself out, to crash to her death through the glass canopy below. In her overwrought and terrified state, she thought that the FBI had a sniper on the opposite building, ready to shoot her if she made any threatening or otherwise untoward movement. Even so, at one point she mused out loud, “If I kill myself, what happens to everyone else in this investigation? Does it all go away?”

  She repeated what she had said when the agents had first approached her in the mall—she wanted to speak to her lawyer, Frank Carter. The prosecutor and FBI men facing her across the room looked at each other, then said that they really didn’t want her to tell anyone about this matter as it was “time sensitive.” The only reason she could think of for this was that the President, she knew, was filing his deposition in the Paula Jones case the next day; their insistence on her cooperating immediately might have something to do with that. Equally important for Starr, however, was the fact that Newsweek magazine was on the brink of publishing the story, which would have ended Monica’s possible usefulness, as once her name had become public Clinton and his legal team would have been more cautious.

  After a while, Emmick explained to her that if she agreed to cooperate she had to go to the room next door, where his colleagues would debrief her about her relationship with the President. He emphasized that she had to tell them the whole truth. Then he explained that she would have to make some phone calls, which they would monitor, or perhaps put on a body wire and go and talk to Betty Currie, Vernon Jordan, and possibly even the President.

  It was not just the preposterous notion that these men were actually considering bugging the conversations of the President of the United States in the Oval Office of the White House that set her head spinning, but the idea that she should betray Betty Currie, a kind, gentle, churchgoing woman who had had more than enough misery in her life in the last few months. “The first thing I thought of,” says Monica, “was what it would be like calling Betty and talking to her on the phone and trapping her like that. I couldn’t do that. It was despicable, it was inhuman. She was a good person and I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

  As the slow minutes ticked by, the room would be quiet for a while and then the pressure from Starr’s deputies would start up again, becoming increasingly aggressive. They set up a tape recorder and offered to play her tapes of her lunchtime conversation with Linda Tripp earlier that week. It was then that she realized that Tripp had worn a wire throughout their meeting and that FBI agents had been listening to their conversation. Worse still, they showed her black-and-white pictures of the two of them leaving the mall together after their lunch. Starr’s men had her cold, Monica realized. She couldn’t wriggle out of this one.

  Then they talked about cooperation again. They told her that, if she did as they asked, they would speak to the judge and have him reduce her sentence from twenty-seven years in jail to, say, five—but only if she agreed to cooperate immediately.

  All the while, Linda Tripp watched impassively as her young friend disintegrated before her eyes. For Monica, the very sight of her was enraging: “I wanted to hurt her. I felt like an animal wanting to claw at her skin.” Finally Tripp was taken from the room, and a female FBI agent took her place. She had said not a single word in all the time she had been there. It is worth noting that after the scandal broke, Tripp said in an interview where she portrayed herself as a victim: “If I were an innocent bystander, I would believe that I was at best treacherous, at worst a fiend.”

  Once more Monica asked to speak to Frank Carter—maybe she could take a cab to his office if she was not allowed to call him? Again they said that they really did not want her to speak to him, this time adding that it was because of the way
she had been put in touch with him. They were worried that he would tip off Vernon Jordan. Her mood shifting from belligerence to one of trying to appease them, Monica told them that she understood.

  Throughout the afternoon, in moments of lucidity Monica asked again and again to be allowed to contact her attorney. On one occasion it was explained to her that, as Frank Carter was a civil, rather than a criminal, attorney, he would be of little use to her in this instance. They were being disingenuous: Carter had headed Washington’s public defender service for six years. She then said that she would like to call him and ask him to recommend a criminal attorney, but they told her that she couldn’t do that either, because it would make Carter suspicious. In desperation, she asked if she could phone Carter’s partner and see if he could give her the name of a criminal attorney. This time they reverted to their original response: the whole matter had to be kept under wraps.

  Finally, she asked what she was supposed to do without a lawyer. They offered to give her the telephone number of a criminal attorney but she refused, believing that any attorney they recommended would be acting on their behalf. As various commentators have pointed out, their behavior was in clear violation of Monica’s rights as a US citizen; furthermore, these men, particularly the FBI agents, who more usually deal with mass murderers and mobsters, were taking advantage of an impressionable, frightened young woman who was largely ignorant both of legal processes and of her rights. Even the President, when he gave video testimony before the grand jury, castigated the prosecutors for treating Monica like a “serious felon” during their sting operation.