The image of a shackled Susan McDougal was firmly fixed in Marcia Lewis’s mind from the moment she and Monica escaped the clutches of Starr’s deputies. “All I knew was that these were the same people who had put Susan McDougal in jail without a trial because she had not done what they wanted her to.”
Ironically, Susan McDougal had featured in the last conversation Monica had with Catherine Allday Davis, just after the New Year. Catherine, sensing that events were closing in upon her friend, cautioned her not to go down the same path as McDougal because, she remembers, “I didn’t want her to lie to protect the President if it meant that she would get into trouble.”
When at last they left the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, very early in the morning of Saturday, January 17, Marcia was confused about the nature of the charges her daughter faced, and simply could not understand why she herself was at risk, not knowing then that Monica had mentioned her name frequently during her taped conversations with Linda Tripp. After all, the only “crime” she had committed was to have listened to her daughter’s romantic woes and then encouraged her to leave Washington. The memory of that time is etched on Marcia’s mind. “When we went home we knew absolutely that Starr’s deputies were just going to come later. That’s how we lived in that apartment, in the darkness, all alone and completely isolated from everyone, with the door locked, thinking that they were coming at any minute.
Monica with Andy Bleiler, the first man she fell in love with. They met when Monica was a high-school student and he was a drama technician at the school.
Monica and Andy at her 21st birthday party during the summer of 1994, which he spent in Portland, Oregon.
Hanging out with Lewis and Clark college friends.
With Linda Estergard, who became a close friend and the “mother” of Monica’s college group.
Graduation Day in May 1995.
Monica with her close girl-friends: Neysa DeMann Erbland (above), and Catherine Allday Davis (below). Both of these young women were called to testify before the Grand Jury. In spite of this their friendships with Monica have flourished.
Catherine visited Monica during her internship at the White House. Pictured in front of the East Room on the North Portico.
Monica’s supervisor during her internship, Tracey Beckett, kindly gave her family a tour of the White House. As is customary, they all took pictures behind the podium in the press briefing room.
Left to right, Monica’s aunt, Debra, her grandmother, Marcia Lewis, her cousin Alex, Monica and her brother Michael.
The very first photograph of the President and Monica together. It was taken at his 49th birthday party on the South Lawn of the White House on August 10, 1995. Even before the relationship started, it was clear that there was a mutual attraction.
The President and Monica in the Chief of Staff’s office during the furlough on Friday, November 17, 1995. Unbeknown to everyone else present, they had already met privately twice earlier that evening.
Monica at an arrival ceremony for the President of the Republic of Ireland on June 13, 1996. She attended this event with her father and brother Michael. When President Clinton passed by he said: “I like your hat, Monica.” Her father was amazed that Bill Clinton recognized her.
Family outing to the White House to listen to the radio address on June 14, 1996. Left to right, stepmother Barbara, Bernard Lewinsky, President Clinton, Michael and Monica. Michael had just turned 18 and he was eager to let the President know that he would be casting his first vote for Bill Clinton.
Monica shakes hands with the President at a White House holiday party in December 1996. The next night the President called to compliment her on her appearance. He also told her that he had Christmas presents for her—a hand-made hat pin from New Mexico and a beautifully bound edition of Leaves of Grass by the poet Walt Whitman.
Monica’s favorite picture of herself with Bill Clinton. It was taken in the Oval Office on February 28, 1997 and signed for her birthday in July that year.
Leaving for Bosnia on a C-17 cargo plane. This was Monica’s first trip to Bosnia. Pictured with her boss, Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon (left) and Colonel P.J. Crowley.
Receiving an award for outstanding achievement from Ken Bacon on behalf of the Secretary of Defense in 1997. On the lapel of her “lucky suit” she is wearing the pin given to her as a 24th birthday gift by the President.
Monica with her mother and her Aunt Debra in Washington, D.C., in 1998.
Monica’s one-time friend and, later, betrayer, Linda Tripp, who secretly taped their private conversations, outside her home in Maryland in January 1998.
Days after the scandal became public in January 1998, former lover Andy Bleiler called a press conference outside his home in Portland, Oregon, to make public his version of their time together.
An emotional reunion with her father outside his home in Los Angeles in February 1998. It was the first time Monica had seen him since the story broke. He was her “Rock of Gibraltar” during the darkest days of her life.
Stepmother Barbara holds off frenzied paparazzi as she and Monica emerge from a restaurant in Santa Monica later that week.
Monica was sickened to see this picture of her mother emerging from her second day of Grand Jury testimony in February 1998. It made Monica more than ever resolved to stand up to the Office of the Independent Counsel.
The man behind the four-year investigation of President Clinton, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.
Leaving the Federal Building in Los Angeles on May 28, 1998, after spending three hours giving fingerprints and handwriting samples to the FBI. Left to right, Todd Theodora, Monica and attorney Bill Ginsburg.
Monica with her closest friend in DC and White House colleague, Ashley Raines, at Michael Lewinsky’s graduation in June 1996. She was the first of Monica’s friends to be called to testify against her before the Grand Jury.
Attorney Jacob Stein (right) joins the legal team in June 1998 to try and secure Monica immunity from prosecution. He and fellow veteran Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris replaced Bill Ginsburg. Lawyer Nathaniel Speights (left) stayed on.
Monica’s family all gathered together for her 25th birthday celebration—the best birthday present she could have imagined. She had learned that day that it was likely that she would receive immunity. Left to right: stepmother Barbara, Bernard Lewinsky, Monica, Marcia Lewis, Michael and stepfather Peter Straus.
The first day of Monica’s testimony before the Grand Jury on August 6, 1998. By the end she had built up an affectionate rapport with the jurors, who offered her a “bouquet of good wishes” for the future. This meant the world to Monica.
“I can’t help it if that sounds overly neurotic, but I cannot tell you just how frightened I was. How absolutely certain I was that these people were going to put us in jail and that Monica, who would not cooperate with them, was going to jail for twenty-seven years.”
They were convinced that the FBI were tapping their telephones, that their Watergate apartment was bugged and their every move watched by unseen but accusing eyes. For most of the time before the scandal became public—and all the time afterwards—they stayed in the apartment with the curtains tightly closed, pacing the floor, afraid to speak except in whispers, and expecting at any moment the knock on the door that would be the dreaded prelude to a prison cell.
They hardly ate—their mouths were almost too dry to talk, let alone swallow food—and all the time they felt either very hot or freezing cold, as if their bodies were shutting down. Both women were in severe shock, shaking continually. Marcia says, “If I had been alone I would have thought I was dying, but as we both had the same symptoms I realized that it was a result of the fear and shock.” Such was their terror that they dared not even throw out the trash, afraid that those they suspected were watching them would subsequently accuse them of destroying vital evidence. Each day Marcia bundled up the garbage in a bag and left it neatly in the kitchen, so that when the FBI came to take them away they wo
uld be able to show that they had acted correctly.
Marcia says, “You do crazy things because you are so full of fear. We were literally terrorized. For days we stayed there, frightened, isolated, afraid to speak to anyone. All I could think of was, if we both went to jail, who would be there to visit Monica? The other thing in my mind was my son, Michael—what happened when he married and had children? I couldn’t stand the thought of my grandchildren visiting me in jail.”
Naturally, Marcia’s first thought was for her family. She dared not let Monica out of her sight, afraid that she would harm herself. As the days passed and they began to realize that the scandal was going to become public, her fear for her daughter’s safety intensified. At the same time as seeking to protect Monica, she wanted those others she loved to escape this “ugly, horrifying mess.” Shortly before the story broke on Wednesday, January 21, 1998, she spoke urgently to Debra, who still maintained her pied à terre in the Watergate, telling her to pack her bags and leave Washington. Afraid that the FBI would be watching the train station and airport, Marcia urged her to drive as far away as possible. Debra collected a few things from her home in Virginia and then drove for eight hours to be with her son, Alex, in Boston, Massachusetts. “I was really scared, I felt like a fugitive in my own country,” Debra recalls.
Also before the scandal became public, Marcia briefly called her fiance, Peter Straus, who was due to have eye surgery and was expecting her imminent return to New York, to say that Monica had had an accident and that she, Marcia, would have to stay in Washington for a while to be with her. “I felt awful,” Marcia remembers, “because I didn’t want Peter to know about it. At that time I really never expected to see anyone I either knew or loved again. It sounds melodramatic but there was a darkness, a strange nightmarish quality to this affair. While it is easy, now that the pieces are in place, to say, ‘Why didn’t I do this or that?’ for an ordinary person who has never been in a criminal situation to be swept up by the FBI, Starr and the government. . it was truly terrifying.” Several days later she called Peter to see how he was, and explained that something terrible had happened but that she could not say what it was. She told him that if he never wanted to speak to her again when he found out about the scandal she would quite understand, and thanked him for the great times they had had. Peter recalls: “She was trying to protect me and I have never, ever been so touched.”
One of the most difficult aspects of this awful affair for Marcia was having to lie to her son. Again, just before the scandal broke Michael phoned from Pittsburgh, where he was attending Carnegie Mellon University, to say that there was something about his sister on the Internet, and he asked what was going on. Still thinking that the affair would never become public, she told him that the rumors were nonsense. “I felt very bad about that because he trusted me, he took my word that it wasn’t true. But a parent wants to soothe a child,” she says. After the scandal broke, she found she could not even explain the situation to him on the phone; instead, she had to speak to him through the family’s attorney, Bill Ginsburg.
For Maria, as for her daughter, “There was just a paralyzing fear. I thought I would never go to New York again, never walk down the street, never breathe fresh air, never see my son again. I thought we were going to jail. Period.”
A sign of just how scared they were came when they were watching television, for Marcia discovered for the first time the truth about the now infamous stained blue dress. Having watched a story about the fabled garment, she turned to her daughter and said, “Where is the dress now?” to which Monica replied, “Mom, it’s in the closet in the New York apartment with all my other things.”
With hindsight, it seems ridiculous that Marcia, Monica or someone with access to her apartment in New York did not simply remove the dress and destroy it. The reason was simple: at that time both women were too terrified to travel, to leave the apartment or even to make a phone call, fearful that they were being watched or followed by G-men. They were certain that at any moment they were about to be arrested. Paralyzed with dread, they left that most incriminating piece of evidence in a closet, waiting for its place in history.
As her mother declares emphatically, “Did Monica send the dress to her mother to hide? No. Did her mother spirit the dress away and hide it? No. Did her mother know where the damn dress was? Only when she found out about it on television.”
They were not alone in feeling scared. From the moment he became involved, even as experienced an attorney as Bill Ginsburg was sufficiently anxious about the FBI following him to book six separate flights on different routes to get from Los Angeles to Washington. In fact, he flew via Pittsburgh, and from there caught the shuttle to the capital, arriving on the evening of Saturday, January 17, the day after the sting operation.
Monica went to the airport to pick him up, still fearing that any gaggle of men might be FBI agents waiting to arrest her. That night, in a charade of normalcy and with appropriate irony, she, her mother and Ginsburg went out for dinner to The Oval Room, which is only a short distance from the White House. Since neither Marcia nor Monica knew Ginsburg at all well, this was a “get-to-know-you” meeting, before which the lawyer questioned Monica and discussed his plan of attack.
At one stage she used a pay phone in the restaurant to speak to her father in Los Angeles. It was a tearful, traumatic exchange. Bernie made her promise that she would not harm herself, saying that “that bastard”—the President—was not worth it. Then, when this draining, difficult conversation had ended, Bill Ginsburg came on the line and immediately dropped a bombshell: because of Monica’s emotional state, he said, he could not allow her to talk to her father again. He was afraid that, during such a call, she might blurt out something that would incriminate her, with disastrous consequences if the phone she were using happened to be bugged.
There was more. Bernie and Barbra had booked a holiday in Hawaii, but had decided to cancel it and fly to Washington so that they could be with Monica. Ginsburg, however, would not hear of it, arguing firmly that their presence would only complicate matters. He insisted that they go on vacation, and added that he would give them a daily update on developments. Bernie says, not without bitterness, “Unbeknownst to us, Bill Ginsburg never told Monica that we had wanted to come to Washington. She felt very hurt when we didn’t. It wasn’t until May that she discovered the true story.”
The following day, Sunday, January 18, Monica waited anxiously in the apartment while Ginsburg went to meet prosecutors at Starr’s office to assess their thinking. Her fate was now out of her hands—more even than she thought, because on the Internet The Drudge Report, the gossip column which had run the Kathleen Willey story, was reporting a rumor that Newsweek had spiked a story by Michael Isikoff about the President and an intern. As yet, however, Monica’s name had not been mentioned.
Monica and Marcia picked up Ginsburg from the OIC to take him to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he was staying. In the car, he announced that he was going to state publicly that the President had sexually harassed Monica, and that he was nothing more than a child molester. For the distraught girl, this was her first intimation of how Ginsburg’s statements could hinder rather than help her case. The effect on her was instantaneous: “I just flipped out. I screamed at him that he [Clinton] hadn’t molested me, that we had an adult relationship.”
At that point, too, she said that she wanted to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. “It was all too much for one person to handle. I just felt I was having a nervous breakdown,” she says. Instead of being sympathetic, Ginsburg told her brusquely to calm down, and then yelled at her that she would have to learn to get tough so that she could deal with this situation. It was an approach he followed for the next few months.
At the Ritz-Carlton, once they had composed themselves, the trio hired a conference room so that they could discuss the results of Ginsburg’s meeting with Starr’s deputies. There were, he said, two options, both equally bleak. The first was that Mon
ica would agree to wear a wire and to place phone calls, something that she had already made crystal clear she would never do. The second option was that she face trial, in which eventuality, Ginsburg said, her defense would cost at least $500,000, which would, he pointed out, ruin her father’s medical practice. Marcia burst into tears. This set off Monica, which provoked Ginsburg’s anger. “It was a ludicrous meeting,” Monica remembers.
In the meantime, Monica had been receiving increasingly frantic messages on her pager from Betty Currie. “This was breaking my heart,” she admits now, for though she was longing to warn Betty and the President, she knew that if she did so she would lose her last slim chance of immunity, something which would imperil not just her but her mother as well. At that point Marcia faced the prospect of criminal charges relating to the issue of conspiracy. In any case, at that time the OIC prosecutors were offering not immunity from prosecution, but merely an agreement that they would inform the judge, if Monica was convicted, that she had cooperated with them. It was a type of plea bargain which Ginsburg had no hesitation in rejecting.
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