The following day—Martin Luther King Day, as it happened-Starr’s deputies arranged to search Monica’s apartment. In the event, they did not show up. Meanwhile Betty kept paging her—“Family emergency, please call,” “Good news, please call,” and so on. Then Vernon Jordan paged her, and so too did her former attorney, Frank Carter, but Monica was too scared to call them. Eventually, Monica, desperate to make Betty realize that she had not turned on the President and thus on Betty too, went to a pay phone to call her. Once again, thinking that she would be overheard by unseen enemies, she tried to think of some secret way of conveying to the President’s secretary what had happened. So when Betty answered, Monica just said “Hoover” (referring to J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972), and then hung up. After that brief call she became so afraid of using the phones that she wrote Betty a note, in which she thanked her for letting “her daughter Kay [their codeword] visit the White House and the FBI building.” She never sent it, nor would it have resolved the dilemma to which, in her misery, her thoughts returned again and again: immunity would betray the man she loved; the alternative, she believed, would see her mother prosecuted. “What was constantly going through my head was my mom and family and everyone on the President’s side,” she says. “I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t matter anymore.”
As Monica wrestled with her conscience, Bill Ginsburg and the Washington criminal attorney he had brought on board, Nathaniel Speights, battled with Starr’s deputies. For hours she waited in an office in the OIC building, being “babysat” by various prosecutors. Meanwhile her two lawyers, who had emphasized to her that their job was to make sure that she was OK, no matter what happened to anyone else, tried to strike a deal. The prospects did not look good. At one point Ginsburg outlined a scenario in which Monica, like Susan McDougal, might be jailed for contempt of court and sent to an all-women’s prison if she didn’t cooperate with the OIC. Even the possibility of winning at trial now seemed slim.
She was rapidly running out of road. Washington was buzzing with rumors of a presidential affair; The Drudge Report fueled the gossip that day, January 19, by mentioning Monica by name. She was now “radioactive.” Starr’s deputies said it was doubtful that they could offer transactional immunity-which prevents a person being prosecuted for matters arising from their testimony—anymore, as the White House could now be alert to her involvement in the case.
After hours of fruitless negotiation, Monica and her legal team went across the street to the Hard Rock Café for supper, hoping that Starr would make a firm offer of immunity, in exchange for which she would tell them what she knew, rather than wearing a wire and having her phone calls tapped, as Starr had originally wanted.
When they returned to the OIC about ten-thirty, Monica, anxiously waiting in the office, was stunned to hear Ginsburg’s deep voice boom out, “You motherfuckers! You’re going to subpoena the father?” He opened the door, grabbed Monica and said, “Come on. We’re leaving.” As they walked down the hallway he told her that they had tried to serve him with a subpoena for Dr. Lewinsky. At this point, Monica says, “I lost it. I fell to the floor in a delirium of despair. It was this feeling of never-ending torture. What were they doing to my family? I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
Brusquely, Ginsburg told her to get up and calm herself: “You can’t let them see you’re upset.” While he and Monica left the OIC building, Nate Speights stayed behind and eventually persuaded Starr’s deputies to drop the idea of serving Bernie with a subpoena.
Meanwhile, Marcia had by now appointed an attorney, Billy Martin. When they first met on January 18, after she had been served with a subpoena, he was deeply troubled. As a prosecutor with fifteen years’ experience, practiced in everything from homicides to rapes, he knew that he was dealing with a woman who exhibited all the signs of being a victim of a very serious crime. “She was very, very frightened,” he says, “and my initial impression was that she was overreacting. It didn’t take me long to realize that her reactions were entirely appropriate.”
There was a level of zealous malevolence behind the decision to force Marcia to testify against her daughter that alarmed many seasoned attorneys. As Billy Martin says, “Inside the Office of the Independent Counsel there seems to have been a decision to investigate this matter with the expectation of prosecuting the President, a view that has never varied. They wanted to prosecute Clinton come hell or high water.”
Indeed, their decision to force Marcia to appear before the Grand Jury was part of that tactic. “It was to provoke Monica to agree to cooperate with the OIC as it was obvious that of all those who testified about the affair, Monica’s mother knew the least,” says Martin
Monica and Marcia, by now convinced that their phones were tapped and the apartment bugged, decided to pack their bags and move upstairs to Marcia’s mother’s sixth-floor apartment. As they had both been subpoenaed, and, further, warned not to talk about the case even to each other, they would go into the bathroom late at night, turn on the faucet and whisper to each other. “This was not how we should be living in America in this century. It reminded me of The Diary of Anne Frank. We were living in constant fear,” says Monica, remembering how they would rarely sleep for more than a few hours each night before waking in a paroxysm of anxiety.
On her last day of anonymity, Tuesday, January 20, 1998, Monica left her mother’s apartment as Starr’s deputies finally arrived to search her rooms. She walked around aimlessly, killing time while they went through her personal possessions: “It was so violating, these men going through my things.” By now Starr had also served a subpoena on the White House, requiring that anything linked to Monica Lewinsky be produced.
At five the following morning, unable to sleep, Monica went out into the hallway and picked up the early edition of the Washington Post. The story had broken. A front-page piece by Susan Schmidt cited “sources,” who said that on Linda, Tripp’s tapes Monica could be heard describing “Clinton and Vernon Jordan directing her to testify falsely.” This was emphatically not the case, as Monica has sworn on oath, and yet this assertion was the linchpin of Starr’s expanded jurisdiction, and the premise behind every front-page news story and TV broadcast about the scandal for the next few weeks.
As she read the Washington Post story, time seemed to stand still, a feeling that was strengthened in the next few days by the endless waking nightmare. The mass media went into a feeding frenzy of a kind not seen since the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995. Senior TV news anchors covering the Pope’s historic visit to Cuba were sidelined as details emerged of secret tape recordings, a mystery stained dress, the President’s voice on Monica’s answering machine, her secret visits to the White House, and every shade of rumor, supposition and invention in between. Ironically, she had even chosen that year’s Valentine’s message for him, some lines from a verse by Emily Dickinson which she had planned to put in the Washington Post.
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Not for the last time, Bill Ginsburg upped the emotional temperature by accusing the President of being a misogynist, and Starr of having ravaged Monica’s life. “Once the story broke,” she remembers, “we stayed inside and this whirlwind roared around our heads. Everyone was talking about him having to resign. I couldn’t believe that. I was still very much in love with the President, very protective of him and I did not appreciate Bill Ginsburg saying that he was a misogynist. At the same time, there was a sense of frustration because these charges were simply not true. He never told me to lie.” She was very much behind the President, approving when he said of her in a TV interview that “there is no sexual relationship.”
Just as she wanted to protect him, so she was consumed with worry about how her family and friends—none of whom she dared call—were coping with the news. Her Aunt Debra, who was by now in Boston, found the experience “scary,” wh
ile her brother ascribes the fact that he was able to get through the first few traumatic days to the comradeship of fellow students in his fraternity house at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael was unable to speak to his family except in very short, cryptic phone calls, and it was a month before he heard his sister’s voice. “For the two days before the story broke I was a wreck just worrying about what was going to happen,” he recalls. “I felt very alone and when the story broke it just went crazy. I was in denial; to my mind the girl featured on every TV channel was not my sister. It was very, very ugly and I only came through thanks to my buddies and teachers in college.”
The effects were just as distressing for Monica’s friends. The problem she faced in dealing with her confidantes was encapsulated in two words: legal jeopardy. If she called her friends or they her, a phone record would be created, which meant they would come under suspicion from Starr. As a result, legal quarantine was established around Monica and her mother, shutting them off from those close to them and increasing their sense of isolation and fear. At that stage, while she knew that Tripp had taped her at their lunch in Pentagon City, she still did not know that Tripp had taped her private conversations; her closest friends were already implicated because Monica had told Tripp what she had said to them and how they had responded—all of which was recorded.
Monica was particularly concerned about Neysa DeMann Erbland, whom she had called, leaving a message, on the day before the sting. When Neysa returned her call, Monica had been abrupt, saying only that she would get back to her. Like all Monica’s friends, the first Neysa knew of what was happening was when, while driving though Marina Del Rey in California, she heard a radio news broadcast that mentioned Monica’s name. “I just flipped out,” she says. For more than six months she was unable to speak to Monica again and offer her comfort; her only contact was through Bill Ginsburg.
For Monica’s friends in Portland the news was just as traumatic, but with the added difficulty that within days they found themselves besieged by the media. Just as she had been at college, Linda Estergard, then heavily pregnant, acted as the “mother” to former students who phoned her Portland home from around the world to ask for advice. She told them to say nothing, and herself repeated that message each day to the hundreds of journalists who called her or hung around outside her house.
Like Linda and all Monica’s former fellow students, Carly Henderson was shocked and fearful of the impact on Monica. Carly, who was studying for a psychology Ph.D., remembers that “Everyone was freaking out, we were so scared for Monica. I was crying and cussing at the TV screen. I thought that she would consider killing herself because I couldn’t imagine her being able to deal with it. She was on the TV news before the Pope’s visit to Cuba, for Christ’s sake.”
The reason why her friends had to rely on the television to find out about Monica was simple, if distressing. She and her mother existed in a twilight world, the curtains drawn, the Watergate building under siege from the world’s media, and every phone call bringing tidings of hope or despair. They dared not go outside at all, for they had been warned by the apartment manager that film crews had taken over the apartments that overlooked their balcony. It was a life that was sharply brought home to Debra Finerman when she called one morning to see how they were. A storm had just passed, leaving a beautiful clear day in its wake, but Marcia didn’t even know it had stopped raining because the curtains were drawn. For Debra, “This was a metaphor for this whole thing—they were living like caged animals. My sister, who had done nothing, was having to hide in the shadows like a criminal.”
There was no respite. A few days into the scandal, the two women crawled unseen onto the balcony at two in the morning for a breath of fresh air. “I felt like I was dying, like I was being slowly tortured to death by this whole business. It was frightening,” says Monica.
Inside the apartment the television played all day long. Marcia says of its harsh intrusiveness and apparent reality, “It was quite unreal, because the story was about us. They showed her picture all the time and Monica was sitting next to me and we were so frightened and overwhelmed by the enormity of it. It’s very hard when you are watching your life being destroyed on primetime television.”
Like piranhas with a fresh victim, the mass media quickly picked clean the lives of Monica, her mother and her family. Perhaps one of the least edifying moments was the scene outside a Los Angeles courthouse where scores of journalists eagerly grabbed details of the Lewinskys’ divorce. Ironically, a few weeks before the scandal broke, Marcia had explored the possibility of having the papers legally “sealed” because of her impending marriage to Peter Sraus.
Her feeling of utter impotence and anguish was shared by Bernie, unhappily and unwillingly on vacation in Hawaii. Even though he and Barbara lived just a couple of blocks away from the O.J. Simpson murder scene in Brentwood, Los Angeles, nothing could have prepared them for their unwelcome role as the latest act in this prurient media circus. Bernie, an unassuming, phlegmatic man, was appalled as he saw his life dissected by total strangers, a media vivisection that drove him to the edge of despair. “Each time Bill Ginsburg called on the phone, it was more dire news,” he says. “The worst was when the divorce papers came out.” Barbara remembers him calling out, “Oh my God, the Lewinsky name is over the entire world. People in Mozambique will know about my divorce. I can only thank God that my father is dead.”
As Barbara walked in manic circles around their eighth-floor room in their Honolulu hotel, her husband crouched on the bed constantly saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer used for, among other offices, mourning. He still finds it very difficult to talk about that time, the darkest days of his life. “We were just so shocked,” he says. “We knew nothing about any of this. There was a point during those awful days where I looked over the edge of the balcony and considered jumping. But I didn’t think it was high enough.”
But it was when they returned at the end of January that the nightmare really began. On Ginsburg’s advice they had arranged for special security at Honolulu and Los Angeles airports, although these measures proved unnecessary. What relief they might have felt was short-lived, however, for their modern wood-and-steel home in Brentwood was under siege, TV trucks and banks of photographers and reporters crowding the road. Even now, their house is on the “Star Tour” which shows sightseers famous homes in Los Angeles.
Almost immediately on getting home, Bernie took the White House tea towels, aprons and other gifts Monica had bought for them in Washington and burned them on their barbecue. Then, on the advice of the Los Angeles police, he installed a paper shredder so that the media, who scavenged through their trash sacks, would find nothing they could use. Indeed, one of the first things he threw out was the card Monica had sent him for his fifty-fifth birthday a few days before the scandal broke. It read, with unintentional irony, “I know over the years I’ve caused you a few gray hairs, but I didn’t mean for the rest of them to fall out.”
They were told, too, that a well-known private investigator, who specializes in bugging houses, was in the neighborhood, which made them specially cautious about even routine conversations. Even when Bernie returned to work to tend to his patients at West Hills Hospital, he found himself pursued through medical wards by TV camera crews. “I was very nervous to meet my colleagues after all that had been said,” he remembers. “In the canteen someone came up and gave me a hug. It was very emotional and difficult.”
He was right to be concerned, especially about his daughter. By the time he and Barbara returned from Hawaii, a distinctly unjust and unflattering image of Monica Lewinsky was solidifying in the public mind. She was caught in a withering crossfire of competing political creeds, vested interests and self-interests, with no one venturing out into this dangerous terrain to defend her, not because her friends did not want to, but for fear of being subpoenaed.
Republicans condemned her as an adulteress, while Democrats lambasted her as a threat to the President. For e
njoying and being at ease with her sexuality, she alienated moral America, while liberal feminists, who respect Hillary Clinton’s work, dismissed her as a classic product of exploited femininity. At the same time, the wide streak of misogyny in the American psyche, and particularly in the media, remorsely and sneeringly lampooned her weight, her taste, her styles, and her Beverly Hills background. The mechanics of her sexual relationship with Bill Clinton were manna from heaven for talk-show hosts, stand-up comedians and dozens of sites on the Internet dedicated to the scandal. The very name “Monica” has become a byword for loose moral standards.
As well as foundering in the political and cultural cross-currents of American society, she was overwhelmed by several rivers of personal self-interest that converged on her, notably the White House, the Tripp—Goldberg axis, the Starr team, her former lover Andy Bleiler, and a walk-on cast of characters from her past.
A man-to-man conversation between the President and Dick Morris, a former Democratic campaign strategist and media “attack dog,” on January 22, the day after the scandal broke, demonstrated just what she was up against. Morris, who had resigned from the administration—he had been one of Clinton’s political advisors—six months earlier after being found to have had an affair with a prostitute, told the President that he was prepared to issue a statement attacking the Lewinsky story as the “fevered fantasy of a teenage mind,” and going on to say that Monica owed the nation a “massive apology.” He intended to call a press conference to elaborate on the theme of her “make-believe.”
Monica's Story Page 29
