Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  “So he dared to bring my grandmother’s name into this evil place and it was just too much for me. I thought to myself that he could not subpoena my grandmother as she was dead—what are they going to do instead, dig up her grave? I was afraid they would arrest me if I left the courtroom so I just put my head down and started to cry. You are telling things to twenty-three strangers on the jury; they are listening to the most intimate things about you and your family. There is nothing in your family that isn’t fodder for these prosecutors to throw in front of these strangers.”

  As the hearing staggered to a halt, Marcia refused to allow the people she considered to be her family’s tormentors, Starr’s prosecutors, to touch her, only responding when her attorney, Billy Martin, came into the courtroom. Gently, he led her to the bathroom, where she collapsed on the floor in hysterics.

  When she had sufficiently recovered her composure, she left the courthouse. Billy Martin told the assembled media that “no mother should ever be compelled by a Federal prosecutor to incriminate her daughter.” Then Marcia traveled to Baltimore to see a psychiatrist, Neil Blumberg. It was only thanks to the concern shown by Billy Martin, however, who cared about her as a person rather than as simply a client, that Marcia was able to pick herself up after this traumatic experience. He managed to convince the authorities to allow her to give a deposition instead of having to face the Grand Jury again.

  When Monica returned to Washington to be with her mother, it was as if she were meeting a stranger. Marcia spoke about what had happened as though she were a rape victim, crying endlessly while her daughter tried in vain to comfort her. “It was this dark, violating experience for her,” says Monica. “This was my mother . . and I hated those bastards for what they had done to her. I hated them.”

  The image of the wan, disconsolate figure of Marcia Lewis emerging from the courthouse troubled many, and so, particularly, did Starr’s tactic of pitting mother against daughter. His strategy was dubbed by the White House, “Throw momma in front of the train,” while Bill Ginsburg attacked the “torture” of Marcia Lewis which, he said, “was intended to be a clear signal to others, including Monica, that he’s [Starr’s] going to be rough.” As Margaret Carlson noted in a magazine article, “We are now on notice that the conversations we have with our children are not safe from the government . . in Ken Starr’s America, moms do tell—or else.”

  The sight of his ex-wife emerging in dazed misery from the courthouse reinforced a growing feeling in Bernie Lewinsky that it was time for him to speak up for the family. He therefore spoke to Ginsburg who, after some initial hesitation, agreed that Bernie should appear with Barbara Walters on ABC TV for his first television interview. He immediately warmed to her: she took his hand when they first met and told him, “This must be every parent’s nightmare.” During the twenty-minute interview, which was broadcast on February 20, he spoke with barely controlled anger about the way Marcia had been treated. “To pit a mother against a daughter, to coerce her to talk, to me it’s reminiscent of the McCarthy era, of the Inquisition and even, you know, you could stretch to the Hitler era.”

  After the interview was broadcast, Monica called her father to congratulate him. She was at her Aunt Debra’s apartment in the Watergate building, and as she and Bernie talked, she noticed that her mother was out on the balcony, moaning, wailing and gesticulating to herself. She was seized by fear that Marcia was going to throw herself over the edge, such was the utter despair in her every gesture. She rushed to embrace her, to comfort her, but the older woman, racked with sobs, pushed her away, saying that she did not want to talk to her. Then Marcia went inside and curled up in a ball on the kitchen floor, crying her eyes out. Monica felt helpless: “I had never seen my mother like this. This is the mom who makes everything OK, who always has hugs, kisses and solutions. Here she was breaking down in front of me.”

  She phoned her Aunt Debra and then Bill Ginsburg, who advised her not to call an ambulance, since then the media would claim that her mother had had a breakdown. Finally Marcia calmed down, and mother and daughter had a long heart-to-heart about what was troubling her. It was not, Marcia said, just the ordeal of testifying before the Federal Grand Jury, but the vicious media comments afterwards, which had suggested, among much else, that she had faked her breakdown in court. To all this was added the constant worry that she and Debra might be instrumental in sending Monica to jail. Indeed, this emotional aspect, the torment felt by her mother and aunt at the thought that they might be responsible for Monica’s fate, suffused their every waking moment. “The dread that they may have to testify against me at trial hung like an unspoken cloud over us all,” Monica remembers.

  That night, Monica was so worried about her mother’s state of mind, and so afraid that Marcia was going to take her own life, that she couldn’t sleep. She finally dozed off at four in the morning, only to be awakened by a sound like that of an animal being tortured coming from her mother’s room next door. “I went in and she was crying and saying that she didn’t want to go to jail and was afraid to the point of paranoia about what was going to happen. Finally she let me cuddle her. She was just crying and crying.” On the following day the psychiatrist who had seen Marcia after her courtroom breakdown visited her in the apartment, and insisted that she take the medication he had already prescribed. In any other circumstances she would have spent some time recovering in hospital—although it has to be said that in normal circumstances she would never have been subjected to such intolerable stress.

  Within a month of Monica having become front-page news, the fabric of the Lewinsky family had been torn to shreds. Both her parents had seriously contemplated taking their own lives, while Michael had internalized his problems. “I have a big pack on my back and everything I run into I throw into my backpack,” he says simply.

  Besides having been forced to stand idly by while Starr’s investigators intimidated her brother, harassed her father and drove her mother to the point of collapse, Monica watched helplessly as her friends were subpoenaed by the OIC to appear before the Grand Jury. It was a terrible time for her. They had taken away her gifts from the President, read her private e-mails, listened to her intimate, unguarded conversations, subpoenaed her reading lists and searched her apartment. Now, not content with exploiting the bond between mother and daughter, they wanted to test the limits of friendship.

  Every day, she and her mother sat before the television, transfixed with dread as they watched close friends and others, like Betty Currie, for whom Monica cared, make their way to the courthouse. She had no way of knowing who had been called, what they would say or how they thought of her in the light of the scandal. As one of nature’s pessimists, she assumed that they would all despise her, perhaps for having had the affair and been caught, or for having driven the presidency to the brink of chaos, but certainly for having plunged them into this mess.

  Her mother describes the scene as they waited for the television to bring the bad tidings: “Monica would put on the news and sit there staring at the screen. A car would drive up and at first you could not see who it was. Out would come maybe a blonde head and the camera would catch them as they emerged. Then Monica would cry, ‘Oh my God, it’s Ashley,’ or whoever, and break down in tears. It was enough that they were coming after her, but to watch these friends whose only crime was that she had confided in them being marched in was unbearable for my daughter.”

  The irony was that, just as Monica felt terrible about Neysa, Catherine, Ashley and the others, they felt equally wretched at being forced to betray their friend’s most intimate secrets, while also realizing that their testimony could send her to jail. After they had given their evidence, several sent her messages of love and support through their attorneys. It was at least a small consolation in a sea of woes.

  Her friend Neysa was the first of her confidantes to tell the world of the use to which Monica had put one of the President’s cigars. Neysa remembers that “at a certain point in my testimony I
suddenly broke out in a sweat. Here I was talking to a roomful of strangers considering a criminal prosecution against my friend because of her sex life with the President.”

  While Neysa, Ashley Raines, Debra Finerman, and others were all obliged to tell the truth, whatever harm it might do Monica, about their conversations with her, for Catherine Allday Davis the situation was further complicated by the fact that at that time she was still living in Tokyo. Not only was she subpoenaed, but so was the computer she had used to send e-mails to Monica and receive her answers when her friend was working at the Pentagon. In mid-March, while the FBI unearthed the contents of her hard-disk drive, Catherine was flown from Tokyo to Washington appear before the Grand Jury on March 17; she had to testify against her friend. She found the experience as embarrassing as it was humiliating. “It was awful—I’m no prude, but they wanted very, very specific details about their sexual relationship. I felt I was violating her. I thought it was so wrong and quite disgusting to have to talk about another woman in front of a bunch of complete strangers.

  “Worse than that was the feeling that they were trying to use me to catch her, to squeeze her into submitting, to prove that she had lied in her affidavit. That was terrible. They wanted to prosecute her and have her squeal on the President. There were moments during my testimony where I was thinking,”My God, I’m here to help these people screw the President of the United States.”’

  Just as defiling was the cavalier way the OIC printed out all the e-mails from her subpoenaed computer, without regard for their relevance to the case. Yet it did not necessarily help Starr’s investigators, for while she had deleted some information, Catherine had sensibly—and fortunately—saved correspondence relating to Vernon Jordan and Monica’s job search. These e-mails showed that the attorney had been involved in that search long before the Paula Jones case swept Monica up under subpoena. Unforgivably, ignoring the protests of Catherine and her attorney, Starr’s deputies published private correspondence about members of her family, including her feelings about her husband, Chris, which appeared in the Special Prosecutor’s report to Congress.

  The effect on Catherine was devastating. “I have never been so angry in my life,” she says. “It was so violating to have your personal thoughts published for the world to read. I find this hard to deal with, and I hate this government for what they have done to people in this case. I couldn’t bring myself to vote last time. As my father is British, I am seriously considering renouncing my American citizenship.” Chris, a company executive, feels equally strongly about what he considers to be an “outrageous” invasion of their privacy. “We were side-players in this whole drama, had absolutely nothing to do with it at all. Yet our rights as citizens were trampled over by this bizarre political process,” he says.

  Interestingly, through the experiences of Monica, Catherine and others, computer users worldwide have learned from Starr’s investigation that Big Brother is always watching. Many companies now instruct their staff to compose and word confidential e-mails as though someone were standing at their shoulder reading what they write.

  It is significant that those who entered “Starr country” soon saw the dark side of the American dream. Monica’s friends and family are white, affluent, middle-class, liberal-minded, law-abiding people who came to understand the hard realities of untramelled power, be it of the government, the judiciary or the mass media. Marcia Lewis, for example, through her friendship with Billy Martin, her stalwart African-American lawyer, saw just how the other half lived, the constant fear and routine repression faced by ethnic minorities in America, particularly the black community. “I would walk down the road in the ‘hood’ [the neighborhood] with Billy and people would come up and give me a hug and say, ‘You are one of us,’” she remembers. Clearly, while neither the media nor most of affluent America saw her as a victim, that society’s other victims did.

  Indeed, the moment the story broke on January 21 it was, for its chief victim, Monica, as though she had been instantly transported to another world, a land where time stood still and darkness and Dan Rather reigned supreme. Each day she would get up about eight, breakfast—keeping to her diet of half a bagel, cream cheese and coffee—and watch the news on CNN or surf the Internet, when at her father’s, afraid of missing anything about her story.

  At lunchtime she would tune in to the legal show Burden of Truth, which at that time invariably focused on issues surrounding the Starr inquiry, while she walked on her treadmill before having a Weight-Watchers lunch. “I didn’t have the patience to read books, I just couldn’t focus. Most of the time I spent obsessing about the case, constantly ruminating on the legal issues. I really got a crash course in the law.”

  In the evening she surfed TV stations, watching shows such as Larry King Live and Geraldo which constantly pursued fresh lines of legal inquiry whose true significance only she knew. Her new lifestyle was an unnecessary form of masochism, a reflection of her personality, her need to be in control of her life while at the same time punishing herself as she helplessly watched her life being cruelly dissected.

  In her daily search for scraps of information, she heard the TV pundits denigrate her lifestyle, her clothes and her morality. “In their eyes I was this sad, pathetic loser who loved the limelight and made up a relationship with the President.” Certainly, Monica would not have suffered so much anguish and torment if she had left her legal team to do their job and kept the television off. That, however, is not her way. More constructively, from mid-March, she traveled to Nate Speights’s office downtown and helped with organizing the case, filing and researching material. It was work as therapeutic as it was vital.

  If making herself useful was one consolation, another was the avalanche of mail that well-wishers sent—about seven out of ten of her correspondents were sympathetic—although she was legally barred from replying. One letter in particular had caught her eye. It was from an actress, Sheri Densuk, living in New York, who was worried because she had been contacted by the Office of the Independent Counsel and didn’t know what to do. She said that she had never had an affair with the President, although she had had illicit relationships with other famous men; she wondered whether Monica’s attorney, Bill Ginsburg, would represent her. Both Monica and her mother thought this amusing, assuming that here was an actress trying to hit the headlines by employing the man who was, at that time, America’s most famous lawyer.

  Several weeks later, in early March, Monica received another letter from Ms. Densuk, this time enclosing a copy of her subpoena from Starr. Feeling sorry for her, Monica, against the wishes of her mother, passed the letter on to her attorney, Nate Speights, who in turn gave it to a Washington, DC, lawyer friend, Keith Watters. There the matter lay—for the time being at least.

  At about the same time, Monica was hit by a double whammy which sent her spirits spiraling downwards. Bayani Nelvis, the White House Steward to President Clinton, was called to testify before the Grand Jury for the second time. As she watched him on TV, she noticed with horror that he was wearing the first tie she had given the President. She had two immediate reactions: first, that the President had insisted that “Nel” wore his tie as a signal to her to support him; the second that she meant so little to him that he had given her tie away. Given her natural melancholia, she inclined to the latter view.

  The second incident, a few days later, had a more sinister flavor. Her hairdresser, Ishmael Demir, called and gave her the astonishing news that Linda Tripp had been to see him. He had become briefly famous earlier when Monica had gone to him to have her hair cut shorter—she had been followed by a posse of media types who had filmed and photographed the event through the salon window. Tripp made an appointment at Toka salon under a false name, with the result that Ishmael was forced to tend to her—otherwise she could sue him for breaking the appointment. On learning of Tripp’s visit, Monica’s lawyers advised Monica that she could no longer use the hairdresser, whom she liked enormously, without placing him i
n legal jeopardy. It may seem a trivial loss, but Monica felt it deeply, for in a world where every piece of her was now owned by others, be they journalists or the judiciary, Ishmael had been one person who was still part of her former, happier, existence.

  Nor was this the first time that her nemesis had deliberately stalked Monica. On her first public appearance after the scandal broke in January, Tripp had worn a coat Monica had given her, while on the day in June when she appeared before the Grand Jury she sported a fake Chanel handbag that Monica had brought back for her from her trip to Korea with the Department of Defense. More recently, shortly after it was announced in October 1998 that Monica was to give her first TV interview to Barbara Walters, Tripp approached the show’s producers and tried to secure her own time in the media spotlight.

  On the evening of Thursday, 12 March, while she was still brooding on these events, Monica went out to a Washington steakhouse, Sam and Harry’s, for dinner with her legal team. They were joined by Keith Watters, the lawyer who was by then representing Sheri Densuk. As they tucked into steak and fries, Nate Speights leaned over the table and conspiratorially told Monica that Densuk was “Jane Doe Number 7”—the girl after her in the Paula Jones case.

  This was Monica’s worst nightmare come true, for it meant that the President had been seeing another woman at the same time as he was conducting a relationship with her. She had been duped. She rushed to the bathroom, where she burst into uncontrollable sobbing. “If there was a Jane Doe Number 7,” she says, “it meant that everything he had ever said to me was bullshit, that I meant nothing to him and that the whole two-year relationship was a farce. After having gone through so much pain already, having cared so much and risked so much, I tormented myself with the idea that she could have meant more to him, that he liked her more, that they had had sex—maybe he even said that he loved her.”