When her father, himself a keen photographer, and Barbara arrived, they were greeted by the surreal sight of Monica in a blue chiffon dress, holding a pink poodle. Some of the gilt was rubbed off the occasion, however, when Ginsburg made yet another of his crude remarks. “The President,” he told Bernie, “is going to cream his pants when he sees this.”
Monica remains ambivalent about that day in Malibu. She treasures the friendships she made, and the memory of an experience that made her feel like a whole human being once more. With hindsight, she would not pose with the American flag again, simply to avoid the inevitable fuss, but that is as far as her regret goes. She is not, and never has been, disloyal to her country, and sees no reason to feel ashamed of being seen with its most emotive symbol.
In fact, even before the Vanity Fair furor, Marcia had become concerned that Ginsburg was seriously mishandling the media, to her daughter’s detriment. She had too often seen Monica in tears because of an off-color, inaccurate or exaggerated remark by her attorney. It was bad enough that she had acquired an image as a fantasizing publicity-seeker; the last thing she needed was Ginsburg contributing to the hype.
After discussing the vexed issue of media relations with her attorney, Billy Martin, and with her sister, Debra, Marcia decided to enlist a public-relations expert, freeing the legal team to concentrate on the court battles. Martin, who was a tower of strength not only to Marcia, but to the whole family, suggested a long-time colleague, Judy Smith, a seasoned publicist and attorney who had worked in public relations at the White House and for the NBC TV network. They discussed the idea with Monica, who, aware that Kenneth Starr had hired his own public-relations advisor, thought it made sense. Luckily, she was immediately impressed by Judy Smith, finding her sharp, sassy and focused, and, most important, prepared to work pro bono.
The next hurdle was to convince Ginsburg that he should concentrate on the courtroom, rather than carousing with correspondents from CBS, CNN and the other TV networks. In late April, therefore, a full-scale family meeting was convened at Bernie and Barbara’s house in Los Angeles, to which the lawyer also came. That conference awakened deep-seated emotions in Monica. It was a double first—the first time for years that her parents had been in the same room together, and the first time ever that her father and Barbara met Marcia’s new husband, Peter Straus. “Everyone got along famously,” she recalls. “I really felt the most loved ever, and to sit down at dinner with both my parents and to see them getting along was a really wonderful feeling.”
The only fly in the ointment was Bill Ginsburg. When Monica, who chaired the gathering, outlined her case for bringing Judy Smith on board, he ostentatiously doodled on his pad, making it clear that he took little interest in the proceedings. Monica had prepared a three-page brief clearly outlining her reasons for dividing media and legal matters into separate portfolios. “We have,” she argued, “reached a turning point in this case. First and foremost, Starr has said he is in for the long haul, and has hired a media consultant. This makes our team the only one which does not include someone whose sole responsibility and expertise is the media.”
Although she promised that she would not respond personally to attacks on her integrity, she felt that she badly needed someone who would put her case more effectively. “My reputation is that of a stupid ‘90210 Valley girl’ who services men. This is not acceptable because that is not what I am.” Predictably, despite the cogency of her arguments, Ginsburg opposed the plan, arguing that he should remain in sole control of the family’s affairs. Only very reluctantly did he agree to relinquish his grip on Monica’s public image.
Shortly afterwards Judy Smith joined them and “Team Lewinsky” was born. Judy and Monica worked in harness to generate public support, and to make it clear that Starr had no case against her. At another family powwow in May it was a very subdued Bill Ginsburg who faced the media when the family group walked out of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles after lunch on May 17, where the issue had at last been settled. As one reporter noted, “In contrast to the family’s bright mood, the lawyers were straight-faced.”
Not that Monica had much to cheer about. Two days earlier a Federal appeal court had declined to become involved in her long-running dispute with Kenneth Starr over whether or not she was immune from prosecution. Ever since February, when the Independent Counsel had rejected the immunity agreement, Monica’s legal team had been at war with him, sniping at his methods and questioning his integrity. Now, not content with filing a motion to enforce legally the written immunity agreement, Ginsburg asked the Attorney General, Janet Reno, to launch an official inquiry into alleged leaks from Starr’s office of facts relating to the case. He also demanded that the Attorney General order lie-detector tests to be conducted on Starr and his various deputies to establish whether they had leaked privileged information to reporters.
This echoed a formal complaint made by the President’s private lawyer David Kendall, who in early February had filed a motion accusing Starr of contempt of court and calling for the Independent Counsel’s office to be investigated, again for alleged leaks about testimony given to the Grand Jury. A judicial inquiry was instituted, and found twenty-four possible leaks of Grand Jury information, in violation of federal law. The judge ordered an investigation.
While Kendall had stuck to the courtroom, Ginsburg had continued to conduct his case on the studio floor, endlessly berating Starr in a non-stop round of talk shows, and once even declaring the Special Prosecutor to be a “menace . . a nonconstitutional monster.” His remarks, justified or not, made wonderful headlines, but he was becoming more of a TV talking head than an advocate for Monica.
Nor did his tactics did sit well with Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, a Washington district judge known for her disapproval of flashy lawyers. When arbitrating on the vexed question of whether the written immunity agreement between Monica and the OIC was legally binding, she had made it clear that she did not like her cases to be tried in the media, a barbed reference to Ginsburg’s daily punditry. His partner, Nate Speights, had urged him to stop “feeding the bear,” since to continue doing so would be bound to harm their case, but as soon as a microphone was poked in his direction Ginsburg had to talk.
For all his public huffing and puffing, Ginsburg, a Washington outsider, was faced with a tenacious Beltway bruiser in Starr. While he might have behaved like a confused, if enthusiastic, bloodhound, he kept the bite on Monica. By late March, with a constant parade of witnesses appearing before the Grand Jury, and Congress voting $1.3 million for a possible impeachment probe, it had seemed that the Independent Counsel held all the aces.
The Lewinsky family were playing against high rollers in this legal poker game and they were rapidly running out of stake money. In desperation, Bernie set up a defense fund, and appeared on the The Larry King Show and other TV programs to raise money to pay the spiraling legal bills. His performances attracted around $35,000 from well-wishers, but Bill Ginsburg was unhappy, and made sure that he appeared on the same shows soon afterwards, to demonstrate that he was still the media star. As Bernie says, “When I went on TV, he saw it as taking his power away. He didn’t want [Monica’s] dad to play a role.”
A ray of sunshine briefly illuminated this gloomy legal scenario when, on April I, Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed Paula Jones’s case against President Clinton, ruling that his “alleged conduct does not constitute sexual assault.” After that verdict the nation, canvassed by opinion poll, declared by a margin of almost two to one that Kenneth Starr should abandon his inquiry as well. He, however, had no intention of stepping aside, and declared that Judge Wright’s ruling “doesn’t affect our case.” As for Monica, though she was pleased for the President, her joy was tinged with sorrow that she would not be able to share his reaction to the news. “It made me miss him deep down in my heart,” she says. “I felt very lonely. I wanted to see the look on his face when he heard the good news.”
In truth, she had more than enou
gh to worry about without pining over the President: it was she, not he, who was facing jail. In a warning shot across the bows of Monica’s legal craft, it was made clear that the more hawkish prosecutors in Starr’s team were keen to indict her for perjury if Judge Johnson found in their favor—that is, ruled that the original immunity agreement from February was not binding upon the OIC. The very least Starr expected in exchange for any future immunity agreement was for Monica to make a more forthcoming proffer—a promise that she would testify under oath that President Clinton had had sex with her and then tried to cover it up.
Both her attorneys were confident that they would win the day against Starr. They were wrong. In late April, Judge Johnson rejected Ginsburg’s arguments that the immunity deal was legally binding. Ginsburg now changed his tune, and said he had expected to lose in front of the District Judge but was confident that they would win on appeal. Moreover, if that failed he was looking forward to a trial and the chance to cross-examine Linda Tripp in the witness box. In fairness, and for all his shortcomings, Ginsburg is an excellent trial attorney.
Nor is he easily downhearted. Every new defeat and setback was greeted with his now immortal phrase, “We’re right where we want to be” (a maxim which today the Lewinsky family mock mercilessly). Just over two weeks later, when the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia refused to become involved in the dispute, Monica found herself right where she didn’t want to be—facing indictment and a possible jail sentence for perjury and other crimes. As one media wag commented, “It’s time for Monica to decide if she wants to see how she looks in an orange prison jumpsuit.”
For Monica and her family, this was very, very far from a joke. Her fear that she might spend as long as twenty-seven years in prison had subsided, but she still often woke up with a start in the middle of the night, consumed by fear of being shackled and handcuffed like Susan McDougal. Her anxiety was shared by her father, who suffered a recurrent nightmare in which he saw himself escorting her to jail in chains. “I could not fathom the notion of Monica in shackles,” he says.
Until she was granted immunity, Monica lived in constant fear of arrest. On one occasion she and Judy Smith were in a cab on their way to the train station when they were pulled over by an unmarked police car; such cars are also used by the FBI. A plain-clothes detective got out, walked over and flashed his silver badge. Monica’s heart started beating faster, her mouth went dry and she began to sweat. It turned out that he had stopped the cab driver for a driving infringement, but the incident revived in Monica the paralyzing fear she had felt in Room 1012. “I thought they were going to arrest and indict me there and then,” she remembers with a shudder. “I had nightmares for days afterwards.”
In her new life of notoriety, the main enemy was the mob of photographers who hung around the Watergate apartment and stalked her every move. Even other journalists were shocked by the way she was hounded. One tabloid TV commentator who had been consistently bitchy about Monica on the air, bumped into her at the hairdresser they both used and was horrified to see massed TV crews and photographers on the sidewalk outside, taking pictures through the glass as Monica had her hair done. (One of the reasons why she now wears her hair short is so that she can tend to it at home, rather than having to run the gauntlet of the paparazzi.)
To give the enemy the illusion that she never left without their knowing, Monica seldom used the main exit from the Watergate building. By using other exits, she could avoid the media pack and thus move around Washington incognito. Wearing dark sunglasses, and with her hair pulled back and pushed under a straw hat, she was able, at least for a time, to escape her tormentors. (On one occasion she was walking around fashionable Georgetown when the presidential motorcade roared by. She did not catch so much as a glimpse of “Handsome.”) Most Sundays, Walter Ellerbee, a private investigator working on business for Billy Martin, phoned her at her apartment and asked cryptically, “Is the package ready for pick-up?” He and Shawn Wright would then call for her and take her for a drive in the countryside to “air her out.”
For the rest of the time, Monica assumed she was always followed. She came to live by the maxim, “Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that someone’s not watching you.” Her suspicions were apparently borne out in June, when she and Judy flew to Los Angeles: also on the plane was Mike Emmick, the Starr deputy who had interrogated Monica in Room 1012.
Shades of the prison house began to close around her in earnest after the Appeals Court denied her immunity plea on May 15. Within days, the Independent Counsel subpoenaed her to appear at the federal courthouse in Los Angeles for fingerprinting. As she had often been warned by her attorneys, this was the first stage in the indictment process, a procedure that would eventually culminate in a visit to the prison where she would be sent if convicted.
On May 28 Monica, accompanied by her father, Bill Ginsburg and another attorney, Todd Theodora, ran the gauntlet of reporters waiting outside the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard, where her prints were to be formally taken and logged. In response to a shouted question, Bernie said, “My daughter is being used as a pawn by two powerful men. This is un-American.” Inside the gloomy building, Monica had to face a continuation of the subtle and not so subtle intimidation she had resisted in Room 1012 more than four months earlier. The party was made to use the full-body jail turnstile before being led past the mug-shot room to the fingerprint room. It was no coincidence, Monica believed, that Agent Fallon, the FBI man who had tried to frighten her by showing her his gun and handcuffs, had flown out to accompany her.
The fingerprinting was as long and drawn-out as it was humiliating. Besides the usual fingertip impressions, the prosecutors wanted prints of the fronts, sides and palms of her hands. In all, it took thirty minutes—Bernie Lewinsky knows, because he timed it. “I was crying when I watched them do this to her,” he confesses. “It was scary and it was unnecessary—after all, she had one of the highest security clearances at the Pentagon. It was all done deliberately to intimidate her, treating her as if she had committed mass murder.”
Starr’s deputies did not want voice prints or samples from her, but they did want comprehensive specimens of her handwriting; she had to write with various pens in different styles. Distrustful of the OIC prosecutors, she objected when they tried to get her to sign checks and to copy out a letter she had sent to the President. It was a wearying process, made all the more stressful because Bill Ginsburg, who, not being a criminal lawyer, was unfamiliar with the procedure, had to keep calling his colleague, Nate Speights, who does practice criminal law, for guidance. Monica remembers that “I was very stoical and quiet, but inside I was scared stiff.”
Agitated and distressed by this legal performance, Monica left the building with her attorneys and, flanked by police, they walked through the media crowd like avenging sheriffs in a Western movie. By now, though, Monica was gunning for only one man: Bill Ginsburg. Two days earlier, an article by him entitled “An Open Letter to Kenneth Starr” had appeared in California Lawyer magazine. In it, he virtually admitted that Monica and the President had had sexual relations. Given that, at this time, she was still standing by her false affidavit, it seemed to cut the legal ground from under her, causing a furor in the media and consternation in legal circles.
Ginsburg also charged Starr with trampling over Monica’s right to privacy and turning her into a “virtual prisoner.” “Congratulations Mr Starr!” he wrote. “As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults. In doing so, of course, you’ve also ruined the lives of several people, including Monica and her family, whilst costing them $1,000s in legal fees to protect themselves from the abuses of your office.”
Even the respected attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, who in his book Sexual McCarthyism later savagely criticized Starr for turning a “tawdry series of Oval Office encounters into a constitutio
nal crisis,” was alarmed. He said that, however justified Ginsburg’s criticism might be, he had gone too far. Dershowitz publicly called on the Lewinskys to ditch Ginsburg and “start from scratch” with an experienced Washington attorney. Bernie Lewinsky reluctantly—“It was,” he says, “very embarrassing” —recognized that his legal friend had outlived his usefulness.
In fact, Ginsburg’s indiscretions might have been a great deal worse. On the weekend of the Vanity Fair shoot, he had called Monica to say that California Lawyer had commissioned him to write the article. She had been worried about it, feeling that yet more publicity would only hurt her chances of being granted immunity. When Ginsburg read her a draft of the piece, her worst fears were confirmed. “Now Mr Starr,” he had written, “thanks to you, we will know if another’s lips aside from the First Lady’s have kissed the President’s penis.”
Monica was aghast. “Bill, you cannot say that! Over my dead body! It is the crudest, most appalling thing I have heard in my entire life.” Not much chastened, but recognizing the sense of what she said, he promised to tone down the article and to inform Judy Smith when the article was due to appear. However, the story about his article leaked prematurely.
With Monica now facing the prospect of imminent indictment and her attorney an object of ridicule, action had to be taken quickly. Another family conference was convened, and it was decided that Billy Martin should be deputed to put together a short list of lawyers who were prepared to take over the case. The consensus was that the new team members must be seasoned attorneys who could operate shrewdly inside the brutal Beltway ring. Bernie knew of no one, but Marcia had read a flattering profile of Jake Stein, himself a former Independent Counsel, in The New Yorker. Martin contacted both Stein and another respected figure, Plato Cacheris, both of whom he had known for fifteen years, and the two men signaled their interest in taking on the case—with the proviso that they would not work with Bill Ginsburg.
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