On December 31, she had gone to see Vernon Jordan to explain, in a roundabout way, that she suspected Linda Tripp of being the source of the leak. Rather than tell him the truth, however—that she had confided in Tripp for many months—she said that Tripp had stayed at her apartment and could have seen notes she had drafted to send to the President. Jordan’s response was emphatic: “Well, go home and make sure they are not there,” which Monica took to mean that she should throw away or destroy the letters.
As they were chatting, she rather cheekily asked the attorney if he thought the President would stay married to the First Lady. He replied, “Yes, as he should be,” and quoted a line from the Bible to her. After a minute or so he added, “Well, maybe you two will have an affair when he’s out of office.” Monica was taken aback by Vernon Jordan’s comment. Once again the mirage of marriage to the President seemed to shimmer in the not too far distance, but she then let him know that they had indeed had an affair, but that it had stopped just short of full sex.
It was a perplexing exchange in a perplexing week. She didn’t know what to think anymore, about either her erstwhile lover or her fair-weather friend Linda Tripp. Her difficulty with Tripp was more pressing. The woman who had called her constantly for months was now avoiding her. Her silence was deeply worrying and Monica did not know what to do, or whom to ask for advice. When, earlier in December, she had spoken to her mother about her dilemma, Marcia had seen the issue not in legal but in human terms, and had suggested the name of a Christian Science counselor in New York who might be able to give her daughter some confidential advice.
Because, at that time, Monica had had in any case to fly to New York again for her interviews with MacAndrews & Forbes and Burson-Marsteller, she had decided to give it a try. After all, she reasoned, she had nothing to lose. She had met with the Christian Scientist and outlined her problem in general terms: there was a woman at her office who was about to betray a confidence, and if she did it would endanger her and several other people. The counselor suggested that Monica should look at her colleague’s positive virtues, and that focusing on her good qualities might well induce her to change her mind. She had also suggested that Monica meditate on the Ninety-First Psalm, which says that trust in God is rewarded with personal protection.
With this advice in mind, and despite her rising sense of panic, on New Year’s Day Monica left Linda Tripp a friendly message on her answering machine, wishing her a Happy New Year and hoping that all was well with her and her family. It seemed to work; Tripp called back and left a message a few days later, and the two then played phone tag until Monica, who had become wary of phoning the older woman at home, called her at the Pentagon. Her trust in Tripp, once so absolute, had by now evaporated.
Whatever Linda Tripp may have been thinking, at the end of the first week in January 1998 Monica faced her own moment of truth. On January 6 she collected the draft of her affidavit in the Paula Jones from Frank Carter’s office, and arranged to return on the following day to sign it. She made a number of amendments—some of them after calling Vernon Jordan—to the draft, according to her version of events, and at ten o’clock on January 7, 1998, duly presented herself at her attorney’s office. “I took a deep breath and walked down the hall to his office,” she recalls. “I was prepared to deny the affair because of my love for and loyalty to the President. When I saw that the document said that I did not have sexual relations I thought that I could buy that, as we had never had sexual intercourse. That made made me feel much more comfortable. By signing the affidavit I was in effect putting on my team jersey, to be on the President’s side.”
Whatever gloss she may put on it, however, the affidavit she filed was false. In it Monica, who was referred to as Jane Doe 6 to preserve her anonymity, said she could not “fathom any reason why the plaintiff [Jones] would seek information from me for her case,” outlined her work at the White House, and stated that she had met the President several times in the course of her employment. The document continued:
7. I have the utmost respect for the President who has always behaved appropriately in my presence.
8. I have never had a sexual relationship with the President, he did not propose that we have a sexual relationship, he did not offer me employment or other benefits in exchange for a sexual relationship, he did not deny me employment or other benefits for rejecting a sexual relationship. I do not know of any other person who had a sexual relationship with the President, was offered employment or other benefits in exchange for a sexual relationship, or was denied employment or other benefits for rejecting a sexual relationship. The occasions that I saw the President after I left employment at the White House in April, 1996, were official receptions, formal functions or events related to the U.S. Department of Defense, where I was working at the time. There were other people present on those occasions.
I declare under the penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.
(signed) Monica S. Lewinsky
It was paragraph 8 that fatally compromised her, and which was eventually to force her to accept an immunity deal from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to escape being charged with perjury, for which the penalty on conviction is a jail sentence.
Though she had signed her affidavit, it was not filed in court until nine days later. At this point, therefore, Monica still had an escape route. Though filing a false affidavit is a federal offense, merely swearing one is a minor offense and rarely prosecuted. This important distinction became crucial on the day she was betrayed by Linda Tripp to the FBI.
Once she had signed the document, she felt a sense of relief, believing that she was one step closer to getting the whole matter out of the way, something that would allow her to get on with her own life. It is important to understand that there was no intention that her affidavit would not be filed until she had got a job; in no sense was she blackmailing the President and his advisors by offering the false affidavit in return for his influence in finding her a position. So far as Monica was concerned, that issue did not even arise, and it became important later only because of Linda Tripp, and then the Special Prosecutor.
On January 8, the day after she signed the affidavit, she had her second interview at MacAndrews & Forbes in New York. Monica, whose natural pessimism tends to cloud her judgment, felt that the interview had not gone well and phoned Vernon Jordan—who was a member of the board of directors of the MacAndrews & Forbes subsidiary, Revlon—to express her disappointment. He then called the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, Ronald Perelman, and recommended Monica as a “bright young girl, who I think is terrific.” Perelman duly conveyed those thoughts to Jaymie Durnan, the executive who had interviewed Monica, and said, “Let’s see if we can be helpful.”
In fact Jordan’s intervention was not necessary, and merely muddied the waters once Judge Starr waded in. For Durnan had been impressed by Monica and, before Perelman spoke to him, had already been in discussion with colleagues at Revlon to see about an opening in their Communications Department. Monica was interviewed the following morning by a senior officer of MacAndrews & Forbes and two Revlon executives, and immediately clicked. She loved them and they loved her, and later that day they informally offered her a job in the Public Relations Department at $40,000 a year (less than she was making at the Pentagon). A “thrilled, very excited,” Monica informally accepted their offer.
The same day, she called Jordan with the news, and that afternoon he called Betty Currie and told her, “Mission accomplished.” He also passed on the news to his friend the President, who said simply, “Thank you very much.”
Once back in Washington, Monica had a longer and more emotional encounter with Jordan, and gave him a snappy tic and pocket handkerchief as a small thank you for all his help. “You are the only person who did what they said they were going to do for me,” she told him. “You were the only one who came through.” When Jordan snapped his fingers, things happened; comparison with the President’s e
fforts was inescapable.
It seemed that the girl who had been an unhappy Cinderella, both in love and at work, was at last about to go to the ball. Though she left her heart at the White House, she had packed her bags for New York and reconciled herself to life without “Handsome.” But this fairy tale had no happy ending. The two Ugly Sisters, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, ensured that Monica never made it to the ball.
Wary and cautious, Monica finally spoke to Linda Tripp on Friday, January 9. As they talked, to Monica it seemed that the Christian Science counselor’s advice had worked; inexplicably, Tripp had changed tack. She now said she had decided to be vague about Kathleen Willey, and implied that she wasn’t even going to mention Monica in her testimony. At last it looked as though Monica was safe. In fact, precisely the opposite was true. She was being led into a trap.
Tripp, who herself used to boast of her “witchy feelings,” attributed her personal epiphany to a psychic, who had told her that a friend of hers was in danger because of the words she, Tripp, would say. The truth, however, was that she had fired her lawyer, Kirbe Behre, because he had threatened to go to Bob Bennett, the President’s attorney, and tell him to settle the Jones case. What Tripp and Goldberg wanted was not a settlement but a story. By the time Monica spoke with her, Tripp. had, through the offices of Lucianne Goldberg, engaged a new attorney, James Moody, and they were preparing to contact Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
When they spoke, Monica was anxious not to arouse Tripp’s jealousy, and so played down her success in New York, saying only that she might have secured some temporary work. Tripp at once bragged that she too had been advised to move to New York and get a job in public relations because she was so “savvy.” This worried Monica somewhat, as she had always had the suspicion that Tripp might be copying her lifestyle.
In order to maintain the fiction that Tripp held the whip hand in their relationship, Monica said she had not yet signed her affidavit. “Monica, promise me you won’t sign the affidavit until you get the job,” Tripp demanded. “Tell Vernon you won’t sign the affidavit until you get the job.” To keep her sweet, Monica agreed.
Tripp’s insistence on this point became critical, for only by showing that Monica was being given a job in return for her silence, and that Jordan and the President were involved in a cover-up in order to obstruct justice, that the Starr inquiry was able to expand its jurisdiction and, ultimately, to make a case for impeaching the President. It is therefore curious indeed that Tripp should have invoked precisely the scenario needed to bring in Special Prosecutor Starr, even before the date at which, it is claimed, Starr did actually become involved.
Over the phone, the two women agreed to meet later that week. The suggestion was Monica’s; she now thoroughly distrusted Tripp, and thought a face-to-face meeting would give her greater control over the course of the conversation. By this time she had also come to think that Tripp might even be so underhanded as to try to tape their confidential exchanges. She therefore had it in mind to look in the latter’s handbag when she went to the bathroom and, if she found a tape recorder, remove it. She could not, however, in her wildest dreams, have realized the extent of her “friend’s” treachery.
Whatever she might or might not have known or suspected, Monica was right to be skeptical of Tripp’s curious about-face, a change of heart which, given the imminent involvement of the Independent Counsel, seems with hindsight suspiciously like conspiracy to entrap. For Tripp had realized, way back in November, that it was against the state law in Maryland to tape someone without their knowledge and consent. Far from protecting her, therefore, the “insurance policy” of the tapes—this evidence of her integrity and honesty—could instead land her in jail. According to Lucianne Goldberg, when Tripp’s former attorney, Kirbe Behre, had found out about the illicit recordings, he went “ballistic” and told her to stop. Instead, she fired him and hired James Moody in his place.
Tripp apparently felt so worried about being prosecuted—though this did not stop her taping her conversations with Monica—that she asked Lucianne Goldberg to find a way of contacting the Office of the Independent Counsel, hoping thereby to obtain immunity from prosecution for her illegal actions in exchange for her cooperation in their investigation.
So on January 12, 1998, according both to Tripp and the Office of the Independent Counsel, she called that office and told investigators that the President was having an affair with a government employee who had been subpoenaed in the Paula Jones case, and that the President and Vernon Jordan had told this employee to lie about the affair. She had, Tripp added, twenty hours of taped conversations to back her story. Over the phone she said that the employee had already signed a false affidavit—although she continued to stress to Monica, in their subsequent meetings, that she should not sign until Vernon Jordan had got her a job.
For once in her life, Linda Tripp was the center of attention. Within an hour of her call to the OIC, six federal prosecutors and an FBI agent had descended on her home in Columbia, Maryland, to hear her story. It transpired later that the reason for their enthusiasm was that Starr’s office had already heard, apparently from Paula Jones’s lawyers, about Monica and the President. Tripp was debriefed that night, and told them all she knew. Seemingly, however, a verbal betrayal, backed by her tapes, was not enough—Tripp agreed to the investigators’ request that she wear a body wire when she and Monica met, so that the OIC could overhear and record their conversation.
The arrival of the Special Prosecutor took Tripp’s story onto a different plane. No longer was this about personal betrayal in order to make money out of a “tell-all” book. It had become a plot to trap the President.
For the previous four years, the Independent Counsel to the Whitewater investigation, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, a right-wing Southern Baptist, had zealously tried to find evidence of presidential wrongdoing. (The office of Special Prosecutor had been established in 1978 after the Watergate scandal, specifically to investigate the executive branch of government—that is, the presidency.) Starr had originally been appointed to look into the Whitewater land deal scandal, in which both Bill and Hillary Clinton were caught up, and to gather evidence of any wrongdoing, especially on the part of the President.
By January 1998, after four years and $40 million of taxpayers’ money, his investigation had got nowhere, so Tripp’s call was manna from heaven. If her allegations and evidence held up, Starr would at last have evidence of wrongdoing by the President, albeit in a matter far removed from Whitewater. His prosecutors were particularly interested to hear Tripp’s tale of Vernon Jordan finding Monica a job, for Jordan’s name had cropped up in the Whitewater investigation in relation to alleged hush money paid to former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell.
Starr needed legal approval each time he wished to expand his inquiry, so he had to have some form of evidence linking Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky. Vernon Jordan was the link that enabled Starr to connect his existing investigation, into a dubious land deal, to an allegedly corrupt presidential love affair.
Essentially, if the President could be proved to have found, through Jordan, a job for Monica in return for her silence, he would be guilty of abuse of his position—in Starr’s view an impeachable offense. Hence the importance of Tripp’s tapes and her testimony in demonstrating Jordan’s involvement with Monica’s job search. Yet, just as the contents of the conversations between Monica and Tripp were prejudiced by their context, so too the tapes gave a highly misleading picture of Monica’s life in the fall of 1997, a deceptive impression upon which Tripp dramatically embellished, misrepresenting to Kenneth Starr the true nature of events.
Whether by accident or design, Tripp either did not record or held back the recordings of numerous significant conversations which would have seriously diluted Starr’s case for including Monica Lewinsky in his investigation. They would have shown that Jordan’s involvement with Monica had been at her own suggestion, and well before any notion of
her being connected with the Paula Jones case had become apparent to her, to the President or to Jordan. Conspicuously absent, too, was a record of Tripp’s October 6, 1997, conversation with her friend Kate Friedrich, during which Friedrich had allegedly said that Monica was blacklisted by the White House. This was a lie, as Friedrich later testified, and Tripp’s demonstrable perfidy would therefore have undercut her credibility as a witness. According to the Starr Report, subsequent investigation by the FBI has also uncovered evidence that the tapes themselves may have been tampered with or duplicated; if that is true, it means that Tripp lied under oath before the Grand Jury and in her FBI deposition.
As one commentator, Elise Ackerman, noted, “The picture that emerges [from the tapes] is not one of illicit sex or obstruction of justice, but of girl talk raised in a frothing boil by a devious, knowing Tripp in an attempt to provide material for the Independent Counsel, the attorneys for Paula Jones, and—most lucrative of all—a book about how Tripp ‘uncovered’ a vast conspiracy to obstruct justice and cover up illicit sex.”
As for Kenneth Starr, at this early stage he took a gamble. In essence, he bent the rules in order to catch the man he suspected of breaking the law. Technically, the Independent Counsel only had authority to investigate Whitewater. So when, at Starr’s behest, Linda Tripp wore a body wire to record their conversation at her meeting with Monica, he was acting beyond his mandate. Many have argued that he acted beyond his remit in order to uncover possible evidence that would convince Attorney General Janet Reno that he should be allowed to bring Monica Lewinsky into his existing investigation.
Wearing a secret listening device beneath her clothing, Linda Tripp met Monica for lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City on Tuesday, January 13, 1998. She greeted her young friend with a kiss, knowing all the while that, in an upstairs room of the hotel, agents from the Office of the Independent Counsel. were listening to all they said.
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