Having exhausted the subject of contacting her lawyer, Monica changed tack and asked if she could call her mother. Again they emphasized that they would rather she did not call anybody. All the time they watched her, monitoring her every move. When she asked to go to the bathroom, they made her empty her pockets. Then an FBI agent went into the bathroom and removed the phone before she was allowed to enter.
Next, the pressure started again as another of Starr’s lieutenants, Bruce Udolf, walked into the room and went through his routine. Once again she was faced with the choice: twenty-seven years in jail, or immediate cooperation. The thought of being in prison for that length of time was simply overwhelming. At one point, she said plaintively to Mike Emmick, “My life is over. If I go to jail for twenty-seven years who is ever going to marry me? How will I be able to have children?” The prosecutor replied, “That’s why we want to give you this chance to cooperate. It’s the best thing for you to do. The right thing.”
Then all of a sudden the air seemed to grow thicker, the room became hotter and more crowded as the imposing figure of Jackie Bennett, Jr., entered. One of Starr’s top deputies, and a man more used to tough mobsters than to sobbing young women, Bennett, like a pit-bull terrier with a kitten, made short work of his reluctant witness. “Look, Monica, you’ve got to make a decision. You have had two hours.” When she pleaded to be allowed to call her mother, he replied gruffly, “Monica, we know you’re smart, you are twenty-four years old—you don’t need to call your mommy.”
As it happened, Marcia Lewis, who usually speaks to her daughter once a day, had by then paged her for the third time. Monica told them that if they didn’t let her call, to reassure her mother that everything was OK, Marcia would have the police looking for her. Reluctantly they agreed to allow her to make a short call, but only on the condition that she limited the conversation to telling her mother not to worry. It was now three-twenty in the afternoon. Monica had been with the FBI for only two hours, but it felt like a lifetime.
As she had agreed, Monica told her mother that she was all right and would call her soon. During their brief conversation FBI Agent Fallon sat by her, his finger over the phone ready to cut her off if she tried to tell Marcia what was happening. Then the remorseless pressure to cooperate started again, Bennett’s deep, rough voice cutting through the fuggy atmosphere in the room, warning her that she was running out of time, that if she didn’t soon decide to cooperate they would not be able to help her with the legal consequences.
At one point Agent Fallon asked her, with a smirk on his face, “Does it bother you that I have a gun on? Because I can put it in the other room.” Later, when they had again told Monica that she was facing twenty-seven years in jail, he nonchalantly flipped back his jacket to show her his handcuffs. Monica was being subjected to intimidating and remorseless psychological pressure, her inquisitors telling her, for the record, that she could leave when she liked, while making it very, very clear what the consequences would be if she did. Understandably, Monica disagrees with the assertion made by Kenneth Starr—who was never present—that she was not held against her will by the assorted law officers crowded into room 1012. “I still have nightmares about it,” she says, “the sense of being trapped and drowning.”
For ten hours Monica was alone with as many as nine armed FBI agents and Starr’s deputies, hard-boiled characters who normally hunt or prosecute those responsible for the most serious and brutal federal offenses. It is worth noting, too, that Udolf had previously been found by a jury to have “maliciously and arbitrarily” violated a defendant’s civil rights when he was Georgia’s State Prosecutor; the jury awarded the plaintiff $50,000 in damages.
Yet, in spite of all the bullying and occasional blandishments, Monica stoutly resisted their demands that she betray her lover and her friends by wearing a body wire or by allowing their investigators to listen to her phone calls. She was sustained by thoughts of Hannah Senesh, the Hungarian-Jewish poet whose heroism and love for her mother had figured in one of Monica’s school essays.
These thoughts gave Monica strength. She defiantly told Bennett that, since they were not going to allow her to make any phone calls or to speak freely to her mother, she was leaning towards not cooperating. Bennett, who is known in legal circles as “The Thug,” played his ace: “You should know that we are going to prosecute your mother too, because of the things you have said she has done. We have it all on tape.”
For Monica, this whole terrifying experience had now come down to the cruelest of dilemmas: did she save the man she loved, or her mother? She broke down in tears again, sobbing to the roomful of prosecutors and agents that, while she could choose her own fate, she could not make a decision that would hurt her mother. In her heart, Monica conceded that she was no Hannah Senesh.
She pleaded with them to let her call her mother once again. They remained very reluctant to grant her request, fearful that Marcia would speak to a lawyer. Monica was made to promise that, if she was permitted to speak to her mother, she would make sure that Marcia did not tell a soul about what was going on.
At last, they agreed. Prosecutor Emmick said that Marcia could call him, so that he could explain the situation. Monica insisted that she speak to her mother alone, away from Room 1012. Even though they assured her that they would not listen in, she was adamant that she wanted to call from somewhere where she could be reasonably certain the phones were not bugged. They laughed in her face as though she were insane when she said that all the phones in the mall were probably bugged as well. Monica remembers thinking, “They have taken my picture, listened to my conversations, Ken Starr is prosecuting me—and I’m supposed to be paranoid?”
They allowed her to leave the room on the conditions they had discussed, and promised they would not follow her. Within moments of walking out, though, she was being monitored by an FBI agent. As in a movie, she lost him by changing elevators, and eventually reached the mall without a tail. Then, to her amazement, as she passed the Museum of Art store she saw Linda Tripp, carrying several bags. The woman who had plunged her into this nightmare was calmly shopping, seemingly without a care in the world. As Monica passed her she snarled, “Thanks a lot!” Clearly startled, Tripp simply recited, like a mantra, “They did the same thing to me, they did the same to me.” Monica walked on. Had she then known the full extent of Tripp’s treachery, she says, her response would have been very different. “I would have tried to kill her,” she says simply—and means it.
From the mall Linda Tripp went home to another reception committee—Paula Jones’s lawyers, who were scheduled to question President Clinton the following morning, after he had made his deposition regarding the case. Tripp gave them a full briefing about Monica Lewinsky.
As media commentator Steven Brill noted, “Thus the President’s criminal inquisitors [the OIC], having just finished with Tripp, had now made it possible for his civil case opponents [the Jones legal team] to be given ammunition with which to question the President in his sworn testimony—from which Starr, in turn, might then be able to extract evidence of criminal perjury.” When, on January 17, the President came to make his deposition, he was ambushed by Jones’s lawyers with information about Monica supplied the previous day by Linda Tripp.
It proved deadly. Cross-examined by Jones’s attorney, the President denied under oath having had an affair with Monica. Then the attorney asked, “Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky?” Clinton’s answer may have sealed his political fate. He said, “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I’ve never had an affair with her.” As the saga unfolded, much would depend on the strict definition of “sexual relations” and on whether oral, as opposed to penetrative, sex came under that definition.
As for Monica, though she was acutely aware of the danger facing the President, her first concern as she wandered through the Pentagon City mall was to speak to her mother. Eventually she found a phone, called Marcia and, between gusts of tears—she managed to keep h
er voice fairly calm—told her what was going on. Her fragile self-control shattered when an overweight bag lady sidled up to her: still disoriented by shock and fear, Monica at once suspected that the woman was an undercover FBI agent. Lowering her voice to the barest whisper, she begged her mother over and over again, “Please don’t make me cooperate, please don’t make me cooperate.”
Monica kept the bargain she had made in Room 1012: she made her mother promise not to speak to anyone else, but to call Prosecutor Mike Emmick at the Ritz-Carlton. Then, having ended the call, she returned to the room to let them know that her mother wanted to talk to them. One of them called Marcia and, after a short conversation, agreed that she could come on the train from New York to join her daughter.
In Marcia’s Fifth Avenue apartment, Debra Finerman was sitting with her sister and mother when Monica called. The scene is burned into Debra’s memory. “We were just sitting chatting when the phone rings. Marcia answered it and started to shake. She said, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ and started screaming over the phone. I thought, ‘Oh no, something’s happened, Monica’s had an accident.’ Then she hung up the phone and Marcia was drip white. She said, ‘The FBI have Monica. I don’t know why exactly but Linda Tripp has trapped her at the Ritz-Carlton at the Pentagon. The FBI have her in a hotel room and they won’t let her call a lawyer. She was crying and we have to go right away.’”
Appalled, the three woman grabbed their coats and headed for Penn Station to catch the 5 P.M. Washington train. During that interminable journey, they tried to absorb the enormity of the situation. They simply could not understand why Monica was in danger of going to jail because of the Paula Jones case. They could not believe it might be true. “We were frightened and bewildered. We didn’t know what terrible danger she was in. It was scary enough that she was in a room full of FBI agents,” says Debra.
As the train rumbled on, Marcia desperately jabbed at the buttons on her mobile phone, trying to contact her ex-husband, Bernie, in Los Angeles to tell him of their daughter’s awful predicament. It was beyond frustrating. First she couldn’t get hold of him, then the connection kept breaking and, since the train was delayed, she had to stand in line because everyone wanted to use the train’s phone.
Bernie Lewinsky was chairing a meeting of the Los Angeles County Radiation Oncology group when he was beeped. When told that Marcia was on the phone, he thought her call would be to say that Monica, because she was moving to New York, needed some assistance until she was settled. Marcia swiftly shattered that illusion, explaining that Monica was in the hands of the FBI and in deep trouble because of something to do with Whitewater and a relationship with the President.
Though he was in the dark about the entire business—Monica had confided in her mother a little about her affair, but had told Bernie nothing—his instinctive response, when he heard that the FBI had threatened his daughter with jail if she didn’t cooperate, was that she must do what the G-men told her. Bernie, a man who won’t even jaywalk, has a deep respect, amounting almost to fear, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As he says, “You just don’t mess with those guys.”
Over the phone, he and Marcia agreed that they urgently needed to find a lawyer. Neither of them knew of anyone in Washington, but Bernie’s medical-malpractice lawyer, Bill Ginsburg, had an office there. Bernie told Marcia he would contact Ginsburg and get him on the case. From that moment on, Bernie worked tirelessly for his daughter, and the decade of bitterness between Bernie and Marcia since their divorce was forgotten. Marcia has said, “Bernie was truly wonderful, because he went through hell. He stepped up to the plate for Monica. I wrote to him to say that he was a father for the whole country.” Even Debra Finerman, who had not spoken to Bernie since the divorce, was impressed. “He was everything a father should be. It really was his shining hour.”
Back in Room 1012, meanwhile, Monica was feeling calmer, knowing that her mother was on the way. She had had plans to go out that night with her friend Ashley Raines, but knew that there was no chance she would make it now. Still thinking that the phones in the room were bugged, she insisted on going to a pay phone in the hotel lobby to call Ashley and cancel their date. Again as in a movie, an FBI agent lurked nearby. When she made the call, leaving a message on Ashley’s machine, Monica hoped that she might by the tone of her voice alert her friend to the danger the President was facing, and thereby get a warning to him. It was, of course, a vain hope.
By now it was early evening and Frank Carter’s office was closed. She asked how, the following day being a Saturday, she could contact her attorney over the weekend if she decided not to cooperate. Knowing that the immediate danger to their inquiry—that Monica should consult with her lawyer—was now past, Agent Fallon offered to phone Carter’s office to establish his whereabouts that weekend. When he returned, he told her that Carter could only be contacted through the office answering service.
As it turned out, Fallon’s call to Carter, whether by accident or design, later enabled Kenneth Starr to argue publicly that his men had not violated Monica’s rights; the phone records showed that a call had been placed to her attorney’s office, which proved that they had given her the opportunity to speak with him. As so often in this case, the facts may be accurate, but the truth lies somewhere else.
In the Ritz-Carlton, Monica was consumed by two thoughts: worry about her family, especially her mother; and a frantic, despairing determination that, somehow, the President had to be warned and protected. She felt she was going crazy in that crowded, airless room, and so suggested that she might kill time until her mother arrived by walking around the mall. The investigators agreed.
Accompanied by Fallon and Emmick, she strolled around the mall, pottering about in the Crate and Barrel household store and window shopping in others. Monica put on her bright and cheerful face, and was friendly and chatty, cracking jokes and trying, in her usual way, to make her wardens like her. If, she reasoned, she could show that she was just an ordinary, nice person, they might decide not to prosecute her.
Uppermost in her mind was the need to save the President. While they were mooching around Macy’s store, she excused herself and went to the restroom on the third floor. There she saw a pay phone, and she tried to call Betty Currie to warn her, but there was no answer and Monica slammed down the handset in frustration. Stifling her rising panic, she spotted a mother changing her baby’s diaper and thought if she gave her Betty’s number, maybe she could call her. Then she was struck by the contrary thought that, if the FBI found out, the baby’s mother would end up in jail as well. Paralyzed with fear, she did nothing. “It is exhausting just to think about it,” she remembers. “I was so panicked I could hear my heartbeat going ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ and feel myself breathing.”
When she emerged from the restroom, she discovered that Agent Fallon, anxious because she had been gone for so long, had left to search for her. When he returned she suggested that, to kill more time, they have supper. So at six-thirty in the evening Monica found herself sitting in a booth of Mozzarella’s American Grill with an FBI agent and one of Starr’s deputies. “It was just surreal. Everyone around us was laughing and enjoying themselves and here was I, my life in ruins. I thought of the President and his face when he heard what had happened. It was like imagining how angry your parents are going to be when you do something wrong as a kid.
“Emotionally I was shut down now, like a rape victim who screams for the first five minutes and then just stops. I had just closed down.”
Even their dinnertime conversation was bizarre. Monica asked Emmick to explain why she would go to jail for twenty-seven years, whereupon he rapidly ticked off the number of years for each charge, using his fingers to emphasize each point. What he did not say, of course, was that these were the maximum sentences for each offense. In fact, as Monica had never been convicted of a felony, she would most likely have escaped with probation or a minimal custodial sentence.
Even Emmick’s assertion tha
t she had committed a crime was dubious, for the simple reason that when she was picked up and held, her attorney, Frank Carter, had not yet filed her false affidavit. Until it was filed it could have been changed, without serious legal consequences. This may explain why, throughout that long afternoon, the men from the OIC and the FBI worked so hard to stop Monica from contacting her lawyer. Carter has confirmed that, had he spoken to her, her sworn affidavit would not have been filed. As it was, he sent it to the court in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Jones case was to be heard, by Federal Express at the end of that day’s business.
Were Kenneth Starr and his deputies acting as agents provocateurs, wanting a crime to be committed and waiting for that to happen? They could easily have prevented the crime, had they so wished, but they knew that if Monica committed perjury they would have leverage not only over her but over the President, their real target. Again, if the President had known of Starr’s interest in Monica Lewinsky that day, he would almost certainly have changed the nature of his deposition in the Paula Jones case, thus altering the course of history. This was not the first time Starr’s investigation had sought progress by, at best, questionable means, nor would it be the last. As one hard-bitten American attorney has said of the OIC’s methods, “What they did was par for the course, SOP, Standard Operating Procedure.” It is worth noting, too, that in the United States in 1998 there were fewer than a handful of prosecutions in “victimless” civil cases for any of the charges Monica faced. “At the time they seized her they did not have a solid case,” observes Billy Martin, who later became Marcia’s attorney, agreeing with the view, expressed by the New York Times, among others, that this whole episode has been manipulated by the Paula Jones lawyers and other right-wing attorneys with the purpose of snaring the President.
Just as Starr’s men had played fast and loose with the rules in order to link the Whitewater inquiry to Lewinsky, so in the twelve hours during which they held Monica they ruthlessly exploited her ignorance of the law and of her rights. Yet throughout her ordeal she resisted their threats and their browbeating.
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