Monica's Story

by Andrew Morton

  In her ten-page proffer, she admitted that she and the President had indeed had an “intimate and emotional relationship” which included oral sex but excluded intercourse. She then detailed the history of the previous two years, outlining the reasons why she left the White House, her attempts to return there to work and her subsequent search for a job in New York. After they had gone through several drafts of the immunity agreement, the two sides verbally agreed to a deal. On Monday, February 2, Starr’s office sent an FBI agent with a letter confirming the agreement, which was duly signed by Monica and her attorneys. Starr’s deputies, once they had read Monica’s version, agreed that it was acceptable—except in one crucial point. Ginsburg, they claimed, had said that the President had told Monica, “Deny, deny, deny,” in relation to her affidavit in the Paula Jones case. Naturally, the investigators wanted this added to Monica’s proffer. Sparks flew between Ginsburg and his client as she told him in no uncertain terms that she had never said that the President had spoken those words.

  As Monica has said all along, during their affair the President and she had agreed, at an early stage, that they would deny their relationship if they were ever to be questioned about it. This became point Number 11 in Monica’s proffer. It read: “At some point in the relationship between Miss Lewinsky and the President, the President told Miss Lewinsky to deny a relationship if ever asked about it. He also said something to the effect that if the two people who are involved say it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. Miss Lewinsky knows that this was said sometime prior to the subpoena in the Paula Jones case.” Thus the agreement to deny their affair was made only in general terms, and predated Monica’s affidavit—hence her fury with Ginsburg.

  She had mixed feelings, knowing that, though the agreement ensured that she and her family would not be prosecuted, it also meant that she would be alienated from the man she still loved, the man who had denied to the world that he had a relationship with her. She remembers that ambivalence with a tinge of bitterness: “I didn’t feel good about it. I felt like Hitler’s whore. I felt what Starr was doing was so wrong. They were trying to hurt people I loved. It wasn’t just the President and my mother, it was those I felt a fondness and affinity for like Betty Currie and Vernon Jordan.”

  If the legal heat seemed to be diminishing, so too was the emotional temperature. After two weeks of pleading to be allowed to see a psychiatrist—her lawyers were worried that if she was seeing a doctor, their bargaining power with Starr would be weakened—Monica was finally permitted to see the woman who, she says, “saved my life.” She spent six hours in consultation with Dr. Susan, who not only encouraged her to talk through the trauma of the scandal, but also gave her medication (two prescription antidepressants) to help her cope.

  The best tonic of all, however, came when Ginsburg allowed her to speak to her father, now that immunity seemed imminent. Over the past few weeks, Monica had gained the impression that, because Bernie and Barbara—on Ginsburg’s advice—had not come to Washington to support her, they were so angry with her that they had disowned her. Her phone call instantly calmed her fears: her father was obviously excited that at last he would be able to see his daughter. Until then, Bernie admits, “We had been living in a vacuum, as Bill Ginsburg was worried that I would be subpoenaed if I spoke to my daughter.”

  In early February, as she boarded a plane to Los Angeles, Monica believed that, at long last, the nightmare prospect of going to jail was over. She was very wrong.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Starr Chamber

  IT WAS A SPECTACLE with which the residents of the affluent suburb of Brentwood in Los Angeles had become wearily familiar: the wailing cavalcade of police cars, the relentless camera crews, the reluctant celebrity emerging from the rented limo into the pitiless flak of flashlights. In 1994 Brentwood had gained instant notoriety as scene of the murder of O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife and a male acquaintance, and for more than a year the media had prowled the quiet streets while the “Trial of the Century” took place in a courthouse downtown. Now, scenting a second such trial, they were at it again, TV crews and photographers commandeering the front lawns of Bernie Lewinsky’s neighbors as they waited for Monica to come home.

  For her, the trip was a “nightmare” from the moment she left her Watergate apartment that day in early February. In an attempt to escape attention, she flew, for the first time in her life, first class, with Bill Ginsburg in tow and with cameramen and reporters watching her every move, noting each morsel of food she ate. Rarely can the gap between reality and journalism have been wider, as was epitomized by a headline in the New York Post which, with that subtle understatement for which the paper is justly famous, yelled, “Stir-crazy Sex Siren Goes Home.”

  Arriving at Los Angeles, she and Bill Ginsburg were whisked through the airport by waiting police and then escorted in motorized procession, all flashing lights and sirens, to Bernie’s home. Even the homecoming turned into a photo opportunity, a chance for the world to see that Monica had a family and was a real person with real emotions, not some bimbo brunette from Beverly Hills who had stalked the President.

  As ever, Ginsburg was master of these ceremonies, attempting to whip his reluctant charges into the media circus ring. Even though they later recognized the public-relations value of the occasion, father and daughter did not want to perform. Bernie says, “We had Bill on his cell-phone telling us that when the car stops Monica will get out and greet you outside on the lawn. We felt like movie actors, and it wasn’t what we wanted.” Monica was equally unhappy about it, when Ginsburg ordered her out of the car and into a fatherly clinch with Bernie. “This was private,” she says. “I didn’t want to feel like I had to show my emotions so that the rest of the world could see. None of us liked that. However, when I look at it objectively, it was an image that brought sympathy, father and daughter together.”

  Even so, Ginsburg spoiled the show somewhat by saying to reporters that she had come home to her father just as Chelsea Clinton had returned to see the President after her first term at college. It was a comment that “really irked” Monica, who states emphatically, “I know how precious Chelsea is to the President and how valuable her privacy is. I’ve never wanted to be associated in that way with her.” Indeed, the attorney’s stream of remarks that Monica considered inappropriate, combined with his love of the limelight, gradually drove a wedge between the “avuncular Mr. Ginsburg” and his young client.

  For the moment, however, all was hugs, tears and smiles as Bernie, Barbara and Monica shared their first hours together since the scandal had hit the press. For Monica, “Seeing my father was like having been lost at sea and suddenly seeing the lighthouse in the distance. We were all crying together. It was very grounding to see him. I needed him.” Then, while the massed ranks of the media waited outside, they sat down to one of Bernie’s famous meals (he is an excellent self-taught cook) and tried to make sense of the last few weeks.

  They did not dwell on the legal issues, as they assumed that the house had been bugged by the FBI; if they had, Bernie would have been left open to a subpoena from Starr. “It was very emotional. We all cried and gave each other support,” remembers Bernie, echoing his daughter. “It was a tremendously charged meeting because we all felt such an awful amount of pain at the way our family life had been so viciously torn apart. Monica had a true need to commune with her father.”

  Monica spent most of her time in LA cooped up in the house, although each day she managed to crawl onto the upstairs deck without being spotted and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine on her face. Barbara found that “it was very invasive and threatening to have these people standing outside the house,” and the family experienced the full force of the media mob when they went out to a nearby restaurant, L.A. Farms, for dinner one night. As they finished their meal, they saw dozens of photographers and camera crews waiting outside.

  While Bernie went for the car, Monica and Barbara tried to walk through the press of photographe
rs, assuming naively that they would part and let them through. Instead, they were engulfed by a sea of snappers, one cameraman holding Monica in a vise-like grip and refusing to let her go. Finally Bernie, using all his strength honed from years of fitness training, managed to shove open his car door so that they could escape. “It was,” says Monica, “very, very frightening.”

  Even that was not their worst experience. Next day, they were traveling along the freeway through rush-hour traffic when a trailing car full of photographers rammed them, flinging Barbara forward and causing her whiplash injuries. While a local KNBC TV news helicopter hovered overhead recording the scene, they called the Los Angeles police. The police told them that they must stay in the car at all costs, because ramming was a tactic used by cameramen to force their prey out of their cars so that they could take pictures. To their credit, even local media commentators were horrified by their colleagues’ behavior; one noted that Monica was now hounded more brutally than the late Princess of Wales had been. Charlie Peters, editor of Washington Monthly, says of the media feeding frenzy, “For months they were insane. It was the most disproportionate coverage I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  It was not just members of the media circus who scented blood. Kenneth Starr was now circling his quarry, preparing for the kill. Before Monica left for Los Angeles, she and her legal team had agreed that she would be interviewed there for four hours a day by Starr’s deputies as part of the immunity agreement.

  The ink was hardly dry on the document, however, before Starr changed his mind. On Wednesday, February 4 he withdrew his offer of immunity, ostensibly because Monica refused to accuse the President of proposing or assisting in a cover-up. He also wanted to meet his star witness face to face. “There is no substitute for a looking a witness in the eye,” he told reporters, “asking detailed questions, matching the answers against verifiable facts and, if appropriate, a polygraph [lie-detector] test.”

  Ginsburg huffed and puffed, filing a motion in court to enforce the written agreement. He recognized that Starr’s decision marked a change of tactics: Starr was now trying independently to corroborate Monica’s story, as recorded by Linda Tripp, by calling her family and friends and White House staff before the Grand Jury. Not only would this test the credibility of his key witness—which was then still in doubt—but it would also reduce her bargaining power with regard to any future immunity agreement.

  Starr’s enthusiastic employment of these “squeeze tactics” drove Monica to the brink of despair, but she refused to submit to his slow legal torture. She did not realize that, for the Special Prosecutor, this treatment was more than just a matter of the law: this was personal. As commentator Peter Maas noted, “There was a palpable air of almost puritanical frustration and anger emanating from Starr’s office, as if Lewinsky must be punished for her obstinacy, dating back to her refusal to wear a wire.”

  While Monica was penalized for her sexual morality, her loyalty and her principles, the woman who betrayed her, Linda Tripp, was cosseted by Starr’s deputies and given a safe house, as well as being allowed to retain her $80,000 a year government salary. In one exchange with Monica, Starr deputy Bob Bittman told her that when investigators went to Tripp’s house she made them wonderful cookies and handed out platefuls of delicious sweets. If he meant his words to wound, he certainly succeeded.

  The first indication that Starr was really playing hardball had come in late January, when two FBI agents arrived unannounced at Michael Lewinsky’s university. A few days before the scandal had broken, Monica had sent her brother a sweater by Federal Express. The agents were suspicious that the innocent parcel might have contained presidential gifts to Monica which she had sent to her brother for safekeeping. Even though they knew by then that Bill Ginsburg was acting for the family, the two FBI men questioned Michael, then just twenty, in his room at Carnegie Mellon, asking him what he knew about Monica’s movements, and the substance of their discussions when he had stayed with her in Washington. When they left, he had phoned Ginsburg and told him about his unwelcome visitors. The attorney became very angry, emphasizing that Michael should not speak to anyone without his authority. “I felt horrible,” Michael says. “I thought I had messed up, but when you have the FBI on your doorstep waving badges and so on, your first instinct is to tell them what they ask.”

  Starr’s gimlet gaze seemed focused on every smallest part of Monica’s life. Not content with serving her with a subpoena to give up her computer and disks for investigation, the OIC subpoenaed a Washington bookstore, Kramerbooks & afterwords, for receipts of all her book purchases since 1995. “It was such a violation,” she complains. “It seemed that everyone in America had rights except for Monica Lewinsky. I felt like I wasn’t a citizen of this country anymore.” Flexing their muscles further, the FBI, acting on the instructions of Starr’s office, started putting pressure on Dr. Lewinsky. Ginsburg told Bernie that Starr’s office or the FBI were either threatening, or were going, to investigate his personal tax returns, a tactic usually employed when searching for laundered drug money. When that failed to bear fruit, they moved on to the tax records of his medical practice, saying that they wanted to do a detailed audit of all Medicare billings. Bernie believes that “the harassment and threats against our family were made in order to force Monica to give them what they wanted … At that time she had no immunity and the threat of prison was constant. Bill Ginsburg was always preparing us for that eventuality.”

  Harassing her father and brother was bad enough, but harassing Marcia was quite another. Indeed, the first time Marcia realized that she was facing the prospect of criminal charges was a few days after their ordeal in the Ritz-Carlton. Monica’s lawyer Bill Ginsburg told her that Starr’s deputies had decided, in their words, “to give mom a pass”—that is to say they had decided not to file criminal charges against her. “It must have been some kind of joke or game to them,” says Marcia. “Remember, I did not know what was on those tapes or even that they existed.” She was the most vulnerable point in Monica’s defenses, and from the moment she was served with her subpoena as she left Room 1012 in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Marcia realized that she was being used against her daughter by Kenneth Starr. “They had found her Achilles’ heel and that was me,” Marcia says simply. “What better way to force someone to do what they don’t want than to threaten those they love? My own family saw that technique used very effectively by Josef Stalin, which is why they left Russia.”

  On February 10, as she sat watching TV in the den of her father’s house in Brentwood, a horrified Monica saw her mother walking in to testify before the Grand Jury in Washington. It came as a total shock because, before she had left for Los Angeles, Marcia’s lawyer, Billy Martin, had assured Monica that her mother’s appearance would be postponed. Marcia seemed to have coped well her first day’s testimony, but after the second day she emerged distraught and clearly upset. In fact, she had broken down on the witness stand and a nurse and a wheelchair had been brought for her, although in the end she had managed to walk out unaided.

  Monica, feeling both guilty and distressed, decided there and then to fly home to comfort her mother. Before she left, she and her father talked quietly outside the bathroom—the only place in the house, or so they had been advised, where they could talk without being overheard by outsiders. With tears in his eyes, Bernie made an emotional speech in which he told her how proud he was of her, and urged her to be strong through the trials and tribulations that lay ahead. As tears streamed down her own cheeks, Monica answered, “Dad, you are my Rock of Gibraltar.”

  It is worth noting in passing that, if the scandal has achieved anything worthwhile, it has brought father and daughter together again, the misunderstandings and bitterness of the last few years seemingly behind them. Monica acknowledges that “my dad was just so incredible, really supportive and there for me. It was really wonderful.” Both recognize, however, that there is still much work to be done before their relationship can be fully repaired.r />
  For Marcia Lewis, some things will never be the same again. The experience in Grand Jury Room Number Four, where she testified in early February, knowing that a single word out of place might send her daughter to jail, is seared into her memory. When she talks about those days, it is as if she were being forced to return to a dark and terrifying place in her soul. She speaks of her Grand Jury testimony with difficulty, taking deep gulps of air as though she were diving into a treacherous undersea cave.

  Marcia, who had lost her fight to avoid testifying altogether, felt as if she were walking through a verbal minefield; she was desperate not to hurt her daughter but knew that she had to tell the truth. If, for instance, the prosecutors were to ask her where the stained blue dress was kept, she would have to answer. At the same time she knew that, far away in California, Monica would be watching and, just as she had tried to bolster her daughter’s morale in Room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, she wanted to show her that it was possible to testify before the Federal Grand Jury and survive.

  She negotiated the first day, but on the second, February 11, she arrived at the courthouse already upset. That morning she had read a vicious commentary which suggested that she was nothing more than a pushy Beverly Hills social climber who had in some way encouraged her daughter’s romance with the President. The reality, of course, was that she had spent two painful years trying to wean Monica off this unfulfilling relationship.

  On the second day of her cross-examination, she was asked about the family nickname for her grandmother, Babushka, which corresponded to the name Monica used for Hillary Clinton, Baba. At this point Marcia broke down. Explaining her reaction, she says, “These people had attacked my whole family, and for me my family is the most important thing in the world. They were going after my sister, my daughter, my son and me. Now this prosecutor was bringing up my grandmother, who had been dead for twenty-six years and who helped raise me when my father died and my mother had to go to work.