Worried now about her safety, and aware that the media would be watching the airports and train stations for her return to Washington, Monica and Judy Smith decided to drive back. So Walter Ellerbee flew into town, rented a car and drove them through the night to Washington.
That day, Tuesday, July 28, 1998, was one of high emotion for Monica. When her attorneys arrived back at their downtown office following an earlier meeting with Starr, they brought with them a watertight agreement, signed by the Independent Counsel. Monica and her parents now had full immunity from prosecution in connection with the Office of Independent Counsel’s investigation. In return, she agreed to testify truthfully before the Grand Jury, telling the OIC everything about her relationship with the President. Not surprisingly, Stein and Cacheris expected her to be pleased. They were taken aback when, instead, she burst into tears.
“They didn’t understand my emotional outburst,” she says. “It was knowing that I was turning against someone with whom I had wanted to spend the rest of my life, someone I wanted to wake up with each day, someone that I loved. Even though he called me ‘that woman’ and hurt me so much, I still loved him. The last few months had stripped away the obsessive quality of my relationship with him, but the fundamental deep, quiet love was still there.”
She was crying so much that she found it very difficult to sign the immunity agreement. When Stein and Cacheris went outside to announce the deal to the waiting media, Monica was still in the bathroom, trying to wash away the tearstains. In any case, she simply did not want to face the media. She was worried that if she did, they might make it appear that she was reveling in the fact that she was going to testify, and make her seem little better than the “despicable” Linda Tripp. By that time Tripp had completed her Grand Jury testimony. After completeing her testimony she had made a nervous—and subsequently ridiculed—statement in which she had told the American people, “I am you,” before going on to say that if she had to betray Monica again, she would not hesitate to do so. Sanctimoniously, she had also urged her former friend to tell the truth when she appeared before the Grand Jury.
As Monica, accompanied by Judy Smith and Billy Martin, left her attorneys’ offices, she took some small comfort from the news that the President’s response to the immunity deal, according to his press secretary, Mike McCurry, was that he was glad things were working out for her. She took his words with a large pinch of salt, though. She strongly suspected that, now she had agreed to cooperate with Starr, the White House attack dogs would be let loose on her. Sure enough, within days the National Enquirer was questioning both her honesty and her sanity, citing a White House insider who had described her as a “virtual psychopath” who stalked the President.
Knowing what lay in store for her, at Billy Martin’s house that night Monica, Judy Smith and Martin had a rather subdued celebration dinner which he had picked up from his favorite restaurant. But if their joy was muted by forebodings, Monica’s family were naturally relieved that she was now out of danger of going to prison. That day, as Monica was leaving for her lawyers’ offices to sign the immunity agreement, her grandmother, Bernice, had said, “At last I can sleep at night.”
A few weeks later, in her grandmother’s apartment Monica came across a zip-up bag stuffed with little pieces of paper covered in scribbled jottings. While watching the endless analysis of the scandal on television, Bernice had made notes she thought might be relevant to any future legal case in which Monica might be caught up. “She had kept that pain and fear to herself,” Monica reflects. “It symbolized to me exactly what everyone in the family had been going through. We could all now breathe a sigh of relief.”
Such relief, however, carried a very high price. Though she had been spared a possible prison sentence, Monica now suffered a punishment much more cruel and relentless. A methodical legal process was set in train which stripped her, layer by deliberate layer, of her dignity and her sense of self. By the end she had become arguably the most humiliated woman in history.
The degradation of Monica Lewinsky began on July 29, when she had to hand over all the gifts from the President that the FBI had missed in their original sweep of the Watergate apartment. They also confiscated the Christmas presents the President had given her at their last meeting; Monica had not told Tripp about them, so they are not mentioned on the tapes. Most significantly of all, she handed over the blue Gap dress she had worn for that fateful encounter with “Handsome” on February 28, 1997. Unbeknownst to her mother at the time, it had been in her apartment in New York when the scandal broke in January, but had been returned to Monica’s Washington apartment in May. It was to go to the FBI laboratory for DNA testing, testing which later proved conclusively, and independently of other evidence, that the President had been sexually involved with Monica Lewinsky.
Many observers have wondered why on earth Monica did not destroy the dress, or at least have it cleaned, before she made her immunity deal. “It has been one of the most humiliating things, having to hand in the dress,” she says. “I struggled long and hard about giving it over to the prosecutors. I had thought of washing it and saying, ‘Here is the dress but it has been cleaned,’ but I was so paranoid that I was being watched. It was possible that I would have had to take a lie-detector test and so they would know that I had broken the law by tampering with evidence. Then I would have been accused of obstruction of justice and lost my immunity.”
As has been explained, Monica never intended to keep the dress as any kind of trophy, as Linda Tripp—displaying her usual disregard for the truth—has said. For one thing, she was by no means certain what the tiny stains were. They could have been guacamole, which she had had for dinner the evening of her meeting with the President. She was so unsure that she told Mike Emmick, when she gave him the dress, not to release the news that she had done so until the Office of Independent Counsel knew exactly what the stains were. True to form, within thirty minutes of her handing over the dress, the media reported that the prosecutors now had it. No wonder that when the debriefing process began, in a room in the Watergate Hotel, Monica’s trust of Starr’s deputies had fallen to a new nadir: she feared that her every remark would be leaked to the media almost before it was uttered.
The debriefing sessions were long, tedious and cruelly embarrassing, particularly when she was questioned about intimate acts between herself and the President. A couple of days into the process the humiliation began in earnest when the two female prosecutors, Karin Immergut and Mary Anne Wirth, asked very detailed questions about the sexual aspect of the relationship. When she was asked if the President had masturbated her when he put his hand down her trousers, Monica broke down in tears and had to leave the room to compose herself. Her memories of this cross-examining are as raw as they are painful. “It was too violating and humiliating to talk about such private issues with a roomful of strangers, most of them men. It was very difficult to talk openly about a private sexual moment. Quite frankly, I thought the level of detail they wanted was sick.”
It was equally upsetting when the prosecutors asked her to tell them what questions would surprise the President, throw him off balance by making him feel that they knew every detail, however trivial, about his life. Monica found it difficult to answer. She would tell them the truth, she said, but in no way would she help them in their attempts to impeach the President. “I don’t want to be a part of helping you trap him,” she told them. “I am not Linda Tripp. I am not reveling in this process.”
After a grueling week of debriefing, Monica was scheduled to appear before the Grand Jury on August 6. Monica, worrying about what she was going to say in court, scarcely slept the night before she was due to appear before the Grand Jury. As a witness for the Special Prosecutor—and an exceptionally prominent one, at that—she would be accompanied by an agent from the FBI, but she was determined not to arrive at the courthouse in an FBI vehicle, as Linda Tripp had done: Monica wanted the world to see that, although she had been granted immunity,
she was not the OIC’s stool pigeon. At the same time she and her family were concerned about her safety, knowing that there were people who hated her because she was effectively testifying against the President. Once again Billy Martin, long since dubbed the family’s “Minister of Defense,” came up with a solution: Monica would use her own car, driven by the ever-loyal Walter Ellerbee, but would be accompanied by an FBI agent.
When Monica Lewinsky arrived outside the Federal Courthouse on Washington’s Constitution Avenue to give evidence, she was stunned by the size of the media contingent waiting outside the courthouse. However, Monica was now a pro with the cameras, and no longer needed to bite her cheek to stop herself laughing nervously as she ran the gauntlet of flashbulbs, microphones and shouted questions. That was just as well because, even in her stress and anxiety there was much to smile at. With their coolers filled with beer and sandwiches, canopies over their heads to shade them from the fierce August sun, their boom boxes, and striped lawn chairs, the massed ranks of the media at “Monica Beach” looked for all the world as if they were covering a county fair.
Once past the media hurdle and inside the building, she had to compose herself for her long day in court. She was very tense, so much so that her whole body began shaking when she was called to testify, and was worried that she would say something wrong or would not perform as well as Starr wanted, thus giving him an excuse to nullify her immunity. She was deeply thankful not to be wholly deprived of help and comfort. The presiding judge, Norma Holloway Johnson, had indicated that she did not want Monica’s parents present, so the full “Team Lewinsky” was there in their stead, to give Monica moral support. Judy Smith ensured that cookies, chocolates and soft drinks were waiting when there was a rest break, and Stein, Cacheris, Preston Burton, Hoffmann and Bob Bredhoff were all on hand to offer advice and encouragement.
When she appeared before the twenty-three grand jurors, Monica talked at length about her affair with the President, as well as detailing Vernon Jordan’s involvement in her search for a job. Inevitably, though, it was the intimate details of her relationship with Bill Clinton—the reason why the Grand Jury had been convened in the first place—that riveted the court. For the jury’s benefit, and also to save Monica from having to go into intimate sexual detail during her testimony, the OIC’s prosecutors had prepared a chart of significant events. It was divided into sections, and in one, the “sex box,” they had written “oral sex” against the dates on which she and the President had been physically intimate with each other at the White House.
The experience was as distressing as it was humiliating, for the stark wording on the chart completely traduced the feelings that had underpinned the affair. “One of the frustrating things,” says Monica, “is that everyone from the prosecutors, the media and the public, has focused on the oral sex as if was the main part of the relationship. There was never a time when I went to the Oval Office and just performed oral sex. It was always more passionate and loving than that stark phrase. I’m very sensitive to that narrow response to our relationship.”
As she gave her evidence, Monica tried to make eye contact with the jurors, hoping to engage them in her story. For a girl who always wants everyone, even Starr’s prosecutors, to like her, one of the most difficult aspects of that day was seeing the hostility on the faces of some of the jurors. It seemed, though, that she was not the only one trying to make contact with others—it was possible that someone was attempting to send her a signal. At the end of the session, the prosecutors told her that they thought the President was that day wearing one of the ties she had given him; they had not wanted to tell her while she was testifying, as they had felt it might upset her.
It was a weary and emotionally drained Monica who arrived home at the Watergate; by way of consolation for not being able to attend the court, her anxious mother had bought her favorite Chinese dish, chicken chow mein. Monica switched on the television news to check the presidential neckwear, and there he was, indeed wearing one of her ties. To her, this was a clear signal of support and friendship. “I thought he might wear one of my ties to pull on my heartstrings the day before I testified. I would stake my life on it that he did it deliberately, no matter how much he denied it in his own testimony.”
That testimony had finally come to the forefront, for now that Monica had given evidence to the Grand Jury, the pressure was very much on the President. Some days after her court appearance it became clear not only that he was going to be questioned before the Grand Jury, via a video link to the White House, but that he was scheduled to speak to the nation afterwards.
In her heart, Monica wished that he had admitted to the affair months ago. She believed that the pressure would have been taken off both of them if he had confessed and apologized. He had chosen not to do so, however, and would therefore have to face the consequences. Now that Monica was working with the Office of the Independent Counsel, and as a result saw how much evidence against the President they had collected, she was even more concerned about him. “My immunity agreement meant that I had to tell the truth, come what may. So whatever exonerated him, exonerated him, but whatever implicated him, implicated him. I could no longer protect him.”
Monica waited anxiously through the hours before he spoke to the nation on August 17, wondering whether his testimony before the Grand Jury, given earlier that day and then still secret, would chime with her own recollections. Neysa DeMann Erbland, who was visiting New York with her scriptwriter husband, Chris, tried to take her mind off the President’s upcoming speech, but with little success.
That evening, in common with the majority of Americans, Monica was profoundly disappointed by the words of the man she had once wanted to marry. Tired and agitated after more than four hours of sparring with Starr and his six deputies before the Grand Jury, the President, whose greatest talent is his ability to persuade, gave the impression that he was not so much sorry for his behavior as sorry that he had been caught. Many viewers sensed that he felt little genuine regret that he had lied, and none at all for the way Monica had been treated.
In his broadcast, the only sitting President ever to testify before a Grand Jury investigating him admitted, for the first time, that he had indeed misled the public, although he emphasized that his testimony in the Paula Jones case had been “legally accurate.” He confessed that he had had a relationship that was “not appropriate” with Monica Lewinsky, and said, “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. ! misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.” Yet his four-minute speech was less an apology, mixing candor with contrition, than an irritated attempt at self-justification for his behavior. It was only toward the end that any of the fire of sincerity crept in—when he condemned Kenneth Starr for investigating his private life and called for the Special Prosecutor’s four-year inquiry to be wound up.
His speech, which she insisted on watching alone, reduced Monica to tears. He was all politician and President; she saw nothing of Bill Clinton the man—the man she had come to love so much. “I was very hurt and angered by his speech,” she says. “I felt like a piece of trash.”
Of her treatment at the hands of the President, she says now, “I wondered how I could have ever cared about this man. He was so self-righteous and self-centered. I was hoping that he would give me some kind of stamp of approval, tell the world that I was a good, intelligent person, and stop everyone from being so mean to me. I felt, too, that he should have acknowledged my family—after all, there are plenty of fathers who would have been far more vocal in their criticism of Clinton’s behavior. My dad had too much respect for the presidency to do that.”
Even given her views on her former lover, she could not wholly expunge the memory of what, once, he had meant to her. On the following day, August 18, the Clinton family flew to Martha’s Vineyard for their annual holiday. As Monica watched Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton walk hand in hand to the waiting helicopter she “felt terr
ible for Chelsea, because no young person wants to think of their parents in terms of intimate sexual acts. I felt very, very sorry for her.”
She spent the next couple of days at the OIC, being debriefed by Starr’s deputies. During this time she formed the impression, from reading reports in the media, that in his (still secret) Grand Jury testimony the President had indicated that she meant nothing to him. She said as much when she appeared before the Grand Jury for the second time on August 20. “It’s my understanding that this was a service contract, that all I did was perform oral sex on him and that’s all this relationship was,” she told the jurors. “And it was a lot more than that to me and I thought it was a lot more than that [to him].” In fact, her fears were groundless. When the President’s testimony was released a month later, it became apparent that, far from belittling Monica, he had acknowledged her as “a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind.” He did add, “I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her upbringing but she is basically a good person.”
During her second Grand Jury appearance—she had been summoned to answer jurors’ questions, rather than to challenge the President’s testimony—Monica was much more relaxed, finding the experience curiously uplifting. By now the faces and the routine were familiar to her; furthermore, she had developed the ability to compartmentalize her emotions.
When she arrived at the courthouse she once again had to run the media gauntlet. Even her method for dealing with that was now practiced, however: straighten skirt, suck in stomach and slide out of car. As she passed the next gaggle of reporters waiting inside the courthouse, she was caught by surprise when one yelled, “Monica, do you think the President should have apologized to you the other night?” While she had a fleeting vision of herself turning round and saying “Yes,” she did what she had done for the last seven months and ignored the question.
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