She had waited on tenterhooks for this court appearance, knowing that every question and answer brought her nearer to the moment when she would win her life back. Yet no matter how she tried to steel herself, nothing could have prepared her for the sheer humiliation of the day’s events, as her sexuality, her character and morals, indeed, her very mind, were laid bare before twenty-three strangers. Every foible, every failing, every silly remark was on parade. The questions were as remorseless as they were agonizingly embarrassing. Did the President ever use a cigar in a sexual way? Did he touch her on the breast or in the genital area? Was it through her clothes or in direct contact with the skin? At times, Monica had to close her eyes, in a futile attempt to retain a shred of self-respect, as she answered.
At the same time, she was asked a number of pertinent, sometimes even poignant, questions which went to the heart of the relationship, forcing her to address her often contradictory responses to him. Asked whether she still loved the President, she replied that before his August 17 broadcast to the nation she would have said “Yes”; after it, she was not so sure.
More disconcerting than questions about her private sex life was being forced under oath to address her flaws and weaknesses, character failings that she has struggled with for years. The juror of whom Monica was most nervous was a middle-aged African-American woman, who seemed strongly disapproving. In a telling question she asked how Monica could talk about truth and honesty in her relationship with the President, when the affair was based on lies; indeed, it was a mirror image of her relationship with Andy Bleiler. “You’re young, you’re vibrant,” the juror continued, “I can’t figure out why you keep going after things that aren’t free, that aren’t obtainable.”
Monica found it both very difficult and very painful to answer. She admitted that she had to work on herself, and said she particularly regretted that she had an affair with a married man. Yet this response, though truthful as far as it went, did not begin to address Monica’s unresolved conflict between her heart, whose dynamics derived largely from her childhood response to her parents’ divorce, and her head. Smart woman, stupid choices. “It was the toughest question I faced,” she admits now. “I felt as if I were standing naked in front of the whole world, all my weaknesses exposed for everyone to look at.”
The jury then moved on to ask her about another harrowing experience, the day of the sting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City. At that point Monica requested that Mike Emmick, the Starr prosecutor who had been with her in Room 1012, leave the courtroom, before taking them through the worst day of her life. She and some of the jurors broke down in tears as she relived the fear, the guilt and the pain of those long and agonizing hours. Typical of Monica, she wanted the jury to have some sense of the real her, asking them to call her “Monica.” One female juror said, “But you’ll always be Miss Lewinsky.” Monica replied: “Not if I get married!”
As the questioning drew to a close, the jurors asked if she had anything that she wanted to share with them. Monica, who realized that this would be her first opportunity to make a statement as well as an apology to the representatives of the country as a whole, had given the matter some thought. Now she said, “I would just like to say that no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence. And that I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for everything that’s happened.” Once more she burst into tears, just managing to blurt out the words, “And I hate Linda Tripp.”
As frightening and demeaning as the process had been, Monica’s honesty and openness had clearly touched the strangers sitting opposite her. The juror who had asked such penetrating questions told her that she had won her forgiveness, and several others urged her to forget Linda Tripp and move on with her life. Finally, the forewoman took the floor and, speaking on behalf of the whole Grand Jury, told the unhappy girl, “We wanted to offer you a bouquet of good wishes that includes luck, success, happiness and blessings.” Once more Monica struggled to stem her tears, deeply moved by these generous words. Even Starr’s deputies were impressed; prosecutor Karin Immergut told their prime witness, “I’ve never seen a lovefest like it.”
Monica felt vindicated, not by the fact that the President, after seven months of evasion, had finally admitted to a relationship with her, but by the response of the jurors, who had set aside their preconceptions and prejudices and opened up their hearts and minds to a vulnerable yet honest young woman. But she could not help wondering whether, if she had turned down the immunity deal, the Grand Jury would have indicted her. It was a sorrowful moment, made worse by the feeling that somehow she might have been able to protect the President and save herself the humiliation and pain of the last few weeks. Her only consolation was that, like the rest of “Team Lewinsky,” she believed she was now free of the Special Prosecutor, the Grand Jury and the FBI.
She had a rude awakening. The Office of the Independent Counsel told her that, because of what the President had said in his testimony to the Grand Jury, she must make a deposition, under oath, about the sexual aspect of the relationship. Not only that, but Special Prosecutor Starr wanted the cameras rolling as Monica answered detailed questions about how, when, where and why she had performed oral sex on the President, and talked about other intimate details of their sexual relationship. This, it seems, is what his four-year investigation had come down to—making, in the name of the American people, a video as verbally explicit as a pornographic movie.
Ostensibly, the rationale behind the idea was that it would spare Monica the ordeal of talking about these matters in front of the Grand Jury. Videotaped evidence is used in court cases involving young children, especially in cases of rape or sexual abuse. In those instances, however, the video evidence is shown in closed court and remains absolutely confidential. Yet when, on September 9, Starr submitted to Congress his report and eighteen boxes of supporting material, almost every detail was published.
The idea that Starr’s sex video itself might also be released to the public—and undoubtedly it would have been a best-seller—filled Monica with the deepest dread. Not even her impressive reserves of courage and resilience could have coped with such an intrusion. “It would have been the complete and utter destruction of my soul,” she says. “I don’t think I would have ever been able to recover from that. I try not to think about it much; the only way I have been able to deal with it is to put it aside. As my step-uncle Jeff says, denial is underrated.”
When the videotape idea was first mooted, she had consulted her attorney Plato Cacheris. At first, he told her that he didn’t see a real problem with videotaped evidence. He then had second thoughts, however, feeling that the process was unnecessary. By contrast, Bernie Lewinsky had had not a moment’s hesitation in condemning the proposal when they told him of it. “I said that, speaking as her father, I thought this was salacious and wrong,” he says. “It was sick.”
Though the video idea was dropped, Monica still had to go through each sexual encounter in detail with two female prosecutors, Karin Immergut and Mary Anne Wirth. What angers her most of all about the taking of her deposition, which she considered to be fundamentally misogynistic, was that the OIC justified it by claiming that the President’s testimony concerning their sexual relationship differed substantially from Monica’s. Yet when his testimony became public, it was clear that his account was based on a strict legal definition of sexual relations, conforming to his defense in the Paula Jones case, and performing semantic acrobatics to sidestep the admission of a sexual relationship with Monica. In any case, since she had already answered the Grand Jury’s questions about the sexual side of their affair, Monica felt that this further deposition was superfluous.
August 26, the day on which she made her deposition at the Office of the Independent Counsel on Pennsylvania Avenue, was perhaps the most degrading of all. At one point, compelled to talk about performing oral sex on the President, Monica said to the two prosecutors, “I can’t believe my dad is going to have to hear this one
day.” They assured her that her evidence would not necessarily be made public. Then the questioning continued—“Who unzipped whose zipper?” “Did he touch you under the bra or over the bra?” “Did he have his mouth on your breast or over your bra?” and so on—for two agonizing hours. When it was all over, Monica went home and took a long, hot shower, trying to wash away her shame and humiliation. “I felt so dirty, like I had been emotionally raped. It was really disgusting.”
She was desperate to get out of Washington, the city that had defiled her, as soon as possible. Starr’s deputies were reluctant to let her leave, however, in case they needed her to go over Linda Tripp’s tapes. When they eventually agreed that she might go away for a few days, they demanded to know where she would be. Monica thought it was none of their business and refused to tell them. In the end they gave in, but they said they just wanted to know if she was going anywhere near Martha’s Vineyard, where the Clintons were on holiday. At this Cacheris broke in, saying with a chuckle, “Yes, she’s going to see Vernon Jordan about a job.”
In fact, she did go to New England—though not to Martha’s Vineyard—where she spent precious time with her mother and Peter Straus’s family at their holiday home. After just four days, however, Plato Cacheris called to say that the OIC had ordered her to return to Washington to listen to the Linda Tripp tapes. “This was the moment I had been dreading all along,” she says. “I didn’t know how I would handle it. The whole thing made me very nervous and apprehensive. Next to going to jail, publication of the Tripp tapes was my worst nightmare.”
On September 3, Monica and her attorney Sydney Hoffmann arrived at the offices of the Independent Counsel in Washington and began the “tortuous” process of listening to twenty hours of conversation between herself and Tripp. It took three full days, which were spent sitting in a windowless, airless room, listening to duplicates of the tapes while correcting the transcripts and highlighting personal comments they wanted deleted or edited. For Monica, “It was humiliating, it was painful and it really opened up the well of hatred and anger I feel for Linda Tripp. It awakened my disbelief at myself and the stupid things I said. There was so much more bullshit there than substance—half the conversations were about diet, shopping, being fat and other stupid stuff. Even the material about the President was just me whinging away.” At one point she began to laugh, and told Karin Immergut, the prosecutor listening with them, that she could not believe the investigation had been based on such trivial nonsense.
One person was taking it very seriously, though. While Monica sat listening to herself complain to Tripp about the “Big Creep,” the President told a press conference in Ireland, “I made a big mistake. It is indefensible and I am sorry.” It was his first true apology and Monica missed it, of course, because she was carefully screening the tapes.
The more she heard, the more clearly she realized that, when Linda Tripp had first approached the Special Prosecutor’s office in January, she had given them a highly colored and only partial account of the events of October, November and December 1997. A number of significant conversations—notably talks about Vernon Jordan’s involvement with her job search, which clearly demonstrated that the attorney had been helping Monica before she was caught up in the Paula Jones case—were not there.
The fact that key conversations appeared to have been omitted led her to suspect that Tripp may have doctored the tapes, leaving out certain key conversations specifically in order to make Monica’s surviving comments seem more dramatic and conspiratorial. Monica believes “with my heart and soul that Linda Tripp misled them when she saw Starr. I read it in her testimony. She just twisted everything, making it seem more sinister than it was.”
As she listened to the tapes, what also both startled and annoyed her was how little incriminating evidence there was about Vernon Jordan, and how very often Tripp’s sentiments—those concerning Kathleen Willey, for instance—neatly dovetailed with the “Talking Points.” She thought that Starr and his deputies should have realized, simply from listening to the tapes, that the issues discussed in the “Talking Points” memo were reflected in her conversations with Tripp, and that no third party, let alone a lawyers, had ever been involved.
What concerned Monica most of all, however, was that she had said some hurtful things about members of her own family, and she was frantic at the thought they might learn of them. Indeed, she felt so wretched and ashamed of herself that, as the process continued, she no longer wanted to see or even to speak to those close to her. “I felt so horrible—I couldn’t believe my language and the stupid, cruel things I said about people I love. I was so worried that I was going to ruin everybody’s lives.” To a lesser extent, she was also worried by the way her personality came across on the tapes: even the prosecutor could not believe that the woman sitting with her in the room was the woman on the tapes.
The lowest point in those three days was when she was forced to listen to herself sobbing over the line to Tripp. “I burst into tears,” she admits. “I had forgotten how much pain I’d been in with this relationship. I just couldn’t believe the cruelty of someone who would deliberately tape that pain.”
Besides having to deal with the raw emotions provoked by listening to the tapes, Monica was confronted with documents taken by the prosecutors from the hard-disk drive of her computer. These were letters, most of them never sent, which she had written to the President during the tumultuous period before Christmas 1997. Not content with snatching her body, Starr’s deputies were now invading her mind. They had exposed her sex life and dissected her personality; now they wanted to scrutinize her very soul. It was an intrusion too far. Monica started to cry, and then screamed at Immergut: “This is so wrong! Do you not understand that no one else is supposed to read this?” Her attorney Sydney Hoffman was equally outraged. Faced with this display of fury, Immergut assured them that the documents would be placed under lock and key, and indicated that they might not appear in the final report.
The issue of publication had preyed on Monica’s mind ever since she had won immunity. Even on the day she signed the agreement she had wanted written confirmation from Starr that they would agree to “redact”—that is, edit—or delete personal material, particularly comments about her family, which was not relevant to the inquiry. Although no such confirmation was forthcoming, Monica’s attorney assured her that there would be no problem over the issue.
In the light of all the leaks there had been, she had no faith in Immergut’s assurances, so when she came to make her “sex” deposition on August 26, she saw it as her last bargaining chip with which to extract from the OIC a written agreement ensuring that her family’s privacy—what little remained of it—should not be violated. Her family were equally anxious. Marcia wrote to Starr, begging that his published material should respect the family’s privacy. He did not deign to reply. Neither did Republican Senator Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to whom she wrote in similar vein before the committee’s decision to release the Tripp tapes into the public domain. (Ironically, Congress was so stunned by the public backlash resulting from the sensational, prurient, almost pornographic nature of the Starr Report, that the Judiciary Committee ordered the Tripp tapes to be heavily censored before releasing them.)
In the end, on September 9, the day Starr submitted his report to Congress, the prosecutors and Monica’s attorneys met to discuss any mutually agreeable deletions. For example, Starr had wanted to name all Monica’s lovers so as to establish her credibility in relation to the President’s testimony, but in the end, Congress deleted their names.
Like everyone else involved in the case, Monica was a helpless spectator as the Starr Report and its accompanying eighteen boxes of information—“guilt by volume,” as one wit noted—which the Special Prosecutor had accumulated during his four-year investigation were delivered to the House of Representatives by uniformed police officers. The Whitewater land-deal scandal, which Starr was originally deputed to invest
igate, was mentioned only four times in his 453-page report. He concentrated his fire almost exclusively on the President’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In all, the report listed eleven possible grounds for impeachment, including perjury, witness tampering, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. The test for impeaching the President under the US Constitution was whether Clinton had actually committed “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” It was left to Congress to decide whether the Independent Counsel had made a compelling case for implementing that process.
Almost immediately, the President’s attorney, David Kendall, hit back at the report, saying, “This is personal and not impeachable. The salacious allegations in this referral are simply intended to humiliate, embarrass and politically damage the President.” Naturally, this view did not wash with Kenneth Starr, who had written in his report, “In view of the enormous trust and responsibility attendant to his high Office, the President has a manifest duty to ensure that his conduct at all times complies with the law of the land.” Perjury and obstruction, he continued, “are profoundly serious matters. When such acts are committed by the President of the United States, we believe those acts ‘may constitute grounds for impeachment.’”
As the nation watched the drama unfold, the President once again donned sackcloth and ashes, telling an audience in Florida on that same day, September 9, “I let you down. I let my family down. I let this country down. But I’m trying to make it right. I’m determined to never let anything like that happen again.” Two days later, after the House of Representatives voted to release the report on the Internet, a contrite Clinton spoke at a prayer breakfast in Washington, at which he said, “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.” He did, however, use the occasion to apologize, not only to his own family, friends and colleagues, but also, and for the first time, to Monica and her family. “It is important to me.” he said, “that everybody who has been hurt knows that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family, also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and all the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.”
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