A Vast Conspiracy (41 page)

But Starr’s muddled defense should not obscure the fact that Lewinsky’s treatment in the hotel room was entirely appropriate for an important witness in an unfolding criminal investigation. From the moment she arrived at 1:05
P.M.
, Emmick and later Jackie Bennett did encourage her to cooperate—and make the controlled calls. They told her she might be prosecuted and face a long prison sentence, which was a real, if remote, possibility. Regarding the dicey business of contacting her lawyer, the prosecutors didn’t want her to reach out to Frank Carter, but they didn’t stop her either. (The situation was complicated by the fact that the prosecutors regarded Carter as a suspect at that point; they believed he had prepared Lewinsky’s false affidavit, but they didn’t know whether Carter knew it was false.) If a narcotics suspect had been treated as Lewinsky was at the Ritz-Carlton, there might well have been public outrage about how she had been coddled. The discomfort with Lewinsky’s treatment seemed mostly to have been a form of displaced anger. It wasn’t the interrogation that offended people as much as the subject matter of Starr’s investigation—one rooted in consensual sexual encounters.

In truth, the showdown in Room 1012 traced a slow but sure trajectory from tragedy to farce. The prosecutors had agreed that Emmick would handle the questioning. An Angeleno, like Lewinsky, Emmick was also a handsome, easygoing type who had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Compared to the overbearing Bennett and intense Udolf, Emmick was the obvious choice.

At first, though, Lewinsky was in no position to be questioned. She had launched into an angry tirade against the stone-faced Tripp, who was sitting silently on a sofa. “Make her stay and watch,” Monica recalled saying to the agents. “I want that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me.” Soon enough, however, Udolf stepped in from the adjoining room and suggested that they let Tripp go on her way. “If we’re going to flip this girl,” Udolf said quietly to his colleagues, “we’re not going to do it with that bitch in the room.” Tripp was excused, but the agents told her to remain in the mall. Lewinsky was finally alone with her inquisitors.

Emmick tried to play the good cop, explaining that Starr’s office wanted Lewinsky to cooperate in their investigation. Lewinsky listened in silence for a time, and then, almost without warning, she broke down in hysterical, unhinged sobbing. Emmick tried to calm her, but he couldn’t break through. As Emmick fretted to his colleagues in the adjoining room, Lewinsky went on and on, for a full ninety minutes. Finally, at around three o’clock, she began to recover her equilibrium. Lewinsky asked to call her mother, and Emmick reluctantly allowed Monica to leave the room and make the call from a pay phone. Since she wasn’t under arrest, Emmick couldn’t stop her. “Well, that’s it,” Emmick told the agents. “She’s never coming back.”

But Lewinsky did return, and her mother, Marcia Lewis, called the room from New York. On the spot, Emmick decided to offer immunity to both Monica and her mother. Obviously stalling, Lewinsky asked if her mother could join the negotiations in person. Emmick didn’t like the idea of the delay, but he had little choice but to agree. After weighing whether Monica should be escorted to New York or to the middle ground of Philadelphia, Lewis said she would leave immediately for D.C. As Lewinsky weighed the offer, Jackie Bennett arrived to play the bad cop. “You’re twenty-four years old, you’re smart, you’re old enough, you don’t need to call your mommy,” he said. But Lewinsky wanted to wait for her mother—who feared air travel and was arriving by train.

As the minutes, and then the hours, began to pass, Emmick and his colleagues began to notice a transformation come over Lewinsky. She began to try to ingratiate herself with the investigators—and then display her own sense of entitlement. She said she had wanted to become an FBI agent herself. She told them a dirty joke. She said she wanted to go for a walk, so Emmick and the agents took her on a long amble through every level of the mall—into Crate & Barrel, a men’s clothing place, and a few other stores.
At one point, Lewinsky said she had to go to the bathroom and was gone for about fifteen minutes. Again, Emmick figured she had skipped. (In fact, she had tried unsuccessfully to tip Betty Currie about the investigation.)

When Lewinsky returned, and the whole group went to dinner at Mozzarella’s American Grill. They returned to the room and watched the beginning of
There’s No Business Like Show Business
. At around eight o’clock, Lewis called to say her train was delayed. At one point, Lewinsky said her contact lenses were drying out. An agent searched the mall for a drugstore, but the best he could do was persuade the Ritz-Carlton sundries store to reopen. When the agent returned with the solution, Lewinsky said, “That’s cleaner. I wanted saline”—and the agent returned to prowl the mall again.

Marcia Lewis finally arrived at 10:16
P.M.
, and spoke to her daughter alone. At this point, everyone in the room was woozy from the combination of boredom and tension. Mother and daughter called Monica’s father, Bernie Lewinsky, in Los Angeles. A lawyer friend of Bernie’s, a fellow named William Ginsburg, called to speak to Monica and then to the prosecutors. Clearly, Lewinsky would not be cooperating. At 12:45
A.M.
, the agents escorted Lewinsky and her mother to Monica’s car in the mall parking lot.

As she wandered the mall with her law enforcement escort on Friday, Lewinsky never noticed one of her more famous fellow shoppers. As it happened, Susan Carpenter-McMillan had chosen that very mall to shop for a new suit for her friend Paula Jones. Susan thought Paula deserved something special to wear to the deposition of President Bill Clinton the following day.

12

The Definition of Sex—and L-E-W-I-N-S-K-Y

“A
ll right,” said Judge Susan Webber Wright. “The purpose of this hearing is really rather unusual. It’s to enable the court to make some kind of decision concerning the scope of the deposition of President Clinton. This deposition will be an extraordinary event.”

They were all in an unfamiliar courtroom. In an effort to avoid the scrutiny of the press, Judge Wright had called a hearing in the small federal courthouse in Pine Bluff, about forty miles south of her usual home base in Little Rock. The judge had even ordered the windows in the courthouse covered, so that no one could see that she was meeting with the lawyers in
Jones v. Clinton
. News of the meeting did not leak, and the secrecy prompted unusual candor, especially from the judge. It was the morning of Monday, January 12, five days before Bill Clinton would become the first sitting president in American history to be examined as a party in a lawsuit.

In her decision on December 11, Wright had already established the general ground rules for the examination of the president, but she wanted one last chance to clarify matters with the lawyers. Everyone recognized that the stakes for Saturday’s deposition were at least as high as for the lawsuit itself. The opportunity to examine Clinton under oath had been a principal reason the Dallas lawyers agreed to represent Paula Jones. Like all
the depositions in the case, the president’s would take place in secret, but Bob Bennett understood the ways of politics well enough to know that some—or, more likely, all—of the president’s words would eventually be made public.

Clinton had long ago stated that he remembered nothing about any meeting with Paula Jones in a hotel room, so his testimony on the incident itself was sure to be uneventful. The real controversy would involve what the plaintiff’s lawyers called the “pattern and practice” issues—that is, Clinton’s testimony about his relationships with other women. As Bennett told Judge Wright, “All they can really ask him is—is sex.” In a practical sense, then, the president’s deposition marked the culmination of the campaign by journalists (led by Brock and Isikoff) and activists (initiated by Cliff Jackson and his fellow Clinton-haters) to explore the secrets of Bill Clinton’s sex life. At last they all had what they really wanted: Clinton under oath on the subject of adultery.

Wright spoke with a deep sense of unease about what was to come—the indignity, the seaminess, of it all. Like so few people in this story, Susan Wright had no agenda of her own, only a desire to provide justice in as fair and dignified a manner as possible. She had summoned the lawyers to make a last pitch to prevent her court, and the country, from heading into the abyss.

“The idea, of course, is to be above politics, to be removed from it. That is my goal,” the plain-spoken judge began, but in light of how the case had proceeded, “I feel helpless. And for that reason, I would like for you all to settle this case. I want you to get the thing settled. This case needs—it just screams for settlement.”

Bennett urged the judge not to hold out much hope that the case would end before the president’s deposition. “Your Honor,” he said, “with all due respect, I think we should use our time to focus on the deposition next Saturday and the trial. This case is not going to settle, as much as Your Honor wants it to settle. We are not going to even consider the amounts of money that they demand. Their latest demand, Your Honor, is $1.5 million, plus I have to take care of this $800,000 lien [filed by Jones’s prior lawyers, Davis and Cammarata]. We are not going to pay it. We’re not going to pay anything close to that.… I made every effort with Mr. Davis and Cammarata, we got reasonably close.… But I’ve had it.”

In retrospect, Bennett’s tough line might appear foolhardy, but he was only reflecting the views of his client and a realistic assessment of his adversaries.
For all his bluster, Bennett would have been delighted to settle the case. As a lawyer who had not tried a case in a decade, Bennett was not one to take heedless gambles on the whims of jurors. The president and first lady thought that a settlement would simply prompt more claims against them, and they wanted to maintain a hard line with the Jones lawyers. That was fine with the team from Dallas. They had entered the case, it seemed, as much to humiliate the president as to compensate their client, and an amicable settlement would have done nothing to advance their political agenda. Paula Jones’s legal situation had deteriorated, yet her lawyers had increased their settlement demand by 300 percent.

Judge Wright wanted to step up the pressure on the Jones lawyers in the only way she could—by signaling her feelings about the merits of their client’s case. “I’ll say quite candidly that with respect to Paula Jones’s case, I think that it is unlikely”—here the judge hesitated, choosing her words carefully—“I think it’s unlikely that a jury will find for her if this matter goes to trial.… And I regret, personally, that she was not willing to accept what was being talked about last summer. And I was prepared to tell her that I thought she should accept it.… I would have almost forced her to take it.”

The judge was suggesting that she might throw the case out on summary judgment—the motion that the defendants would file as soon as depositions were completed. “As you know, the record with respect to sexual harassment aspect is weak at best.… I mean, Ms. Jones is just going to have a difficult time proving her case.… I’m going to look very carefully at the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. The way it looks now, more likely than not, she will fail.”

And in the event the judge let the case go to trial, Wright said that Jones could expect a tougher time. “I have been a lifelong resident of Arkansas,” she said. “I’m aware of Bill Clinton’s reputation for womanizing.… But he doesn’t have the reputation of being a harasser. He doesn’t. And you’re not going to be able to find a jury with twelve people who have never heard that Bill Clinton is a womanizer. But I don’t believe before this case was brought he ever had a reputation for doing anything other than just chasing skirts. You know, just having a good time.…” But the lawyers on both sides were in no mood to listen to this voice of reason.

So Susan Wright turned to the doleful task of listening to the plaintiff’s lawyers summarize their case. She quickly recognized that they planned an extended tour of Bill Clinton’s sex life. She didn’t want to see the trial sidetracked
in that way, but she knew, too, that the law left her little choice. “I’m also aware that in sexual assault cases, the Rules of Evidence promulgated by the Violence Against Women Act has certainly opened it up. So I can’t say that you can’t call any of the witnesses” regarding extramarital affairs, she said. Wright was referring to the change in the law that Susan Molinari had sponsored, and that President Clinton had championed. The judge knew, as perhaps the president did not, that the line between consensual and nonconsensual sex had blurred to the point that she would have to admit some evidence of both.