Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [175]
Geragos now openly charged that Ken Starr and his prosecutors had manipulated the local district attorney’s office, causing it to transport Susan to the decrepit Sybil Brand Institute for Women, where she was placed in lockdown status and classified “K-10,” a status reserved for murderers, child molesters, and the most dangerous reprobates who flowed through the prison system. This was done, Susan’s lawyer declared, as a naked form of coercion. Susan was issued a red jumpsuit and locked in a cell up to twenty-three hours a day, not “for her own safety,” but because Starr’s office was trying to make life as intolerable as possible for her. Although OIC denied playing any role in Susan’s transfer to the California prison as she awaited trial, and an internal Bureau of Prisons investigation supported OIC’s assertion, many observers were skeptical.
On NBC’s Dateline, Susan’s family weighed in, charging that this was a “deliberate” form of psychological torment “aimed at breaking Susan’s silence.” Her mother, Laurette Henley, had grown up in Nazi-occupied Belgium, where her family had harbored resistance fighters in their basement. She now spoke of her daughter’s refusal to cave in. Mrs. Henley said that she had begged Susan to reconsider her plan not to testify in front of Starr’s grand jury. When Susan refused to budge, Laurette Henley took a deep breath and told her daughter, “If I could stand up to them [the Nazis] you can stand up to them [Starr’s prosecutors].”
Susan herself, granting her first television interview from inside the prison in California, appeared coolly defiant. Dressed in a simple peach-colored top, she said that the tactics used by Starr and his henchmen would never cause her to buckle. Although she felt as if “my life was run over [by] a Mack truck,” she had made a solemn vow “never to have anything to do with this corrupt investigation.”
When asked if she expected a pardon from President Bill Clinton when she was released, Susan replied, “No. In fact, I don’t want a pardon. I didn’t do anything wrong.” The show’s host pointed out that with two simple phone calls, Susan could be “free and wealthy.” She simply needed to call the OIC prosecutors, give them a ginned-up story about the Clintons, and then place a call to a major book publisher and wait for her royalty checks to roll in. “Are those phone calls you’ll ever make?”
Susan replied, her tone adamant, “No. I’ve put in [nearly] a year of my life, about something I believe so strongly in, that this man [Starr] is really wrong in what he’s doing.” She looked into the camera before being escorted back to her prison cell. “And I will never, ever be sorry for what I’ve done,” she declared.
JIM McDougal, for his part, had settled in tolerably well at the federal facility in Fort Worth. He was enjoying working on his autobiography and hoped to call it The Promoter, after a series of editorials in the Little Rock papers referring to his penchant for engaging in daring business deals. He liked the sound of that title.
Yet some aspects of prison life were wearing him down. On Halloween Day 1997, Jim McDougal reported for his monthly mental status meeting at 8:00 A.M., taking his usual chair across from his doctor, Dr. Richard Clark. McDougal complained of “increased feelings of depression and anxiety due to stressors he experienced last week.” The principal stressor, he told the doctor, was his inability to provide a urine sample when ordered to perform by prison guards. His inability to urinate had led to a “shot,” or an incident report, being filed against him. According to Dr. Clark’s notes of the meeting, McDougal said that “he did not know at this point how it was that his name had come about on a list for drug testing.” This incident was particularly strange because “his crimes had nothing to do with drugs.” Second, McDougal told Clark, the whole episode was mortifying. “And he told me that he