Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [214]
There was also a young woman named Monica Lewinsky (Jane Doe No. 6), Fisher mentioned in a quick breath. Judge Wright looked up. “Can you tell me who she is?…” the judge asked. “I never heard of her.”
Fisher replied, without flinching, “She’s the young woman who worked in the White House for a period of time and was later transferred to a job in the Pentagon.”
Judge Wright jotted a note. “All right,” she said. “Thanks.”
The Dallas lawyers were confident that Judge Wright grossly underestimated the potential strength of their case, at least the god-awful pressure they could bring to bear on Bill Clinton once they unleashed this Jane Doe information. Their private investigators, the husband-wife team of Rick and Beverly Lambert, had unearthed evidence of a host of dalliances that were potentially embarrassing for the president. “We had hit pay dirt in so many areas,” said Fisher, that the Jones team could not even “superficially address each of them.” The latest piece of information had come from a woman named Linda Tripp—who had contacted the Dallas lawyers of her own accord. Tripp had reported that Clinton was engaged in sexual relations in the White House—fairly recently—with a young, vulnerable former intern named Monica Lewinsky. This tip was particularly “intriguing” to the Dallas lawyers, “because there seemed to be more and more corroboration for it” and “because of the similarities with Paula Jones—the age, the vulnerability of the person, the request for oral sex.”
The presumably consensual nature of Lewinsky’s affair with the president did not, in Jim Fisher’s mind, render it irrelevant. His theory was this: “When the president of the United States is asking for a favor of a twenty-one-year-old whose entire career could be destroyed by a word from him, there are coercive elements there.” Also, Lewinsky had a history of psychological counseling dating back to her teenage years. Fisher believed that he could make a strong argument to a jury that any consent given by this young woman was illusory. Fisher was prepared to argue that “he [Clinton] took advantage of his position and exploited her.”
Bob Bennett again spoke up loudly, urging the judge to keep out the entire list of Jane Does. This ploy was designed solely “to embarrass the president.” Most of the allegations relating to these women involved consensual relations—even if one believed the allegations, which Bennett did not—and had nothing to do with sexual harassment. Additionally, in most cases, there was “no employment nexus at all.”
The Dallas lawyers, waiting for this moment, sprung to their feet and announced that they intended to call a psychiatrist to testify that Bill Clinton was a “sex addict.” At this, the judge’s jaw tightened with displeasure. “I think, really, Gennifer Flowers and the troopers and Paula Jones is bad enough,” she chastised. She had no intention of allowing plaintiffs to use her federal courtroom to “throw dirt at the President.” This litigation was not a free pass to say, “Let’s ask how many other women did he pat on the fanny.” The sex topic could be explored within reason, said the judge—but she planned to watch it like a hawk. Anything that occurred more than “five years before the event,” or with nonemployees, was automatically out of bounds. Also, she was going to put the Jones lawyers on the clock. This case only deserved five days, six days at most. If they wanted to waste their limited time getting into titillating stories involving “other women,” they could do so at their own peril.
Bob Bennett was disappointed that the “other women” topic was permitted at all. He later said: “I felt she didn’t like Bill Clinton, particularly.