• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2110 0

however, is that the written Talking Points were part of a broader series of deceptions carried out by the two women, to throw each other off the track. For one, Monica told Tripp that she had not yet signed her affidavit and that she was “holding out” for a plum job from Vernon Jordan before she did so. (In fact, Monica had already signed the affidavit in Frank Carter’s office on January 7; it was unrelated to her discussions with Jordan about finding new employment; the job that she had accepted at Revlon in New York was hardly a “plum,” as it paid a pittance compared with her position at the Pentagon.) Tripp, for her part, had told Monica that morning that she was thinking of firing her lawyer Kirby Behre and replacing him with attorney Jim Moody at the suggestion of a “family friend.” She wanted Monica to drive her to Behre’s office “for moral support” because canning Behre would be an unpleasant task. (In fact, Tripp had already terminated Behre and had replaced him with attorney Jim Moody at the suggestion—not of a family friend—but of literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who had met Moody through the “elves.”)

With these mutual deceptions in play, Monica picked up Tripp after work and handed her a typed, three-page document. The young woman described it as a way for Tripp to get through this ordeal of the Paula Jones deposition with minimum hassle. The concept was beautifully simple: Tripp could sign an affidavit—as Monica had done—file it with the federal judge in Little Rock, and get out of Dodge.

Captioned “points to make in affidavit,” the three-page Talking Points were surprisingly innocuous for all the hoopla they later generated. The first paragraph suggested that Tripp should begin her signed statement by describing “what you do now, what you did at the White House and for how many years you were there.” The Talking Points then regurgitated Tripp’s position with respect to the Kathleen Willey incident—as already reported in Newsweek—highlighting that Willey had not seemed upset by her encounter with President Clinton. The document concluded by stating that Tripp “never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody.” The puzzling three-page document never directly addressed Monica’s affair with the president, other than an odd reference in the last paragraph, where the writer switched to first person and added: “By the way, remember how I [Tripp] said there was someone else that I knew about? Well, she turned out to be this huge liar. I found out she left the WH because she was stalking the P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another scandal I know about.”

Years later, Monica stared at a copy of the Talking Points and emphasized that they never directly advocated that Tripp lie about anything. She insisted that the document was nothing more than a typed synopsis of ideas Tripp had already shared with her. After presidential lawyer Bob Bennett had replied to the initial Newsweek story about Willey, attacking Tripp’s credibility, Monica had helped Tripp draft a strong letter to the editor of Newsweek, defending her comments. That letter was never published. Still, its contents remained fresh in the younger woman’s mind. She explained: “The genesis of a lot of the ideas [in the Talking Points] came from various things that Linda had actually said or written.”

Lewinsky insisted (and the FBI later confirmed) that she typed the document on her own home computer. Indeed, several prior drafts of the document retrieved from her computer confirmed that fact. According to Monica’s story, she typed the final Talking Points in a rush, over a period of a day or so, as she discussed the subject with Tripp, in anticipation of handing the short summary over to her older friend.

Linda Tripp, however, scoffed at this explanation. She remained convinced that someone inside the White House, most likely Bruce Lindsey or Vernon Jordan or even President Clinton himself, had dictated the document to Monica in order to coax Tripp to provide false testimony in the Jones case. Tripp later acknowledged,