Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [240]
According to Monica’s account, the prosecutor also stated more than once: “You could spend up to twenty-seven years in jail.”
At some point in the speech, Monica completely broke down. “In fact, ‘wailing’ is not too strong [a word] I don’t think,” said Emmick. “I mean, my impression was she was just completely overwhelmed by everything that was happening.” The young woman began crying out, “My life is ruined. Who’s going to marry me after this?” At one point, Monica stared at the window and gasped, “All this will go away if I just kill myself.” She had spent the past months worrying about her broken relationship with Clinton and desperately assessing whether anything could be salvaged of it. Next, the Paula Jones subpoena had arrived to knock her deeper into a black hole. Now this?
Monica would recall a host of disjointed thoughts crowding her mind. Foremost among these was, “I can’t believe this has happened.” How could she be sitting in this hotel room, surrounded by all these FBI agents with badges and weapons and so many prosecutors from Ken Starr’s office? She had always assumed that by having an affair with a married man who happened to be the president of the United States, she always faced the possibility that something would go wrong—she might one day wake up and see her picture on the cover of a tabloid magazine, humiliating her family and hurting Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. But even during the craziest moments obsessing about the dysfunctional relationship in which she had entangled herself, she never dreamed that she might end up with this—a group of federal prosecutors and FBI agents telling her she might go to jail for a quarter century. For Lewinsky, the balloon had popped and “all the air was coming out.… I was flipped out and in shock and somewhat suicidal. And at the same time, trying to figure out how to get myself out of this. And knowing that what they were saying they wanted me to do, I couldn’t do.”
As Mike Emmick clasped his hands together, trying to figure out how to deal with this emotionally overwrought young woman, he felt completely stymied. “She just cried and cried and cried,” recalled Emmick. “And I admit, we should have anticipated this much more. We were completely floored by that. I mean, she was very loud, and people were even concerned that people walking down the hall would hear and wouldn’t know how to interpret it. She didn’t seem to be able to stop herself from crying.” Emmick remembered feeling absolutely helpless, “sort of like a bunch of men standing around with a baby that needs changing. We just looked around at each other and, ‘What do we do? This is not part of the game plan.’”
One FBI agent fetched Monica a glass of water. Another appeared with tissues from the bathroom. “And we tried to calm her down as best we could,” recalled the California prosecutor.
Monica lost it again when the FBI pulled out a copy of her affidavit in the Jones case—an affidavit that had not yet been filed. In addressing one of the great riddles of that day—where did the affidavit come from?—Emmick would later reply, “We don’t know. It came across a fax machine.” The prosecutors were able to reconstruct that the fax originated in the building where Jim Moody, Linda Tripp’s new attorney, maintained his offices. Said Emmick: “As odd as it seems, I don’t think I saw it before confronting Ms. Lewinsky with it in the Ritz-Carlton.” Nor was he aware that the document had not yet been filed: “We assumed that it had been filed because when you see something that has come across