Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [242]
Yet Monica would dismiss this as prosecutorial double-talk. She later insisted that she “continually asked for my attorney.” Her proof was simple: “So if I was allowed to call a lawyer, why didn’t I? Period. End of story. I’m not that stupid.”
She continued, starting to become agitated: “I said, ‘I want to call my attorney.’ And Frank Carter was the only attorney who represented me—for anything. I was twenty-four; I had never had an attorney before.” Monica also noted that OIC was threatening to prosecute her on the basis of the very “affidavit that I signed that he [Frank Carter] wrote.” How could Carter not be her lawyer for this purpose?
These same questions concerning OIC’s brace of Monica Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton would later prompt concerns about the conduct of OIC itself, sparking an internal Justice Department investigation of Ken Starr’s office, that in turn produced some surprising conclusions that were never made public.
At the time, Monica simply knew that all of this pressure was causing her to crack. As she burst into a jag of “crying and consoling,” plowing through Kleenex tissues to wipe her eyes and face, she received a page on her cell phone from her mother. Given her predicament, Monica ignored it. Instead, she excused herself to use the bathroom in the hotel room because [she told the Starr team] she was “having stomach problems.” The FBI asked her to empty her pockets and remove her phone before she used the lavatory.
Some colleagues at OIC, during this intermission, suggested to Emmick that he needed to tell Lewinsky that they were “prepared to arrest her.” Yet Emmick still didn’t think that was “an advisable approach.” Instead, when Monica returned from the bathroom he handed her fresh Kleenex tissues and waited for divine inspiration.
Ken Starr, in the meantime, was ensconced in the OIC office getting regular updates from Jackie Bennett. As Starr viewed the field operation, “it was a law enforcement activity, investigation procedure under way, and we would be advised when there were material matters to report. But we weren’t in radio contact or open telephone line contact or anything of the sort.” Emmick, to the extent that he was going to “flip” this key witness in a single encounter, would have to do it through his own prosecutorial ingenuity.
Monica sat down on the bed, demanded her phone back, and declared, “I just can’t make a decision like this on my own. I need to talk to my mom.” She and her mother, she told her inquisitors, spoke several times daily. If she didn’t return the pages, her mother would suspect something was amiss. The OIC lawyers and FBI agents caucused; it was now time to bring in the reserves. They needed a “sort of a gray-haired-looking guy to turn things around.” If Jackie Bennett appeared on the scene, Emmick decided, “maybe that will force her—not force, ‘force’ is too strong—but sort of break the logjam.”
So Starr’s chief deputy was summoned to the Ritz-Carlton to take a more direct approach. “She’s digging in,” Bruce Udolf told Bennett as he entered the suite. “It’s not going well,” Irons told the burly deputy, pulling him aside. Bennett felt that the OIC prosecutors “were being much too gentle with her. Much too solicitous, and that was sending the wrong signal. And she was starting to play us a little bit.”
Bennett was six foot three and weighed 235 pounds. He looked the part of a tough prosecutor. The moment he arrived, Monica said, “the energy in the room changed.” As she looked at this large man hulking over her, she perceived someone who was “gruff-looking,” who reminded her of a villain “from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.” Everything now seemed “stern and heavy.” Monica