Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [244]
Monica later admitted that if the opportunity had presented itself, “I would have tried to kill her.”
Indeed, the young woman might have done even worse if she had known that after finishing her shopping at the mall, Tripp was headed home on an express bus to Maryland to meet with Paula Jones’s Dallas lawyer, to supply him with ammunition for the president’s deposition the following day. At the time, Tripp feigned total ignorance as to what was going on.
When Monica found a phone that she deemed safe, she dialed her mother’s number, her hands trembling. Marcia Lewis would remember: “She [Monica] was crying and gasping for breath and I just couldn’t understand, and I obviously knew something terrible had happened. I thought it was an accident… that’s what I thought.”
Monica finally choked out the words: “The FBI has me; it has to do with the affidavit and Linda Tripp.” She later admitted, “I was hysterical.”
The bracing of Monica Lewinsky, and the complications that sprung from it, was one monkey that OIC would never get off its back. As much as the events of this day and night would haunt Monica Lewinsky and her family, they would also haunt OIC, leaving unanswered questions about its handling of the Lewinsky sting on which its whole case against Bill Clinton was built. These uncomfortable secrets about OIC’s conduct would be locked in a government archive for a decade. But they would not be lost altogether.
CHAPTER
29
THE AVUNCULAR MR. GINSBURG
Upstairs in Room 1012, the prosecutors and FBI agents were taking bets on whether Lewinsky “was really going to come back.” To their surprise, the former intern reappeared, reporting that she had made contact with her mother, who was “freaked out” when she learned of this god-awful predicament. Her mother, Monica said with tears welling, wanted to speak with the feds directly. By this point, Emmick was starting to feel punch-drunk from tiredness. He concluded that if the mother was going to help get a decision made, what the hell?
So he dialed Marcia Lewis’s number and spoke into the phone: “We have your daughter, and she’s in trouble and we need her to cooperate.” Monica’s mother recalled feeling as if she had received an injection of some crazy, mind-altering drug. She could discern that Monica’s situation had something to do with the Paula Jones case and that Kenneth Starr and the FBI were involved. Other than that, the words were a blur of indistinguishable vowels and consonants. From the tone of the man’s voice and from the sound of her daughter sobbing in the background, all Marcia could tell was that this “was not a joke.”
Monica’s mother told the prosecutor, “Please don’t do anything; I’m coming.” There was a train leaving New York for Washington at 5:00, she said. She would be on it. In response to later assertions that she was intentionally taking the slowest means of transportation in order to buy time, Marcia Lewis would react with incredulity: “I had an absolute sort of primeval mother response.” Her only thought was, “They have my child; I’m going to go get her. It was that basic. I had no sophisticated understanding of why this would even be happening. Couldn’t have told you at that time. Couldn’t have begun to understand.” Monica’s mother dismissed the notion that she had any plan whatsoever. “No, I wish that I had been that sophisticated or that clever. I was very fearful, and my goal was to rescue my child, and I couldn’t have begun to imagine where I was going and what I would find there.”
With her mother en route, Monica now revisited the topic of calling Frank Carter. Mike Emmick, pacing the floor, was still not enthusiastic about the notion. “We thought that his allegiance to Jordan might be very substantial,