Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [248]
At 10:16, Monica’s mother arrived at the Ritz-Carlton carrying a travel bag and wearing a fur coat over her black business suit. Marcia Lewis later recalled that moment when she re united with her daughter in the room: “She was standing by the window, and her face was red and swollen from crying and she was holding a Bible, and she was shaking, just uncontrollably, just shaking so hard.” Monica’s mother also recalled that “one of the men, whom I later found out was Mike Emmick, was lounging on the bed,” which she found “distasteful.” No sooner had Marcia “hugged Monica” than Starr’s team asked the mother to step into the adjoining room. According to Marcia’s recollection, they said, “Your daughter’s in trouble. She could go to jail for twenty-seven years for witness tampering and filing of false affidavit and obstruction of justice.” That doomlike scenario could be erased, but only if Lewinsky was willing to “cooperate.”
Marcia Lewis answered, “Of course she’ll cooperate.” She wasn’t sure what that meant, legally speaking. The most baffling thing, for Monica’s mother, was that all of this had happened “because she lied … about this?” Adultery was a bad thing, she knew. But it usually didn’t result in a horde of prosecutors and FBI agents swooping down on the young woman and threatening to send her to jail for twenty-seven years.
The OIC group agreed to give mother and daughter “some private time to talk” in the hallway, since the women were thoroughly convinced that “the room was bugged.” Even from a distance, the prosecutors could hear Monica and her mother “yelling amongst themselves.” Marcia Lewis kept telling her daughter, “It’s okay, it will be all right.” Monica, in turn, was whispering so loudly she half shouted, “I’m not going to be the one who brings down the f——ing President.”
It was during this heated caucus that Marcia Lewis recalled her daughter saying, “They want me to wear a wire, and they want me to tape-record people, and they want me to tape-record conversations with Betty Currie, and they want me to wear a wire and tape President Clinton and Vernon Jordan.” Marcia Lewis clearly remembered her daughter communicating, “I can’t do that; I won’t do that.”
Truth be told, in recent months Marcia Lewis had grown downright distressed about her daughter’s infatuation with Bill Clinton. She had repeatedly encouraged Monica “to find single men her own age.” Still, wasn’t the punishment being bandied about by the Starr prosecutors a bit extreme? Monica’s mother raised the idea with the Starr troupe: Could her daughter receive immunity without having to tape-record anyone? Emmick shook his head; they needed evidence that could be used in court. Marcia next asked if the Starr prosecutors could put the offer of immunity in writing? Emmick left the room for another powwow and then returned to say he couldn’t do that, because they “didn’t have a typewriter.”
It was at that point that Marcia Lewis concluded that she and her daughter were in a lose-lose situation. Seated in her New York condo years later, remarried to a wealthy newspaper owner, Peter Straus, and having attempted to put this trauma behind her, Monica’s mother would say, “I’m afraid of them still.” She felt that she was dealing with “a frightening, frightening situation.” All she could say to Mike Emmick that night, as he pressed for an immunity agreement while declining to put anything in writing, was, “I don’t see how I can make this decision, either. We really ought to talk with [Monica’s] dad.”
It turned out that Marcia Lewis had already contacted her ex-husband, Bernie Lewinsky, giving him a hurried call on the train using her cell phone. Even though the signal kept fading in and out as the train roared through tunnels, Bernie had processed the basic facts. Marcia now made her confession to the OIC team—Mr. Lewinsky had been notified and he wanted to talk to Starr’s prosecutors, too.
Agent Fallon threw a pencil against the desk. It landed on its eraser and bounced across