Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [305]
Marcia Lewis answered, “Yes. I think she did, but I can’t say when.”
After the first day of testimony, the two OIC soft-liners—Emmick and Udolf—felt that they had accomplished their mission. Monica’s mother had substantiated the likelihood of some physical relationship. In their view, this was good enough—they couldn’t expect the moon. Yet the OIC hard-liners had a different view. On the second day of Marcia Lewis’s testimony, Sol Wisenberg took over. As Monica’s mother would recall: “I could feel that the atmosphere had changed.”
Wisenberg, striding in front of the grand jurors, demanded to know if Monica had an “affair” with the president. He hammered away, refusing to accept “no” for an answer. Marcia Lewis replied, “She talked about a relationship. She talked about she thought she was in love with him.”
Next, Wisenberg demanded to know if Monica had referred to Hillary Clinton as “Bubba”—a term of endearment for Jewish grandmothers—as a way of suggesting that Clinton’s wife was sexually unattractive like an old lady wearing a babushka. When Wisenberg did not elicit the clear response he wanted, the prosecutor stepped down from the questioner’s platform “and started questioning [Marcia] about whether Jewish people call their mothers Bubba.”
After ten minutes of such interrogation, which included questions about her own family and whether she had used the nickname “Bubba” for her own grandmother, Marcia Lewis turned pale. She dropped her head into her hands. Mike Emmick asked his witness, “Would you like—do you need a few minutes?” Udolf stood up and motioned to the grand jury foreperson: “Time out.” Monica’s mother began gulping for air.
As she would later explain, several things caused her to become unglued. Marcia Lewis was seeing in her head images of Susan McDougal in shackles for refusing to testify. Her own situation, she felt, was even more hopeless. “If a parent doesn’t testify and they put the parent in jail, well, then the child or the young adult in this case [Monica], doesn’t have a parent to help, so it’s absolutely a horrible situation to be in.” What’s more, she feared the consequences if she refused to cooperate. “I know this sounds ridiculous,” Monica’s mother said later, “but I thought if I got up and left, that would be contempt and they’d put me in jail.”
But the final straw that caused her to collapse related to the relentless questioning about “Bubba.” That had been the family term of respect and love for her grandmother—Wisenberg’s refusal to let the subject drop had finally caused her to become unhinged. Monica’s mother recalled, “I was very embarrassed that I was becoming too emotional, you know, but my grandmother was dead and she had raised us.” Marcia Lewis paused and collected herself: “And it’s too much that this man … this Jewish man had been chosen to come down and ask me questions … ‘What do I call my Jewish grandmother?’ It was just—it was just really too much for me. So I just put my head down and started to cry. And so they called Billy Martin, and he just came and took me away.”
An anonymous observer outside Grand Jury Room 4 would later tell the FBI that he or she had observed Marcia Lewis emerging from the room “crying loudly and exclaiming, ‘I can’t take it, I can’t take any more, I can’t stand it.’” Her lawyer, Billy Martin, an African American criminal defense attorney with a cool presence, instructed the U.S. Marshals to “summon medical aid.” Within several minutes, the court house nurse arrived with a blood pressure cuff, but Marcia Lewis waved her away. Instead, Lewis was escorted out of the court house by her lawyer, tears streaming