Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [336]
Bernie viewed this whole episode as proof positive that the Starr operation had run amok. “When the kids were young, little toddlers,” he explained sarcastically, “there were a lot of kidnappings here in L.A. I had my kids fingerprinted. I [still] had their fingerprints and their footprints in my safe. I still have them. I could have given them to Starr. He didn’t need anything. This was a tactic to scare the sh——out of Monica. That’s all it was about.”
Although the traumatic fingerprinting incident could not be attributed to Bill Ginsburg, and the FBI likely had no choice but to fingerprint Monica because prints were not transferable among government agencies, the experience drained Bernie of every last drop of confidence in Ginsburg. At a minimum, Bernie believed that Monica’s lawyer had leaked the time and place of the ordeal to CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, his new media pal, in advance. This had led to the appearance of every camera crew west of the Mississippi, heightening the indignity.
Monica, too, had steadily lost faith in Ginsburg. Although she understood that no lawyer could control the “crazy” behavior of the OIC attack dogs, Ginsburg seemed to be waltzing into their trap. The act of entering the stark interior of the FBI building that day, Monica recalled, “was pretty close to knowing what it was going to feel like going to jail.” Years later, those images still tormented her: “There are bars, turnstiles. It was scary. And they fingerprinted me like I had just murdered somebody.” Her complaint about Ginsburg was, “Why isn’t he questioning this?” Increasingly, Ginsburg seemed to rely on Nate Speights for legal decision-making, while the California lawyer gallivanted around and appeared on TV shows. “I just didn’t feel secure,” concluded Monica.
The Lewinsky family was also horrified by the inappropriate comments coming out of Ginsburg’s mouth. In one instance, Ginsburg gave a magazine a supposedly humorous blurb in which he quipped that Monica “was caged up like a dog in heat,” or words to that effect. Bernie’s wife, Barbara, recalled, “When Monica read this, she became completely unglued,” telling Ginsburg, “How could you say something like that about me, given the nature of the case?” Although Ginsburg maintained that he had been “misquoted” and that the line had been “taken out of context,” the Lewinskys viewed this as one more Ginsburgian comment that was “completely outrageous.”
On another occasion in Philadelphia, Monica and her attorney were walking down the street when Ginsburg “stopped at a newsstand and pulled out the Playboy magazine to look at.” Monica froze in her tracks and said, “Bill, you can’t look at that while you’re here [with me].” It was, she felt, a “total disconnect.”
There was also a much-quoted interview in which Ginsburg had declared that he had known Monica since birth and that as a baby he had kissed her “little pulkes”—a cute Yiddish term for inner thighs. The normally calm Bernie Lewinsky would become enraged even at the recollection of this episode. “This is a total fabrication,” he said. “I told him [Ginsburg] he was lying.” Monica’s father pointed out that he did not even meet Ginsburg until the late 1970s. “He did not know her [Monica] … when she was two years old,” Bernie said angrily. “He met her in nineteen seventy-eight, seventy-nine perhaps, when she was six years old. And a six-year-old of mine would never have sat on his lap for anything. She barely sat on my lap. I mean, that was totally false.”
There was also the Vanity Fair photo shoot, which was