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would indict [Monica].” He also believed that the most the Starr prosecutors could prove was “a sexual misadventure.” The president would tell the American public, “I admit that we had an inappropriate relationship,” but “no further comment.” His client would do the same. If OIC was foolish enough to take Monica Lewinsky to trial, Ginsburg would subpoena the Tripp tapes and play them in open court, throwing the proceedings into pandemonium and validating everything that Lewinsky had already written in her draft proffer. Ginsburg would once and for all prove that Lewinsky’s white lie in the affidavit had nothing to do with the Jones case and did not involve a quid pro quo. The California lawyer would plan to tell the jury with a laugh, “This is some conspiracy to obstruct justice, sending her approximately 150 miles away for a $29,000-a-year job in Manhattan? She’d have to be pretty god-damned stupid, and she’s not. I mean, to be bribed for a job that you can’t support yourself on in Manhattan?” Furthermore, he would lecture the jury, there was absolutely no evidence that President Clinton had encouraged Lewinsky to lie under oath or to obstruct justice. She was acting out of “deep feelings for him at that time, [such] that she would have done anything to protect him.” In the end, Ginsburg believed that he would beat the pants off Starr’s prosecutors if they were foolish enough to make a federal case out of his client’s sexual fling with the president. The game would be over, and Monica would walk away relatively unscathed.

Ginsburg’s standard line, in warning Monica not to buckle under to OIC’s threats, was, “What do Jim McDougal, Webb Hubbell, and David Hale have in common? They all had been granted immunity by Starr and they all went to jail!”

Yet Monica was not feeling in the mood to roll the dice, wagering her whole life on the outcome. The same week as the disastrous photo shoot for Vanity Fair, Judge Norma Holloway Johnson had allowed Ken Starr’s office to nullify the immunity deal that Emmick and Udolf had promised her. Letting Starr take her to trial, Lewinsky felt, was a “last choice option”: “I did not want to go to trial, for a million reasons—for emotional reasons, for the risk of [going to jail], for the cost of it.” Already, her father was paying astronomical legal bills. She feared there would come a day when Ginsburg geared up for trial and mailed her family “a bill for a million dollars.” Although she was admittedly unstable at this moment, what Monica had decided in her own mind was, “I wanted immunity if they were going to accept the truth from me.” She desperately needed a lawyer who would work out that deal with Starr.

Monica’s mother still gave Ginsburg credit for the work he did. Marcia Lewis had never seen eye-to-eye with Bernie’s bearded friend, a man who still viewed her as the enemy. Yet, she said firmly, “I think he had [Monica’s] best interest at heart, and while he exercised poor judgment, I don’t think he ever meant her any harm, and my God, compared to what other people had done to her, you know [it was minor].” It had become painfully clear to all concerned that Monica needed to have “different representation.” Yet Marcia Lewis preferred to go easy on Bill Ginsburg: “I just saw this as her mother. She needed an attorney. And then it became clear she needed a different attorney.”

Monica had flown back to Washington disguised in a blond wig. She and her mother were trying to remain hidden from view, staying under assumed names in the Washington Court Hotel near Capitol Hill. In a letter faxed to Bill Ginsburg’s Los Angeles law office, Monica wrote that she “hereby rescind[ed] and terminat[ed]” his services.

Ginsburg later scratched his beard, and his eyes grew sad as he explained the pain he suffered from his break with the Lewinsky family: “Bernie is one of the sweetest men I have ever met in my entire life,” he said. “He doesn’t have a hostile bone in his body. It is so easy to take advantage of Bernie, and he is so big hearted, loving, and good, that the thought of anybody hurting Bernie