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By Root 1971 0

included blanket federal immunity to prevent prosecution by the State of Maryland for violations of its wiretap law. Without further ado, Tripp jumped into a “greatest hits” sketch of Lewinsky’s X-rated affair with Bill Clinton, triggering a push-back from the grand jurors. One asked if this whole saga might amount to a replay of the movie Fatal Attraction, in which a dangerously obsessed woman stalked a married man with whom she had a brief affair. “Is it possible that she [Lewinsky] wasn’t living in reality, that she was fantasizing and you were part of this fantasy?…” Tripp quickly took the defensive: “No. I promise you on my mother’s soul and on the lives of my children, this is not a fantasy.” The grand juror pressed on, asking whether a “professional” might reach a different opinion: “You know, somebody who’s really trained to deal with people with emotional problems more so than you are?” Tripp insisted that the “level of detail” Lewinsky had provided—including her description of the president’s study inside the West Wing of the White House, which few people in the world (even with the highest security clearances) had ever seen—made it impossible for the intern to be concocting these stories.

As Tripp continued her lengthy account of the Bill-Monica soap opera, the grand jurors listened in stunned silence. The witness described one scene in which Clinton broke down and confessed to the young intern that he had engaged in affairs with “literally hundreds of women over the time of his marriage.” The president had tearfully admitted that “it was his fault, that he has a compulsion, he would never be able to recall all of their names, some he didn’t even know.” On official road trips, Clinton had even begun keeping a calendar “marking down all of the days he had been good,” meaning “the days that he overcame the compulsion to be with someone sexually other than his wife.”

Tripp offered her own psychological assessment that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had become “soul friends,” largely because the young woman reminded Clinton of his mother by virtue of her spunk and irreverence. Monica was an “up-front, direct, in-your-face kind of person” who would have been “equally kind and respectful to a head of state as she would be to whoever rang up her groceries.” She also held an allure for Bill Clinton, Tripp told the grand jurors, because she treated Clinton “very much as a human being.”

As the relationship took root, Tripp went on, it became hot and cold, especially after Lewinsky had been “banished” to the Pentagon. Tripp confided that Monica and Bill would get into verbal fights like a quarrelsome couple. “She would use obscenities, she would scream and yell. He would do the same thing back. It was volatile—” For instance, when Lewinsky first learned of Kathleen Willey’s allegations and other stories suggesting that she (Lewinsky) was not the only female with whom the president might be engaging in adultery, Tripp recalled that the intern began shouting, “I hate his [expletive deleted] guts,” and “I never want to see him again.”

One grand juror finally interjected, “May I ask, why did you continue to have these conversations with Ms. Lewinsky?” Tripp fumbled to formulate an answer. She blurted out that she initially felt sorry for Monica, especially because the former intern’s mother had moved to New York and left her without a parent nearby. Tripp had assumed the role of mother hen, she said, until she could no longer condone this dysfunctional relationship.

The grand juror searched for a better answer: “Why did you continue the relationship if you didn’t feel as if you were supportive of her?” Tripp replied, “I thought it was in her best interests at the time to be a little harsher [given] the reality of the situation.”

Tripp regrouped by getting back to her narrative. It was Clinton’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, Tripp explained, who facilitated Lewinsky’s meetings and other communications with the president. At first, Tripp told the grand jurors, Currie only had a vague suspicion about the nature of the