Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [355]
Some sources later indicated that the dress was “sequestered in a vault” inside Marcia Lewis’s apartment. Monica’s mother herself later stated cautiously that the garment was “on the floor of the closet”—at least initially—but declined to go into further detail.
How the dress got to New York, however, is no longer a secret. “I took it there,” Monica Lewinsky disclosed years later. At the time, since she was getting ready to move to Manhattan anyway, Monica had decided to “get it out of my apartment.” She was worrying to herself, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” and “Maybe I’ll throw it away; maybe I’ll keep it.” If Starr’s people or the FBI asked her for the dress, she could always reply, “Well, it’s not in my house; it’s not in my possession. So I’m not lying. I don’t have [it].” But when her new lawyers had confirmed the existence of the garment that might hold the key to immunity, they had made clear that if OIC served “legitimate process” on Monica, she would have to give it up. For the time being, Cacheris had simply advised his client, “Keep the damn thing. Just hold on to it.”
Monica had been tormented over what to do about the dress until this final, unavoidable moment when she handed over the bag to OIC. While she had been moving her possessions from her mother’s apartment in Manhattan, during the cleaning-out process, she had exclaimed to herself, “Oh, my God, now’s my chance! I could wash this dress. Nobody knows about it.… It’s not public; it’s just speculated about. I could just throw it in a washing machine.”
She later recalled, “And I just started to freak out, because I didn’t know [to what extent] I was being watched. And I thought, ‘This is completely obstruction. This is knowingly doing this.’”
One voice whispering inside her head told Monica, “You’re already in a lot of trouble. What’s one more charge?” The louder voice, however, was shouting, “You’re already in a lot of trouble; you don’t need to make it worse!”
Now, as Monica handed over the blue Gap dress to federal authorities, the mystery was finally mooted.
Cacheris would later say, puzzled by OIC’s handling of the interminable search for the single piece of incontrovertible evidence that was sitting right under its nose, “Why they just didn’t subpoena her and the dress, give her immunity way back in February [I don’t know]. They’d have had the whole case then.”
As Cacheris ushered Starr’s representatives out the door with the much-sought-after bag of evidence, he instructed Mike Emmick to keep the fruits of his work to himself. “I do not want to know,” said Monica’s lawyer, “the results of the DNA until it’s made public.”
A newspaper photographer already had managed to capture Monica carrying the shopping bag filled with evidence en route to her lawyer’s office. Within hours, that photo was transmitted across the wire services, enabling President Clinton’s advisers to huddle in the White House, enlarging that same photo and “trying to figure out what was in the bag. Could there be a dress in there?”
In the OIC offices, Bittman personally took custody of the bag of evidence, whisking it into a locked conference room so that his technician team could photograph and label each item—just in case an earthquake struck Washington or a burglar broke into OIC headquarters in the dead of night. Bittman was one of the few people to lay eyes on the infamous dress before it was handed over to the FBI and placed under lock and key. The deputy prosecutor recalled, “I remember it was large. I’m large now, too. And I remember seeing some stains on it. It was hanging up, on a hanger. An agent pointed out to me without touching—there were visible whitish stains on the dress, in the crotch area.” Bittman authorized the FBI to take the dress to its lab for analysis, after being assured that only “several top people would work on it.”
In less than twenty-four hours, the FBI had determined that the stain on the dress was “positive