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By Root 1855 0

given to, and received from, Bill Clinton. Some of these (a “wooden frog letter opener,” an “antique paperweight,” a book of Jewish jokes titled Oy Vey, a “standing cigar holder”), the president had displayed openly in the White House. Monica recounted that in December, after she was subpoenaed as a witness in the Jones case, she suggested to the president that maybe she should “put the gifts [from him] away outside my house somewhere or give them to someone, maybe Betty.” Shortly after that, Betty Currie had stopped by the Watergate apartment to pick up a Gap box into which Monica had stashed many of her treasures from Clinton. Monica had scribbled “do not throw away” on the box, as a reminder that these were special keepsakes. Mike Emmick interjected: “Is there any other way Betty would have known to call and pick up this box of gifts except for the President asking her to?”

Monica replied that she could think of no other explanation.

As the grand jurors sat in rapt attention, Monica recounted the full story of the infamous blue dress, emphasizing [contrary to grotesque press accounts] that she had never kept it as a “souvenir.” Rather, the dress had remained on a heap in her closet because, like many other young women, she was a bit sloppy. “I gained weight so I couldn’t wear the dress and it didn’t fit,” she told the jurors with evident embarrassment. “And I’m not a very organized person. I don’t clean my clothes until I’m going to wear them again.” Monica had noticed the splotches on the material when she had pulled the dress out of the closet to wear it for a family gathering at Thanksgiving. She had looked at the front and said, “Oh, no”—she recognized that she had worn this dress during her last romantic encounter with the president, one of only two times Clinton had engaged in oral sex “to completion.” On that occasion, Monica had insisted that the president continue to a climax, despite his protestations that he “didn’t want to get addicted to me and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him.” After Clinton ejaculated, a tender moment had followed—he embraced Monica, leaving two tiny spots on the intern’s dress: one in the lower hip area and one in the chest area. When she later showed the dress to Linda Tripp, Monica had joked about the splotches as a “funny, gross thing.” Tripp had become dead serious and insisted that Monica not wear the garment or clean it. The older woman had promised to bring her friend an outfit from her own closet to replace it, so she did not wash away any evidence. So Monica had left the dress on the floor. Explained the witness: “And so it wasn’t a souvenir. I was going to clean it. I was going to wear it again.”

The questioning became more graphic when prosecutor Immergut prodded the witness to admit that she and the president had engaged in “brief direct genital contact at least once.” As Immergut pressed for more details, Monica stopped in midsentence and told the grand jurors, “Oh, my gosh. This is so embarrassing.”

One juror interjected, trying to be helpful, “You could close your eyes and talk.” Another juror, expressing sympathy for the young woman’s plight, added, “We won’t look at you.” Monica asked the grand jurors: “Can I hide under the table?”

Next, the Starr prosecutors extracted a direct admission from the witness that her sworn affidavit in the Paula Jones case was false. There was never any question in her mind, Monica told the grand jurors bluntly, that she and President Clinton planned to deny the affair. Frankly, she didn’t think it was “anybody’s business.” Monica’s principal worry when she had seen her name on the witness list for the Jones case wasn’t that she would have to deny the affair—that had always been expected. She was more concerned that there were ten other women on the list. She immediately had confronted the president about these names, and Clinton reassured her that there was nothing to fret about—they were “all women from the old days in Arkansas.” That had been a relief. There was no further discussion about her being called as a witness in the