Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [391]
Marcia Lewis, Monica’s mother, had written a personal letter to Ken Starr “begging him not to release” this private information. For the sake of her daughter’s sanity and to preserve some shred of Monica’s self-respect, she had pleaded for restraint. She had even written directly to Congressman Henry Hyde, imploring him not to make the Starr materials public. Monica’s mother had not received a reply from either man. Now, the Starr Report, as published, was a hundred times worse than she had imagined in her worst nightmares.
“Someone had told me early on that grand jury testimony was never, ever made public. That was my understanding,” Marcia Lewis said, still coming to grips with the experience years later. “I was surprised on that level. And then beyond that, on a personal level, I was mortified and I felt terrible for Monica and everyone else.”
Monica Lewinsky, on that day, was in a New York hotel room with a friend of her mother’s, trying to lie low. When the news channel reported that Congress had dumped the entire Starr Report onto the Internet, Monica plugged in her laptop and connected to the Web. As she scrolled through the document’s introduction, she felt like curling up in a ball and disappearing. “I was in flux between being flabbergasted and being in tears and just disbelief,” she recalled.
For the young woman, the psychological devastation that had been wrought over the past eight months was now compounded by sheer anger. For one, the report contained information that she intentionally had deleted from her computer and that OIC had dredged up from her hard drive. “Talk about sort of raping your mind,” she said. “To write something that you not only think is not for anyone else, you then decide you don’t ever want to look at it again.… To have the government take it out [of the e-mail trash] and then print it and disseminate it for the entire world to see” seemed Orwellian and unconscionable.
Moreover, members of Starr’s staff, particularly Karen Immergut (“the only prosecutor that I [Monica] thought was a semidecent human being”), had made representations to Monica that certain extremely personal information “would not be published.” Now, here was the report staring her in the face and containing truckloads of superprivate material.
Then there was the disgrace to her family: Monica could not imagine how she was going to face her father after he saw this sex-laden account. It created yet another “barrier” that would be difficult to surmount. Already, her grandmother Lewinsky and a number of other family members had shut her out, refusing to acknowledge her existence. In the midst of Monica’s grand jury testimony, her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother had “stroked out” and nearly died. Lying in the hospital bed, Grandma Lewinsky had looked away from the television and asked her son Bernie in a thick German accent, “Vat’s this about the [blue] dress?” Bernie had “pled the Fifth,” replying, “Mom, I don’t know.” Not to be deterred, the elderly lady then asked, “Vat is oral sex?” Bernie was speechless. Thinking quickly, his wife, Barbara, interjected, “It’s when you talk about it, Mom.”
Even worse, someone had slid a “huge stick bomb” through the Lewinskys’ mailbox in the fashionable Brentwood section of Los Angeles, blowing up their piano and nearly causing a house fire. There were “crazy people” out there who were stirred up by public drama; Starr’s sexually explicit referral was bringing them out of the woodwork. At age twenty-five, Lewinsky thought in horror, the whole world knew her most intimate