Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [464]
LINDA Tripp, the older “friend” who had tossed Monica into Starr’s net, had endured her own travails after the Clinton-Starr scandal had receded into history. Following a bout with breast cancer (which required a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation) and after assuming a new identity, settling amid the quiet horse farms of Middleburg Virginia, Tripp would do her best not to revisit the disastrous Lewinsky chapter of her life. Happily married to Dieter Rausch, a former teenage sweetheart from Germany, Tripp saw no benefit in wallowing in Monicagate.
The healing process was made easier after she received a $595,000 settlement from the Bush Defense Department, under the federal Privacy Act, to compensate her for the Pentagon’s improper leak of her teenage arrest record—relating to a crime she had never committed. Linda Tripp had traded in the lunacy of the Washington Beltway for peace and tranquility. As she cooked spaghetti and meatballs, using a favorite recipe from the Italian side of her family, Tripp concluded that she had handled an ugly situation as best she could. Glancing out the window at the horse pasture, the now dark-haired Tripp said, “I just look out there and [think], ‘How in the hell did I ever get myself into all of this?’”
With respect to the media’s portrayal of her as an evil villainess who had betrayed a young and vulnerable friend, Tripp offered her own defense: “I know [Monica] will never see this and never understand it, and it would be futile to try to convince her otherwise, but she, in her tunnel [vision], was suicidal. She was contemplating and threatening suicide almost daily. She was in the most fragile state of mental health I’ve ever seen a functioning human being in. So did I think [exposing her relationship with Clinton] would help her? No, I didn’t think it would help her. Did I think ultimately it might help her in the end and that she’d survive it? Yeah, I did.” Tripp added a postscript: “It had nothing to do with trying to hurt Monica. I never wanted to hurt Monica.”
Tripp insisted, however, that the former White House intern was not blameless. “I can tell you this, and I swear on my children’s lives, I haven’t lied throughout all this. You may not like my motivation. You may think my motivation’s shady, but I’ve tried to be as truthful as I can. And I’ve never been a liar.” Tripp insisted that she was incapable of committing such a mortal sin. “I grew up as a Catholic with the notion that God’s going to get me on the meat rack for eating baloney on Friday. And I also believe God is going to get me if I lie, and cause others pain. So I’m not lying here … someone [else] is.” Specifically, Tripp would point to Monica’s grand jury testimony in which the former intern swore that Vernon Jordan had never known of her affair with Clinton and did not arrange a job in return for her signing a false affidavit in the Paula Jones case. Said Tripp, her face darkening with the reappearance of a ghost from the past, “When I saw her testimony, and saw her lie, and there was no way to prove otherwise, because of conversations that were not recorded that I thought had been, I knew she would get away with it. And she did.”
Tripp concluded, a look of pain overtaking her face, “I think the most hurtful thing throughout this whole thing has been the notion that I was motivated by money or by any sort of self-enrichment, because to this day, I’m still the only one that’s never taken a penny, ever—and, you know, several years have gone by; I should get some credit.”
Yet Tripp’s precise role in these events—and her motives—remained a puzzle in a story laced with unanswered riddles. Among other things, her steadfast denial that a book deal was ever a major motivating