Grand Jury Hears Lewinsky Tell of Alleged Intimacy

Monica S. Lewinsky testified for seven hours Thursday behind the closed doors of a federal grand jury room, saying that she engaged in sexual intimacies with President Clinton more than a dozen times over an 18-month period, according to sources familiar with her testimony.

Lewinsky also described an implicit agreement with the president to keep their relationship secret, the sources said.

This was the first time since January, when she denied such a relationship in a sworn affidavit in a civil lawsuit, that Lewinsky has discussed the matter under oath. Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had agreed only last week to give the former White House intern full immunity from prosecution.

Lewinsky’s long-awaited testimony served to heighten speculation about the president’s upcoming testimony. If he denies under oath having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, as he has in the past, and if Starr has other evidence of an affair, Clinton could open himself to possible impeachment proceedings in Congress.

After a long day of what one source portrayed as the tense and emotional experience of relating to 23 grand jurors matters that she thought should be private, Lewinsky, 25, left the courthouse looking pale and drawn.

And although her spokeswoman later said that the Brentwood woman and “her family are relieved that this ordeal finally appears to be coming to an end,” one of her lawyers predicted that she would have to return.

Defense attorney Plato Cacheris said: “She has not been excused but when she will return is entirely up to the independent counsel. She has no firm date.”

One legal source said that Lewinsky’s next grand jury appearance might not occur before Clinton testifies on Aug. 17.

Judy Smith, her spokeswoman, said that Lewinsky “answered truthfully, completely and honestly” each question posed by prosecutors and members of the grand jury.

Legal sources said that Lewinsky provided details of a sexual relationship that she and Clinton concealed from attorneys representing Paula Corbin Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit--now dismissed--against Clinton.

Lewinsky told of an implicit understanding with Clinton that neither would admit to any intimacies, the sources said. But the president never specifically instructed her to commit perjury in the Jones lawsuit, Lewinsky reportedly said.

While the details of Lewinsky’s testimony could not be learned, a source familiar with the matter indicated that prosecutors’ questions touched on most or all aspects of the case.

Prosecutors for Starr, who spent a week debriefing Lewinsky before her grand jury appearance, also were said to have questioned her about actions that suggested Lewinsky and the president might have had a specific pact to cover up their alleged affair.

These included Lewinsky’s return of gifts that she had received from Clinton after Jones’ lawyers subpoenaed them, including a gold brooch and a book of Walt Whitman poetry. Lewinsky’s story, sources said, is that she returned them to Betty Currie, the president’s personal secretary, even though Clinton never specifically told her to do so.

The drama of a former White House aide testifying with immunity against a president was the first in the capital in 25 years. Former White House counsel John W. Dean III testified similarly against Richard Nixon in June 1973.

But there were important differences. Dean’s public testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee was nationally televised and charged the president with conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Lewinsky, on the other hand, was a reluctant lower-level worker, whose account of alleged personal indiscretions was heard in secrecy by a grand jury.

“This whole case is uniquely seamy and far different from the political corruption of Watergate,” presidential scholar Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution said in an interview.

“It’s new, it’s demeaning and it should be unpleasant for most Americans. It could be disastrous for Bill Clinton but court rulings that have chipped away his privileges also could spell trouble for future presidents,” he said.

Clinton and his advisors, meanwhile, did their best to project a business-as-usual image. But it was clear that the Lewinsky testimony was a distraction.

“This is a day to soldier on with the work the president was elected to do,” said one senior advisor.

If prosecutors decide that Lewinsky’s testimony is powerful enough to implicate the president in subornation of perjury or obstruction of justice, they could refer such charges to the House of Representatives for impeachment proceedings, legal experts said. But Lewinsky’s insistence that she had received no specific instructions to lie would tend to weaken such a case against Clinton, some lawyers said.

Among other aspects of her testimony, legal sources said, Lewinsky was pressed to describe whether job interviews that presidential friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr. arranged for her were an implied favor from the president for her silence.

Sources said that prosecutors also questioned her about a navy blue dress she kept in the belief that it is stained with the president’s semen. FBI tests on whether the stain is semen are reported to be complete but there has been no word on the results. A sample of Clinton’s DNA would be required to determine if a semen stain was his.

Before seeing Lewinsky in person for the first time, grand jurors had grown familiar with her voice from listening to more than 20 hours of phone conversations secretly taped by her former friend, Pentagon employee Linda Tripp, who appeared before the grand jury for eight days.

The tapes, which Tripp turned over to Starr in January, prompted the independent counsel’s investigation of the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky.

In her conversations with Tripp, Lewinsky confided that she had a sexual relationship with the president and suggested that she had been told to lie about it.

However, the recordings also cast some doubt on the credibility of the woman who has become Starr’s key witness. In one conversation, Lewinsky tells Tripp: “I have lied my entire life.”

Nonetheless, Lewinsky’s testimony is a victory for Starr and his chief prosecutors, who now have the central figure’s testimony in the case “locked in” less than two weeks before the president testifies via closed-circuit television.

In addition to denying in the Jones case having had sexual contact with Lewinsky, Clinton told the American public in January: “I never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

If Clinton were to repeat these denials in his sworn grand jury testimony, Starr could have the makings of a more serious perjury case to refer to Congress, legal authorities said.

Starr would need supporting evidence for Lewinsky’s testimony but he may have additional circumstantial evidence from other witnesses, including Currie and Secret Service employees who may have witnessed some meetings or conversations involving the president and Lewinsky.

While Lewinsky was testifying, Clinton was presiding at a gun-control ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, shaking hands with an assemblage of police officers while a band played “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

At the end of a routine GOP-bashing press conference by top House Democrats on Thursday morning, Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) was asked what he thought about Lewinsky’s testimony.

“I haven’t heard it,” he quipped.

Asked if he was tired of hearing about it, Gephardt said: “Oh, I am sick of hearing about it, yes. Most people are. . . . I just hope it can come to a quick conclusion.”

But he said that he hopes Starr would not deliver a report to the House in mid-September or October, when Congress plans to adjourn for the election campaign season, because lawmakers would not have time to give the matter the attention it deserves.

“If we damage the process of self-government through throwing something out there at a time when the Congress is incapable of dealing with it, that becomes a taint on the election, which is a very serious matter. I think it would be a grave mistake and I hope it doesn’t happen,” Gephardt said.

Times staff writers Janet Hook, Elizabeth Shogren and Erin Trodden contributed to this story.

Join a continuing discussion about the Monica S. Lewinsky matter on The Times’ Web site. Go to: https://www.latimes.com/scandal