Legal Fund Sought for Lewinsky

Monica S. Lewinsky needs a legal fund like the president’s, her lawyer said Sunday, declaring: “I am not being paid appropriately.”

“I would welcome” a responsible law or accounting firm’s coming forward to create a fund “like the one that’s helping President Clinton out,” attorney William Ginsburg said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

While “I’m not looking personally for anybody’s sympathy,” he said, “I am not being paid appropriately and her father has limited resources.”

Ginsburg said that Lewinsky has no plans to write a book about her Washington experiences, but that “a literary effort may be her only choice.”

A medical malpractice lawyer, Ginsburg has represented doctors in high-profile cases such as the deaths of entertainer Liberace and Loyola Marymount University basketball star Hank Gathers.

Lewinsky’s father--Bernard Lewinsky, whom Ginsburg has represented for 25 years--has said Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to build a case against the president, “and there’s me. Out in the middle of nowhere, I’m supposed to fight this battle. I don’t have the means for this sort of cost.” Dr. Lewinsky spoke Friday on ABC-TV’s “20/20.”

In a Sunday appearance on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” Ginsburg waded into a discussion of the role of longtime presidential confidant Vernon E. Jordan Jr.

Ginsburg rejected the notion that Monica Lewinsky got a job offer through Jordan in exchange for denying in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit that she had had a sexual relationship with Clinton.

“Unequivocally no. No quid pro quo,” Ginsburg said. Lewinsky met with Jordan in early November about help getting a job, a month before her name turned up on a witness list in the Paula Jones case, Ginsburg said.

Ginsburg would not say whether Lewinsky told Jordan that she had had a sexual relationship with the president. Jordan says Lewinsky told him she hadn’t.

Ginsburg also left room for possible involvement by more than one person in referring Lewinsky to Jordan. Jordan maintained in his only public statement that Lewinsky was referred to him by Clinton’s personal secretary, Betty Currie.

“Monica Lewinsky was referred, principally by Betty Currie, to Vernon Jordan,” said Ginsburg, leaving the possibility others might have played a role.