Washington Reporter Rates His Date With Lewinsky a B-Minus

WASHINGTON — Extra! An uneventful date with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Washington City Paper reporter Jake Tapper took the former White House intern to dinner Dec. 23. They had met in a bar when he bummed a quarter from her to play pool. They went to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Washington’s funky Adams Morgan neighborhood. She offered to pay her share. He gallantly refused.

“A sweet girl,” Tapper writes about the woman now alleged to have had an affair with President Clinton. “Nice.”

But the City Paper’s coverage wasn’t that quiet.

Parodying tabloid sensationalism, the weekly splashed its “exclusive” in tawdry color on its front page in editions that hit the street Thursday. “Two-Bit Romance,” screeched one headline. “Monica Lent Me a Quarter!”

“Big Shocker!” says another. “Intern Never Brought Up the President.”

“My sum total experience is a meeting of eyes at a boring bar party and a B-minus date afterward,” he said. “If fate . . . hadn’t intervened, who knows, maybe I’d be the only reporter in the world pursuing her.”