McDougal, Relishing Victory, Unfazed by Next Big Trial

On the day after a jury in Santa Monica gave her life back to her, Susan McDougal--turned out in shorts, sneakers and a University of Arkansas sweatshirt--was yakking up a storm over tuna salad at the Original Pantry Cafe.

The woman who went to jail rather than rat out her friends, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and who endured a 54-day trial of an embezzlement case so flimsy it angered the jury, still faces what could be her biggest hurdle: trial in Arkansas on charges of obstructing independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s Whitewater investigation.

But Susan McDougal was laughing her way through lunch Tuesday like she didn’t have a care in the world.

Her lawyer, Mark Geragos, who has a family to support, Porsche payments to make and a law practice to sustain, might worry about getting paid--which so far he has not. But no, this lawyer says he’s not worried about the bottom line--at least not for now.

He was laughing it up at lunch too, right beside McDougal, whom he has invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the in-laws.

What is it about McDougal and her defense attorney that makes them so “what, me worry?”

Nothing apparently relieves anxiety like success. And this pair are coming off a big win.

Sure, winning an acquittal spared McDougal from a four-year jail sentence. But even better than winning, they say, was handing a big loss to the prosecutors--for whom they believe the case had become very personal.

Emboldened by her acquittal on the embezzlement charges, McDougal is preparing for a three-week trial in U.S. District Court in Little Rock. The trial is set to begin Feb. 16.

In the meantime, she’s trying to recover some sense of a personal life, avoiding the talk show circuit, lying low, spending quality time with her long-suffering fiance, Pat Harris.

“Everything that’s happened to me in recent years has been about Bill Clinton,” she said. “They want me to say things against Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

But, so far at least, she hasn’t had much to say. McDougal spent 18 months behind bars for refusing to testify. Eight of those 18 months were served in the Los Angeles County jail system, a low point for McDougal

Last week, her battle with Starr took on a personal tone when the independent counsel blamed her--in part--in congressional testimony for derailing his Whitewater investigation.

On Tuesday, President Clinton expressed his pleasure at her acquittal in the embezzlement case. “On a personal level, he was pleased that for someone who’s had a lot of adversity in her life--some of which not brought on by herself--that she’s able to put some of these things behind her,” a White House spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, McDougal was picking at her tuna salad and spinning stories.

Her brown eyes shining, McDougal tried to unravel the mystery behind two of the hundreds of checks her former employer, Nancy Mehta, wife of conductor Zubin Mehta, accused her of forging and embezzling.

It all began with a dead dog, as McDougal told it. Tasha, one of the pet borzois who had the run of the Mehtas’ Brentwood estate, passed away while McDougal was dog-sitting.

“So the dog dies in my bedroom in the middle of the night,” she said. “I called Nancy and she tells me the dog is not dead, that I am not to believe the dog is dead. Well, by now the legs are straight out. I’m telling you, that dog was dead.”

To prove it to her employer, McDougal summoned two veterinarians to the estate. She paid them by check.

And, years later, a Los Angeles prosecutor would present those checks as evidence that McDougal stole from the Mehtas.

The prosecution’s case imploded with such force, it created an angry backlash among some of the jurors forced to sit though the 54-day trial. Some were outraged the charges had been brought.

“There was just something about [her] situation that was so bizarre,” said Geragos, who practices law with his father, Paul, in downtown Los Angeles. “My father was so impressed by her gumption he said, ‘I’d almost represent her for free.’ ”