Lewinsky Testifies, Says She Didn’t OK Taping

She slipped into the courthouse through a side door, anxious to avoid the crush of television cameras camped out for her early-morning arrival.

But by the time Monica S. Lewinsky took the witness stand Thursday to talk about her telephone conversations with onetime confidant Linda Tripp, testifying for the first time in public about the affair with President Clinton, she appeared ready and eager. She was alternately combative and composed, and even Tripp’s son noted later how confident the former White House intern seemed to be as she answered more than 160 questions about the calls.

Before a packed courtroom, Maryland prosecutors kept Lewinsky’s testimony narrowly focused in an effort to show at a pretrial hearing that their wiretapping investigation against Tripp was not improperly tainted by Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel inquiry.

There was no chitchat about Lewinsky’s Jenny Craig diet plan, as in her interview with Barbara Walters. There were none of the lurid details that dotted the best-selling biography on which she collaborated with Andrew Morton, nor any of the historic weightiness that marked her closed-door, videotaped testimony during the impeachment proceedings.

Clinton was not even mentioned by name. Lewinsky said that she was “terrified” in late 1997 by the thought of “my relationship being revealed.”

But by the time she left the small courthouse on a hill atop Ellicott City’s historic railroad and milling district, Lewinsky had made all the key points that prosecutors wanted: She testified that she knew exactly when the key phone conversation with Tripp had taken place--on Dec. 22, 1997. Her recollection was never shaped by Starr’s investigation. And, she declared, “I had not consented” to Tripp’s taping of the phone call.

Tripp Trial Set for January

Tripp, a civilian Pentagon employee and arguably the country’s best-known whistle-blower, is scheduled to go on trial in January on state felony charges of illegally taping a phone conversation with Lewinsky and then disclosing the contents to Newsweek magazine. This week’s ongoing hearings will determine what evidence prosecutors can use against Tripp, who faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and $20,000 in fines if convicted.

In recent months, Lewinsky has talked at length--first on television, then on the book circuit--about her relationship with Clinton and the ensuing scandal, fanned by Tripp’s tapes, that resulted in the nation’s second-ever impeachment of a president. But her relationship with Tripp is one subject she has avoided of late.

Tearfully, she volunteered to grand jurors in the Starr investigation last year that “I hate Linda Tripp.” But when Walters asked her in a Nov. 30, 1999, interview on ABC whether she had now forgiven her old friend, Lewinsky paused for several long seconds, searching. “I really don’t know how to answer that,” she finally said.

If Lewinsky derived any satisfaction Thursday from knowing that her testimony might help ensure a trial for the woman who exposed her affair with the president, she wasn’t saying. She left the courthouse quickly without talking to reporters.

In more than 80 minutes of testimony, she clearly had no intention of going out of her way to help Tripp’s lawyers. At one point, she refused to even volunteer her birth date. And she was sometimes combative, correcting Tripp’s defense attorney several times.

When Lewinsky told the judge that she wanted to ask her lawyer’s advice about a question during cross-examination, defense attorney Joseph Murtha asked her if she could ask him instead.

“You’re not my lawyer,” Lewinsky shot back.

Lewinsky’s Certainty Over Conversation

The key confrontation came over whether Lewinsky could say with certainty that a key conversation with Tripp actually took place Dec. 22, 1997.

That is the only conversation Tripp is charged with taping illegally, in part because Maryland authorities believe they can show that Tripp’s lawyer had warned her by that time that it was illegal to tape her calls without the other party’s consent. In the conversation, the two women talked about the prospect of Lewinsky lying about her relationship with Clinton in an affidavit she was to submit in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against the president.

After several minutes of sparring with Tripp’s lawyer, Lewinsky finally acknowledged that a separate statement she signed last year gave only a vague account of the timing of her conversations with Tripp, never pinning down a specific date for the one in question.

Tripp’s attorneys want to show that Lewinsky’s recollection was colored by her many hours of debriefings with Starr’s aides. That could taint her testimony, since Starr gave Tripp immunity from prosecution and Maryland authorities would not be able to use evidence that was derived from his investigation.

But Lewinsky said she was sure the conversation took place Dec. 22. She pointed to several “markers” to confirm the date--including references to a meeting she had with Clinton friend and advisor Vernon E. Jordan Jr. that same day and her going-away party at the Pentagon the next day.

The timing, she said, was “etched in my mind because it was a pretty frightening time for me.”

The scandal broke publicly in January 1998, less than a month after that conversation, and Lewinsky recalled Thursday that she was “pretty upset” to see verbatim accounts of her conversations with Tripp appear in Newsweek in early February.

Murtha, however, was not sympathetic. He said outside the courthouse that Lewinsky found herself in a situation “of her own making” and Tripp should not be blamed for the consequences. “Miss Tripp had to do what she had to do.”

Although Tripp did not attend the hearing, her son, 24-year-old Ryan Tripp, did. He said afterward that, while his mother “didn’t want to take any attention away from the case,” she would like to see it go to trial so she could vindicate herself.

But Lewinsky, he noted, seemed very composed in her testimony. “She answered all of their questions. . . . She seemed pretty confident,” he said.