Willey Comes Under Attack as Witness

Kathleen Willey, the star witness against a former friend accused of covering up a notorious 1993 encounter in the Oval Office, came under sharp attack Wednesday from defense attorneys who accused her of lying about the episode and forgetting key details.

During nearly 2 1/2 hours of bruising cross-examination, Willey acknowledged repeated lapses of memory and contradictions in her accounts of how she was allegedly groped by President Clinton. But she attributed some of her confusion to a mystery jogger who she said threatened her last year just days before she gave a deposition on the incident.

The second day of Willey’s testimony against her onetime friend, Julie Hiatt Steele, grew intensely personal. Willey said she felt betrayed by Steele, even as she acknowledged that she had passed on to authorities damaging gossip about Steele and other associates.

Willey acknowledged telling the office of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr that Steele’s adoption of a Romanian boy may have been improper, an issue prosecutors later pursued. Willey also told authorities that Steele had an eating disorder and that another woman she knew may have slept with the president.

Defense attorneys for Steele explored these and other issues Wednesday in an attempt to damage the credibility and character of Willey, portraying her as a vindictive woman who recently cussed at Steele during a chance encounter in a Virginia grocery store. Steele, they said, is the real victim.

Steele, the only person indicted thus far as a result of Starr’s investigation of the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, was charged with four felony counts of obstruction of justice and making a false statement after she denied in sworn testimony that a distraught Willey told her about the alleged groping by Clinton immediately after it happened.

Steele, who faces up to 35 years in prison if convicted, says she never heard anything about the allegations until Willey asked her in 1997 to lie to a reporter to corroborate her story.

Defense attorney Eric Dubelier set the tone for the cross-examination, aggressively grilling Willey about the deposition she gave last year in the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit against Clinton.

“You promised in that deposition that you were going to tell the whole truth,” Dubelier said, “but you didn’t, did you?”

Willey said she had told the truth, but acknowledged that her memory was shaky. In the 1998 deposition, she said that she could not remember if Clinton had actually kissed her or touched other parts of her body.

Dubelier also highlighted other inconsistencies or lapses in Willey’s past testimony, including whom she talked to about the alleged groping after it occurred; whether she met at length with a Newsweek reporter and corroborated the account; and whether she tried to contact Clinton at the White House several times after their meeting.

Questions about Willey’s credibility also centered on intimate details of her personal life. Dubelier pressed Willey on whether she had used Steele as “an alibi” to cover up a trip to Philadelphia to see a married policeman, and he prodded her into acknowledging that she had lied to Starr’s office about the circumstances of an ugly breakup with a boyfriend.

Dubelier said the independent counsel’s office gave Willey a new immunity deal and continued to use her testimony in pursuing Steele even after Willey admitted lying to them about the ex-boyfriend.

Willey said that when she gave the Jones deposition she was frazzled because of a bizarre encounter just two days earlier near her Richmond home.

Willey said a man approached her and addressed her by name. “He asked if I had found my cat,” which had disappeared, she said, and whether she had gotten new tires for her car, which had been vandalized. He also knew her children’s names, she said.

When she asked the man how he knew these details, he answered, “ ‘You’re just not getting the message, are you?’ ” she testified.

Willey said she had felt badgered by one of the president’s attorneys, Robert S. Bennett, who she said suggested she should take the 5th Amendment when questioned about her allegations. “It was a threat coming from the president,” she said.