Monica Lewinsky’s reaction to news her once-friend Linda Tripp was near death has received almost universal praise on social media over the last two days.
Tripp, the woman whose illegally taped conversations with Lewinsky almost brought down Bill Clinton's presidency, died Thursday after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 70.
Before Tripp’s death, Lewinsky tweeted out her sympathies and best wishes for the family.
Tripp’s recorded conversations with Lewinsky during Clinton’s second term became the basis on which Clinton became only the second American president to be impeached.
Tripp was a 48-year-old divorced mother of two living in Columbia, Maryland, when she became a controversial national figure as the Clinton impeachment investigation unfolded in 1998.
For some she was a heroine who stood up for the rule of law; for others, she was a schemer for profit who betrayed a friend while posing as a motherly confidant.
Lewinsky was 22 when she worked as a White House intern in summer 1995. That November she and Clinton began their affair, which continued after she was hired for a West Wing job. Reassigned to the Pentagon in April 1996, Lewinsky met Tripp and they became friends.
Tripp provided nearly 20 hours of recorded conversations with Lewinsky to special counsel Ken Starr, who had been investigating a potpourri of allegations against the president since his appointment in 1994. His blockbuster report, which included a graphic account of the sex scandal, became a bestseller.
Tripp first told the lawyers of Paula Jones about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in advance of their deposition of the president. Jones had sued Clinton in 1994 for sexual harassment while working for the state of Arkansas in 1991 during Clinton’s governorship; her attorneys were looking for evidence of Clinton affairs to support her claim.
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Clinton denied during the 1998 deposition for the Jones lawsuit that he had “sexual relations” with Lewinsky. His denial became central to an article of impeachment charging perjury. A second article charging obstruction of justice stemmed from allegations of encouraging perjury by witnesses and other wrongful actions.
The House impeached Clinton in December 1998. After a five-week trial in the Senate, Clinton was acquitted on Feb. 12, 1999.
While defending the taping as necessary to protect herself if her credibility were questioned, Tripp also consulted with a New York literary agent before beginning her secret recordings.
Tripp received immunity for the recordings in exchange for giving them to Starr.
At the time of the scandal Tripp had been a career civil service employee, and since 1994 she had worked for the Pentagon arranging tours of U.S. military bases for select civilians. Before that she had spent a year working on Clinton’s transition team and had been a confidential assistant in the office of the White House counsel in George H.W. Bush’s administration.
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