In the fall of 1997, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff met with Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg in the Washington, D.C., home of Goldberg’s son Jonah. The scene, reimagined in Tuesday’s episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story, would be one of the more bizarre of his career.
“By that point I had heard Linda’s accounts of her young friend and her relationship with the president,” Isikoff tells Vanity Fair Wednesday morning. He agreed to meet Tripp in the hopes of learning more about her then unidentified friend, who turned out to be Monica Lewinsky. “I didn’t know any details about who she was.”
When he arrived, however, he was shocked to be presented with audio tapes Tripp had made of her so-called friend.
“It was pretty strange when they sprung this ‘I’ve been taping [my calls with Monica]’ thing,” says Isikoff. “It was a little bit like, ‘What’s going on here? What are we doing?’ What really kind of threw me off was that they seemed to want to get my advice on what Linda should say to Monica to elicit responses that would make a story in Newsweek. That’s what made me feel uncomfortable—that they were drawing me into this process of taping that was clearly going on without Monica’s consent. It just seemed a little bit weird to me. So I resisted. I had other things to do and I didn’t want to be sitting there for an hour listening to the tape.”
Isikoff high-tailed it out of the apartment, a hasty exit recreated on Tuesday’s episode with the reporter played by Danny A. Jacobs. (Tripp is played by Sarah Paulson, while Goldberg is played by Margo Martindale.) Isikoff, who watched the episode, says of the scene, “Something like that took place but the conversations were not exactly as they presented [on the show].”
“My main disappointment was that they left out the best part—after Monica showed Linda the blue dress, Linda called me and offered to steal the dress and give it to me,” says Isikoff, recounting an exchange chronicled in his 1999 book Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story. “That was like, ‘Whoa, wait a second. What am I going to do with this garment?’ And she said, ‘Well, you could have it tested.’ I thought about it for a second—where am I going to get [Clinton’s] DNA to test it against? That, plus I wasn’t eager to take custody of stolen property. So I kind of dismissed the whole thing and told Linda to forget it. Little did I know that would become a key piece of evidence.”
If Isikoff has one critique of Impeachment and its handling of the scandal, from his perspective as the person who reported it, it’s this:
“Clearly this is a Monica-centric story, and they’re telling it from her perspective. And she certainly deserves to have the world see this through her eyes,” says Isikoff of the series, which counts the real-life Lewinsky (who’s also a V.F. contributor) as a producer. “But I think the show is not fully capturing the gravity of Clinton’s alleged offenses here—both in the Paula Jones matter and the Kathleen Willey matter. With Jones, they don’t really flesh out her story and explain to the viewer how serious it was that Clinton, who was the governor, [allegedly] had a trooper go fetch a woman who struck his fancy and bring her up to a hotel room where he exposes himself and asks for a blow job. I mean, hello, Harvey Weinstein, come on.” (Clinton denied Jones’s allegations; her sexual harassment suit against the president ended with a settlement in which Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000.)
As for the Willey accusations, Isikoff points out, “Remember, the basic details here are: She goes in to see Clinton about a job. She’s just learned her husband is implicated in an embezzlement scandal. They’ve lost all their money and she’s desperate for a job. And it turns into this clumsy sexual tryst in which Clinton paws her, slips his hand under her skirt, gets aroused, kisses her…I mean, this is what happens when the woman is coming in to talk to him about a job. It’s a rather serious matter.” (Clinton denied Willey’s allegations; the Office of the Independent Counsel declined to prosecute Clinton for Willey’s claims.)
In the past few years, Lewinsky has reexamined the power dynamic of her consensual relationship with Clinton in multiple essays for Vanity Fair. In 2018, she wrote, “He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet. He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college.”
Given this dynamic, Isikoff makes one additional note about Impeachment’s depiction of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship.
“It’s worth reminding people that while they’re sort of portraying the relationship [between Lewinsky and Clinton] as being some sort of romantic affair, according to Monica’s own testimony, she wasn’t even sure Clinton knew her name after she had given him his second blow job. The idea that this was some sort of a romantic love affair doesn’t quite square with how this actually evolved.”
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