What Made Linda Do It?

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EXCLUSIVE: Linda Tripp is the mystery woman at the center of the Lewinsky scandal, an Obscure bureaucrat who taped Monica--and turned her in. Why did she do it? An inside look at what drove her to the Feds.

It was late on the afternoon of Wednesday, Jan. 14, and Monica Lewinsky seemed to be more desperate than ever to reach her friend Linda Tripp. At loose ends before she began her new job in New York, Lewinsky was calling Tripp repeatedly from pay phones, for fear of being overheard--or wiretapped. Pulled out of a meeting at the Pentagon, Tripp finally got Lewinsky's call. According to a source familiar with Tripp's account, Tripp believed that Lewinsky had been crying. Lewinsky told Tripp that she had some "new ideas" about how Linda could testify in the Paula Jones case. Both women had been subpoenaed by Jones's lawyers, and what they planned to testify to had been the source of tortured discussion between them for weeks. Much of that talk had revolved around a woman named

Months before, Tripp had told a Newsweek reporter that she had seen Willey just after Willey, a White House volunteer, had been alone with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. Willey had told Tripp that the president had made a pass at her. NOW Jones's lawyers wanted Tripp to testify about the incident in order to buttress their argument that Clinton had a "pattern and practice" of sexual harassment. That Wednesday evening m January, as Lewinsky drove Tripp home to Columbia, Md. (Lewinsky had insisted on making the hourlong drive), the former White House intern seemed hysterical. Lewinsky appeared to know exactly what the president planned to say about Willey: that their encounter had been friendly, but not sexual. According to the source familiar with Tripp's account, the president would be "extremely upset" if Tripp were to contradict him about Willey, Lewinsky told Tripp. Lewinsky said that the president expected Tripp to be a team player. "He feels you screwed him in the Newsweek article," Lewinsky allegedly said. Tripp should know, Lewinsky warned, that both Linda and her children were "in danger" if she didn't testify the right way about the Willey episode. Lewinsky handed Tripp a three-page document. It was entitled "points to make in an affidavit," and it appeared to encourage Tripp to perjure herself. The document, which Tripp later turned over to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, is still the …