Impeachment: American Crime Story - sorting the fact from the fiction in the Clinton-Lewinsky drama

Ryan Murphy’s latest blockbuster series deals with the affair between Bill Clinton and then-intern Monica Lewinsky - and the considerable political fallout - with Lewinsky herself serving as an executive producer
Composite - images c/o BBC

On December 19, 1998, Bill Clinton became the second President in American history to be impeached. The charges - lying under oath and obstructing justice - were connected to his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton had denied details of their relationship while under oath, and 25-year-old Lewinsky, as she later put it, became “patient zero of internet shaming… branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore.”

The case is now the subject of the latest instalment in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise, which has previously grappled with the OJ Simpson trial and the assassination of fashion designer Gianni Versace. Unlike so many accounts of the impeachment, the series centres on the women involved, with Lewinsky, who is played by Beanie Feldstein, serving as an executive producer. “It was both fascinating and complicated, trying to balance what was best for the show versus how I felt about something personally,” she told Variety.

It’s the latest in a recent spate of post-#MeToo projects re-examining the stories of women who were pilloried in the media or, especially in Lewinsky’s case, who took the flack for powerful men who continued to sail through public life. The resonances don’t stop there - it’s possible to trace the seeds of modern US politics, from political conspiracies to the rise of fake news and the emergence of powerful figures in the American right, back to this period.

Before the first episode airs this week, here’s your guide to the true story behind the series.

Bill and Monica’s relationship

Impeachment: American Crime Story
Clive Owen as Bill Clinton with Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

Clashes over proposed cuts to health insurance prompted a five-day government shutdown in 1995. With staff sent home, interns were summoned to the White House’s East Wing to answer phone calls. It was then that Lewinsky, working for chief of staff Leon Panetta, first encountered the President. In a cringe-inducing moment in episode two, which underscores just how young Lewinsky was (22 years old!), she tells Clive Owen’s Clinton of her “huge crush” on him - which is almost exactly how things played out in real life (she said “really big crush” instead, but same difference).

In 1996, Lewinsky was moved to a job in the Pentagon. In the series, it’s implied that Clinton wanted her out of the way in the run-up to the election, but the decision likely came from his staff instead. We do, however, have plenty of details about the gifts that Lewinsky and Clinton gave one another. They’re laid out in the Starr Report, a document assembled by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. He’d been tasked with investigating the President’s conduct, initially his financial dealings, but ended up playing a major role in the impeachment proceedings.

That weird toy frog that Lewinsky presents to the President? Real. The copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (the poetry book he’d previously given a copy of to Hillary - smooth)? Also real. Lewinsky gave Clinton about 30 gifts in total, including a book of Jewish humour, titled Oy Vey! And as for all the scenes showing Lewinsky waiting at home for the phone to ring? It was the Nineties. That’s how things were.

The Whitewater scandal

In episode one, Whitewater crops up again and again, whether it’s mentioned in hushed tones by staffers, scribbled on boxes of important files or gleefully cited by right-wing pundits. It refers to a convoluted controversy about the Clintons’ property investments in Arkansas. Shortly after Bill became governor in 1978, he and Hillary, along with friends Jim and Susan McDougal, bought 230 acres of land (the Whitewater Estate), aiming to build and sell holiday homes. The venture failed, but the legality of one of McDougal’s later investments became the subject of a federal investigation - and Clinton critics alleged that they were involved in wrongdoing.

Three inquiries (including one by Starr, thought to have been encouraged by one Brett Kavanaugh) cleared the First Couple, yet the scandal became useful fodder for detractors. It’s also a source of persistent conspiracy theories. Deputy WH counsel Vince Foster, who appears in episode one, had looked into some Whitewater-related tax returns. Foster died by suicide in 1993, with multiple official investigations coming to the same conclusion. That never stopped right-wingers claiming that he was murdered, though - on the 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump described Foster’s death as “very fishy.”

The TV show also alludes to rumours of an affair between Hillary and Foster, who had worked together as lawyers in Little Rock. It’s a nod to some of the wild speculation that emerged in the press shortly after Foster’s death, later revived in Christopher Anderson’s panned book Bill and Hillary: The Marriage. And while one scene showing important files being whisked away by a swarm of officials might seem to reek of creative license, their speedy removal was in fact the source of some controversy in real life: it was later claimed that Hillary’s aide Maggie Williams took documents from Foster’s office.

The Linda Tripp tapes

Sarah Paulson, left, as Linda Tripp
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

Played by Sarah Paulson in layers of prosthetics and a fat suit (which the actress has already admitted she regrets wearing), Linda Tripp is the show’s anti-heroine - her betrayal of Lewinsky helps set the impeachment in motion. A civil servant who joined the White House staff during the Bush administration, she later worked as assistant to Bernie Nussbaum, WH counsel and Foster’s boss. As Paulson’s character states with a grisly sort of pride, Tripp always claimed she was the last person to see Foster alive.

Several months after her colleague’s death, she was moved to a new job at the Pentagon, where she struck up a friendship with fellow WH outcast Lewinsky, striking up a friendship after the younger woman noticed a huge Clinton poster in Tripp’s office (yes, really - in Tripp’s eventual testimony, she said that Lewinsky “begged her” for one). Eventually, Lewinsky revealed that her elusive “boyfriend” was in fact the leader of the free world, though it’s more likely that she kept it a secret until after the ‘96 election (rather than spilling earlier on, as she does here). As for the moment Tripp tells Monica to make an Excel spreadsheet of her interactions with the President, to track patterns in his calls (oh, the romance)? That’s taken from the Starr Report too.

The series shows how Tripp was moved from the White House to the Pentagon - like Lewinsky
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

While at the Pentagon, Tripp was approached by a Newsweek reporter about claims made by her former WH colleague Kathleen Willey, who’d levelled sexual misconduct allegations at the President - and said that she’d told Tripp of the incident when it happened. Tripp recalled events differently, but still gave her piece to the reporter (in another stranger-than-fiction flourish, she ended up summoning the journalist, Michael Isikoff to a ‘secret’ meeting… at her hairdressers).

When her comments were eventually published, Clinton’s lawyer said Tripp was “not to be believed.” This must have stung, and may well have shaped her decision - spurred on by her literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who spied a potential bestseller amid all this scandal - to record her phone conversations with Lewinsky, in which she shared intimate details of her relationship with the President. Willey, it’s worth noting, was among the four Clinton accusers who appeared alongside Trump ahead of his 2016 debate with Hillary.

The Paula Jones suit

Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

This house of cards might never have fallen down quite so spectacularly were it not for Paula Jones, the Arkansas state employee who filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton in 1994, alleging that he propositioned her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991, while she was attending a conference. As we see in Impeachment, Jones (played by Annaleigh Ashford) only went public with her story after an American Spectator article namechecked her. Jones’ husband Stephen was, as the show reveals, an aspiring actor who had played Elvis in a film directed by indie auteur Jim Jarmusch (there’s no evidence he asked for a part on the sit-com Designing Women as part of his wife’s settlement, though the Clintons were pally with its creators).

When she tried to share her story with the media at CPAC, an annual gathering of conservatives, the press conference was just about as shambolic - and misogynistic - as the one we see on screen (you can still find footage online). Many of the sexist remarks yelled by journalists were quoted directly from A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin’s book about the impeachment case - so too was her lawyer’s spectacularly unfortunate turn of phrase when he referred to Jones’ “blow by blow account.”

Cobie Smulders as Ann Coulter
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

Jones quickly attracted the attention and support of right-wingers like Ann Coulter (Cobie Smulders) and George Conway, who realised that her case had the potential to bring Clinton down. Susan Carpenter-McMillan (Judith Light) became her de facto PR advisor, and really did try to give Jones a camera-ready makeover, with new outfits and even braces (predictably, her appearance and Southern accent were endlessly mocked in the media, and when she later underwent rhinoplasty in 1998, it made the national news).

To paraphrase the fictional Jones, episode one “takes a dramatic turn” when she is asked to describe - and then draw - the President’s genitals as evidence. This is true, although it didn’t happen quite the same way. Her description featured in her signed affidavit as part of the case, but it was not until she gave testimony in court that she was asked (by Clinton’s team, no less) to draw it.

Operation Prom Night

Lewinsky is cornered by the FBI in the first episode
BBC/Tina Thorpe/FX

Jones rejected an initial settlement (she later settled out of court for $850,000; Clinton still denies her allegations) so her lawyers started to subpoena government employees thought to have been involved with Clinton - including Lewinsky, who signed an affidavit denying a relationship. Enter Linda Tripp, who turned over her clandestine recordings to Starr, thus providing evidence of the affair.

In Impeachment’s opening scenes, we see the FBI target Lewinsky after Tripp asks her to meet at the mall. The sting, queasily nicknamed Operation Prom Night, did indeed play out in the mall food court. Agents took Lewinsky to the adjoining Ritz-Carlton Hotel, threatening her with 27 years in jail for lying in her affidavit in the hope that she could get Clinton to admit to their affair in another taped phone conversation (thus giving them evidence of perjury, grounds for impeachment). When Tripp was asked to leave the hotel room, Lewinsky said she should stay, telling agents: “I want that treacherous bitch to see what she’s done to me.”

Impeachment: American Crime Story is on BBC Two, October 19 at 9.15pm

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