The True Story of American Crime Story: Impeachment

The True Story of American Crime Story: Impeachment

Welcome to MsMojo, and today we’re tackling The True Story of “American Crime Story: Impeachment.”

For this video, we’ll be looking at the dramatic true life events that informed the third season of the anthology series, American Crime Story.

Are you watching “Impeachment?” Give us your thoughts in the comments section.

It all began...well, not innocently, if we’re being honest. In the summer of 1996 a young Pentagon staffer named Monica Lewinsky began confiding in her friend Linda Tripp about her affair with a married man. She had no way of knowing that she had just lit the fuse on a bombshell that would rock the nation from sea to shining sea. Because the man in question was, in fact, the sitting President of the United States, Bill Clinton. And Tripp was not as trustworthy as Lewinsky had thought. The events that followed would threaten to upend a presidency, and turn the entire country into a jeering mob. When the dust settled, America would be changed forever.

No one would have guessed that Monica Lewinsky would wind up at the center of a history-making scandal. She was born and raised in California, where, despite her affluent environment, she was a normal teenage girl. She attended Santa Monica College for two years before enrolling at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, where she graduated with a Psychology degree in 1995. Shortly thereafter, a family connection helped Lewinsky land an unpaid internship in the office of White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. She began work in July of 1995, just one of the thousands of young interns who flooded into DC every year.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, had always stood out. The Arkansas native had attended Georgetown and Oxford on scholarships, and earned a law degree from Yale before returning home to become the second youngest governor in Arkansas history. By 1995, Clinton was in the midst of a successful first Presidential term and preparing to stand for reelection. However, his political acumen, popular policies, and affable demeanor distracted from some troubling allegations. A former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones stated that in 1991 Clinton had propositioned her and exposed himself in a Little Rock Hotel room. She filed suit for Sexual harassment in 1994. However, initially her claims weren’t taken very seriously.

If the President himself was concerned about this case, it didn’t show in his actions. Clinton would begin his affair with Monica Lewinsky in November of 1995. Though, according to Lewinsky, the relationship never included intercourse, it was a very intense one. The 22-year-old fell head over heels for her boss, the most powerful man in the world. Forces in the administration acted to neutralize the threat to Clinton’s reelection chances, and Lewinsky was transferred out of the White House to the Pentagon in April of 1996. At the time Clinton promised she would return to the West Wing after the election, however in reality this event marked his slow withdrawal from their relationship before it ended for good in spring of 1997.

While exiled to the far shore of the Potomac, Lewinsky became friends with a co-worker named Linda Tripp. Tripp, a former staffer from the Bush Administration, was no happier to have been transferred out of the White House than the younger woman. When Lewinsky confided in Tripp about her affair with the President and subsequent heartbreak, Tripp was all too eager to listen. More than listen, actually. In the fall of 1997, she began recording her conversations with Lewinsky on the advice of literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. Tripp encouraged Lewinsky to vent, and even offered advice that would allow for key evidence later on. Soon after, she approached Paula Jones’ legal team, and Lewinsky’s name was then added to a list of witnesses.

All this brought Lewinsky to the attention of Ken Starr. Starr had been named an Independent Counsel in 1994, and charged with investigating Bill Clinton with regards to several other issues. When Tripp contacted his office with her damning Lewinsky tapes in hand, he received permission to expand the scope of his investigation. Lewinsky was accosted by several FBI agents and attorneys from Starr’s team and questioned for the first time. Frightening as the experience was, it was nothing compared to what was ahead. On January 19, 1998 Lewinsky’s name appeared for the first time in a Drudge Report gossip column. The story didn’t take off so much as it exploded.

The media frenzy was immediate, and rabid, and Clinton was denying the affair at every opportunity, including in front of a Grand Jury. On January 26th he would stand before the nation and utter the most famous line of his presidency. It did nothing to extinguish the firestorm. Meanwhile, Monica Lewinsky had become a national punchline. As the story continued to dominate headlines, she was relentlessly dragged in the media. The situation was only made worse by the expanded reach enabled by the early internet. All the while, the Independent Counsel continued to pressure and intimidate her. Finally, in July, she agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. With the writing on the wall, Clinton finally came clean the next month.

This testimony went public in September within weeks of Ken Starr’s investigation report, which outlined 11 possible reasons for Impeachment. The case was quickly taken up in the House of Representatives, who officially impeached Clinton in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for his false testimony to the Grand Jury. The Senate trial, only the second in US history, began in January of 1999, with the defense making their opening remarks on the same day as the State of the Union address. The proceedings went on for weeks under the same fevered scrutiny that had accompanied the entire story. However, in February the Senate acquitted Clinton 45/50 on perjury, and 50/50 on obstruction.

And with that the greatest political storm to hit the country since Watergate was over. At least, it was for Bill Clinton. He would go on to finish his second term in office and continues to occupy a place of respect as an elder statesman and former President. His dark history of misconduct allegations remains mostly unexamined. Instead, it could be argued that the greatest political consequence of the Clinton/Lewinsky Scandal was the deepening of partisan divides. Democrats were accused of blind support for Clinton, while Republicans were charged with witch hunting. The impeachment became a major inflection point in a relationship that was already souring, and has only become more bitter in the intervening years.

Monica Lewinsky did not walk away nearly as unscathed as Clinton. She continued to be the target of mean-spirited media attention until she moved to the UK in 2005 to further her education at the London School of Economics. She graduated with her Master of Science in Psychology in 2007. But in a post MeToo era, Lewinsky has made the choice to move herself back into the spotlight. As an advocate for the victims of cyberbullying, she is active on social media, and speaks out against the kind of thoughtless cruelty that almost destroyed her. Remarkably, her experience has not left her bitter, but determined. Determined to build a future with a little more perspective, and a lot more kindness.