ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — Monica Lewinsky gave former pal Linda Tripp a bit of payback yesterday — saying she was “terrified” to see secretly recorded intimate conversations published in a national magazine.
“I was pretty upset. It was very clear to me that it was from previous conversations I had with Linda Tripp,” Lewinsky said at a hearing to determine whether the state of Maryland can put Tripp on trial for illegal wiretapping.
The former White House intern and paramour of President Clinton looked slimmed down — having lost, by some accounts, as much as 40 pounds as a result of her megabucks deal with the Jenny Craig diet conglomerate.
Dressed in a tailored black pantsuit and clutching one of the pocketbooks she designed and is hawking on the Internet, the Sexgate siren held a packed audience spellbound as she took the witness stand for the first time in a public courtroom.
Lewinsky, called by one Maryland prosecutor “a very cooperative witness,” testified that she never gave Tripp, her former White House confidante, permission to tape her phone calls about her affair with President Clinton.
She also said her recollections of those events were hers — and were not influenced by her cooperation with then-independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
These are two crucial points for the prosecution — which must show at this hearing that the evidence against Tripp was not tainted by Starr’s investigation after Tripp became an immunized witness.
Speaking in her now recognizable velvet contralto, Lewinsky recalled becoming frightened when she saw a transcript of one of her conversations published in the Feb. 2, 1998, edition of Newsweek magazine.
“It terrified me because I was concerned about the privacy of my relationship being revealed,” Lewinsky said without once mentioning the president’s name.
“That conversation was — there were certain aspects of it that were marked in my mind, etched in my mind, because it was a pretty frightening time for me.”
Although most of the subject matter was technical, Lewinsky’s appearance yesterday was marked by bitter undercurrents stemming from her past statements that she feels betrayed by Tripp and now hates her.
Although Tripp wasn’t in the courtroom, Lewinsky was a bundle of emotions — nearly a year after she almost brought down the Clinton presidency.
At times, she was charming and poised, once demonstrating her prowess as a federal witness by recognizing an “FBI 302” report — an investigator’s memo on a meeting with a witness.
At other times, she curled her lip or flared her nostrils in exasperation as Tripp lawyer Joe Murtha tried to confuse her and show Judge Diane Leasure that Lewinsky is tainted by Starr’s probe.
At one point, Lewinsky became flustered when Tripp’s youngest son, Ryan, 21, entered the courtroom. After making eye contact with him, Lewinsky asked the judge for a 10-minute recess to compose herself.
Asked later about the incident, Ryan said: “I noticed that, too. I don’t know why it happened. I’ve only met her a couple of times.”
When her 90-minute appearance was over, Lewinsky sighed audibly before being hustled out the back door of the courthouse into a van.
Leasure is expected to rule on whether the case can go forward after the final witnesses appear today.