Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp take the hot seat on Impeachment: American Crime Story
Impeachment’s main players, Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, look for redemption before one of the most fickle audiences of all: the American public.
TV Reviews Linda Tripp
The origins of the Real Housewives reunions may very well lie in the grand jury testimonies of Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. Stay with me.
As a TV tradition, these are spaces where the reality stars come to rehash their pasts and air grievances. Time is spent on choosing the perfect outfit that is meant to also be a statement about their persona. They are under extreme scrutiny; no question too probing or impertinent as long as it results in them “owning it.” The expectation is that you will admit to your shortcomings but also appeal to public sympathy. Receipts abound. It is, in short, an exercise in redemption.
Whatever the nefarious entanglements of politics and Bravo may be, the extended grand jury scenes in this week’s episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story take a nod from the reunion format. Or maybe it’s a reflection of the rise of politics as reality TV. It follows both Monica Lewinsky’s and Linda Tripp’s experience as they enter that courtroom, take an oath, and tell their story to twenty-nine average American citizens. This is their shot to break free from whatever slandering narrative—warranted or not—has been pushed by the White House, the press, and comedy bros. But like most reunions, one will emerge triumphant while another will solidify her villain status.
Monica enters the courtroom with her very best “not a deranged whore” look, which is hard to pull off because any style can be considered a deranged whore look if you run into the Kavanaughs of the world. Before her lies a guy in a ponytail, at least 15 no-nonsense aunties, and a handful of other people. Starr has brought in a lady lawyer because he understands diversity to mean checking off a demographic box for optics.
The questioning is rough. Copies of the Excel spreadsheet cataloguing her encounters with Clinton are passed around. She gets pointed questions from the prosecution about what sex acts she engaged in. An older woman with the attitude of your tough-but-fair elementary school principal asks her about her habit of sleeping with married men.
But soon, Monica is weaving her way into the hearts of grand jury. She does so by being vulnerable and honest. She talks openly about her feelings for the president with the sweetness of a broken-hearted twentysomething. At least five of those suburban moms want to take her to get mani-pedis and tell her why she deserves better. But nothing gets them on her side more than her account of being harassed and threatened by the FBI. By the time her questioning is over, the jury is lifting her up, organizing for police reform, and demanding Linda Tripp’s head.
Ah yes, Linda. Her turn on the hot seat is not nearly as victorious. She has spent the past months as a hotel recluse, sustained by a breakfast buffet and frustration over being away from her cubicle. She spends her days clipping articles about herself to the despair of her daughter. When she finally relents and goes home, what awaits is a bunch of sprouting potatoes and a New Yorker article that functions as an omen for her grand jury experience.
Linda is still under the impression that people will understand her if they can just hear her story. Unfortunately for her, no one gives a shit about her story. They care about Monica because she is the protagonist in this scandal. They are also Team Monica because she won them over. So, when Linda’s angle is to portray Monica as an annoying friend, it backfires.
The grand jury members poke holes in her narrative the way only superfans of any franchise with a vendetta can. Why didn’t you tell her to stop calling you? Why encourage her to give Clinton a tie? Why tape the calls? Sounds like you wanted to keep her talking. Why did she feel she was in danger for exposing the truth but didn’t think Monica would ever be in any danger? What evidence do you have over your Vince Foster conspiracy theory? Why do you prefer Marshalls to Ross?
Tripp trips on her account. (I’ve been waiting all season to write that.) When she leaves the court room, she is distraught. Her long-awaited statement to the press is a plea. “I’m you. I’m just like you,” Linda insists before listing the many ways she’s been wronged. She even ends it with a statement that most civic-minded folks would agree with: “I believe you have the right to tell the truth under oath, without fear of retaliation.” Nevertheless, this has no impact. Tripp might see herself as a whistle blower, but the country sees her as a bad friend. No one wants to identify with the bad friend.
In an episode that focuses on competing stories, there is also something smarter and deeper simmering under the Lewinsky-Tripp feud. And it has to do with the question of who gets to tell victims stories and under what circumstances. Most of the women featured are pressured to spill, which only traumatizes them further—as a kicker, the truth does not set them free either.
Jones gives us one of the more satisfying moments in the show when she kicks man-child Steve to curb. But she also does this in the aftermath of a nose job for a nose she “didn’t even know was bad until you made me do this.” Juanita Broaddrick tells the FBI about her rape only to end up as a footnote because Starr does not deem it a crime worthy of consideration.
As for Monica, she is adamant that her affair with Clinton was consensual. In her experience, there was affection, maybe even love. Her ordeal isn’t the kiss in the Oval Office. It’s the persistent questioning by authorities over it. It’s her recounting her most intimate details to yet another lawyer. It is the mortification over having to share her story, over and over, when she didn’t want to in the first place.
It’s a situation that stems from Tripp’s desire to co-opt Monica’s experience for her own gain, and a society hungry to consume tales of female trauma only to eagerly discard women as trash. Redemption—whether through an affidavit, a nose job, or a sympathetic jury—is short-lived.
Stray Observations
- I know Monica truly saw Linda as a friend because of how they had a nickname for the man she was engaging in sexual activity with a.k.a. The Creep. That’s BFF behavior, right there.
- You can still read The New Yorker profile in their archives, which speculates that part of Linda’s motivation stems from her own philandering father.
- Was this episode also trying to rehabilitate the Karens of the world??? I tried to figure out who the real female lawyer was in the grand jury but from my understanding the three lawyers that questioned Lewinsky that day were Michael Emmick, Solomon L. Wisenberg, and Mary Anne Writh. And yet, here she is named Karen. At the behest of Monica and the grand jury, she is given permission to take over proceedings when Emmick leaves because he was making Monica uncomfortable. Um, let the healing begin?
- Another person looking for redemption? Bill. Not from the public, God no! He’s up in the polls. But from his wife, who is swayed by his admiration of her intelligence and political acumen.
- We can hold space for two truths: One, Bill Clinton is a total creep, to use Lewinsky’s preferred term. Two, he was also subject to a political campaign to thwart his presidency by the Republicans. This is the balance Impeachment wants to juggle by making sure Starr and his Altar Boys come off as sanctimonious misogynist pencil-pushers every step of the way.
29 Comments
what awaits is a bunch of sprouting potatoesHoly shit! I thought those were dead RATS!!!I wondered why she didn’t react with horror. I thought maybe she got so jaded by the threats she didn’t care anymore, but how did they get in her cupboard??? Did somebody break in, or was she collecting them??? Were they real???
So many questions. About nothing, it turns out.
what awaits is a bunch of sprouting potatoesHoly shit! I thought those were dead RATS!!!Don’t matter to me. Either way I’m gunna boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew!
Throw em in a pot, add some broth, a potato…
You want a rat? Onna stick?
I jumped when I thought I saw rats, too!
Fun Fact: Starr would continue his policy that “Some lady changing her mind” is not worth investigating as President of Baylor University.Just google “Baylor rape scandal”.
Dude is SUCH an asshole.
Yeah, I can see how you (and maybe myself) would want that narrative to match up in our heads, of Ken Starr getting his karmic comeuppance, but it’s a stretch: a president of a university is more big picture stuff and fundraising. It’s very likely he wasn’t aware of that kind of stuff. I even think this episode trying to make some feminist statement of Juanita Broadneck being ignored is a stretch. Just like with Trump’s impeachment, they’re goal isn’t to hold him accountable for everything ever, but to stick with the charges at hand
Was she ignored? Yes. Is that a feminist statement per se? No. It’s just a fact that women were pushed to the side despite their very real, very traumatic rapes. Starr is and always was a misogynist douche.
I was referring to his position at Baylor University.
As for the rape charge, I’m not well-informed. What was he supposed to do? He clearly was trying to make Clinton pay for abusing women, do you agree/disagree? I think the kinds of people that said “a public figure’s private life is no one’s business” in 1998 are the same people politically speaking who have no reversed course in 2017-2021 to say that “a public figure’s private life is all our business”, Clinton’s philandering and our forgiveness of it is our cross to bear and Starr was more in line with the modern day #metoo movement than any Democrats were back then, so there’s probably a lot of cognitive dissonance that we as democrats have to contend with.
I assume Broadneck’s rape was out of his jurasdiction, but I’m willing to be corrected.
Monica truly saw Linda as a friend because of how they had a nickname for the man she was engaging in sexual activity with It wasn’t “McDreamy”, was it?
I would have thought it would be Righty or Lefty.
How many more of these are left I wonder? Is 10 the normal ACS season?
Yup. Next week is the finale.
Yep–sorry about that. I posted before finishing off the episode. Post Script to just say the whole Starr legal team is gross.
Karen is played by Lindsey Broad, who played the devious Cathy in season 8 of The Office. She’s the one who invited herself into Jim’s hotel room, took a shower, and tried to have snuggle time on his bed.
So that’s Jim’s baby??? Does Pam know???
I remember that Linda Tripp press appearance well enough to know it was on a sunny day and she did not in fact have a huge shadow over her face…
There is no sun in this series. Period.
I couldn’t help but wonder if we really needed to see so much of that one-on-one between Attorney Karen and Monica. That was brutal, and while I know the real Monica was involved in this series it just seemed a little like putting her through it all over again. I guess they figured it’s already out there and she wanted the audience to see how humiliating it was, but it really was excruciating.I admit I don’t have the legal knowledge to understand exactly what the process with those federal jurors was. Was it really that gossipy and friendly and/or catty? That felt very strange, procedure-wise. What was the function? It was certainly satisfying to watch, but felt a little like fanservice.
Monica is a producer on the series and she knows exactly what she’s doing and consenting to everything being shown on the show IIRC. Monica is certainly a brave woman and any time something is here that would be extremely embarrassing for other people, it just makes me love Monica more.
Beanie Feldstein studied a lot through secondary materials and was careful not to re-approach Monica to ask her traumatizing things.
Oh I wasn’t at all suggesting Monica didn’t clear it, we know that she did. I just wondered if it was necessary, because in many ways it served the same disgusting purpose it did the first time we all heard it. Her personal growth, alas, is not contagious.
I mean, it let people know exactly how power abuse happens.
Watching Linda Tripp implode in front of the grand jury was glorious.
So this is actually a show, not a joke article?
How was Starr’s team misogynist (or any more misogynist then the people of that era?). They were looking to nail a man for abuse of power primarily and needed witnesses. They handled the interrogation of Monica in a rather evil way but that’s because lawyers and company men are slime.
“Starr has brought in a lady lawyer because he understands diversity to mean checking off a demographic box for optics.”
I mean if you want to see things in the bleakest possible terms possible, yes you can look at it that way. Or it could be both? They knew it was good optics and it was a better way to get Monica comfortable.
And the scrutiny of Monica happened in a jury that was mostly women. It’s probably not convenient to the AV Club narrative that the “old auntie” was a black women bc the site is all about championing Black and female voices in stories, so let’s just conveniently skip over that part, huh?
Did anyone notice the cast list in the credits included ‘Juror Who Looks Like Kirstie Alley’? What was that about? So odd.
I gotta give credit to Paulson for her portrayal of Tripp in this show. I was a teen when all this actually happened, so the accuracy might be debatable, but damn if Paulson doesn’t do a good job with at least a version of this person. Tripp is someone who took imagined grievances to shrieking heights and had such a deluded sense of self-worth that she conflated her petty anger with some fight for the soul of the nation. Watching the grand jury destroy her with such alarmingly simple questions was cathartic in a way.I have absolutely worked with people who truly believe without them, the company would fall apart immediately. That giving basic work to interns is “too risky” and they need to do it themselves, then use the fact that they are “too busy doing everyone else’s job” as justification for their own job. That moving 2 cubes farther from the boss during an office layout design change is an open sleight. These people are exhausting and so full of themselves that they are best avoided (I see a lot of Trumpism in Tripp’s perspectives).Tripp seems like she just wanted to matter in DC and the fact of the matter is, she didn’t. She was a receptionist for one admin and when that admin turned over, they wanted someone else. This shit happens all the time and I can even understand being upset by that – I for one was not happy when my company made a reorg and my division got moved to another location and my role was eliminated. But instead of scheming to take down the CFO, I just got another job, which is what most people would do. It is Faustian that she ended up getting her wish – she became a well-known snitch/shitty friend and I wonder to what degree she truly believed she was fighting for the very fate of the US, or whether she realized she was full of shit.
Not a Karen redemption after all… Mary Anne Wirth may have been in the grand jury room, but Monica Lewinsky was deposed by Karin Immergut in the presence of Wirth. Both were associate independent counsels under Ken Starr. Looks like they used the character as a composite of the two. For a transcript of the actual deposition, check out http://www.tep-online.info/laku/usa/clinton/clinlew3.htm and you can also view (now Trump appointed US district judge) Immergut’s Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Immergut