She felt it was her moral duty to expose the president and rescue Lewinsky from a man she considered a sexual predator. But according to Tripp, it was none of the above. The reasons given at the time - mostly not by her - were myriad: She was an opportunist after a book deal, seeing how it was the book agent, Lucianne Goldberg, who advised her to record Lewinsky she was part of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary was always talking about she loathed the Clintons, whom she saw as hippies invading the White House (among the offenses she lists in her book were their jeans, takeout boxes and “rings left by soda cans”). One of the great mysteries is why Tripp did what she did. In 1993, she was transferred to the Pentagon, where Lewinsky arrived three years later. She got a job in the Bush White House and stayed on for the Clintons. Once they divorced in 1990, Tripp’s career thrived. She attended a secretarial school and at 21 married an army lieutenant. “It is probably a good part of the reason that I could not tolerate the behavior of Bill Clinton, the supreme bully, all those years later,” she wrote in her book, “A Basket of Deplorables.” Eventually her father ran off with another woman, leaving Tripp with no money for college. “A raging bully,” is how Tripp later described him. He was unfaithful and physically abusive, and, according to Allison, Tripp received regular beatings. Tripp’s father was an American soldier when he met her mother, then a teenager, in Germany, where he was stationed. “The president got to be a fully formed human who’s flawed and complex,” Foster said, “but the women were always reduced to stereotypes, and that includes Linda.”Īllison told me that to understand her mother you have to begin with her childhood in New Jersey, in the 1950s. The crux of the joke was her weight and her looks. On “Saturday Night Live,” she was played by John Goodman, who screwed his face into a rodentlike grimace and shoveled fast food into his mouth. (Clinton has denied both allegations.) Like those women, Tripp was eviscerated in the press.
“It only makes her more interesting.” With her A&E documentary series “The Clinton Affair,” Foster set out to return full personhood not only to Lewinsky, but also to Paula Jones, who described Clinton inviting her to his hotel room, where he exposed himself to her and to Juanita Broaddrick, who accused him of rape. “Restoring humanity to her doesn’t in any way let her off the hook,” the filmmaker Blair Foster told me. But now that there is a better understanding of how stories are told and by whom, reducing her to a one-note villain feels like lazy storytelling. Tripp is unlikely to ever get the same redemption. Lewinsky, everyone now seems to agree, was taken advantage of by her boss and slut-shamed by the country. See Hollywood’s rehabilitation of Tonya Harding, Marcia Clark and Lorena Bobbitt. Recent years have been kinder to women once judged harshly. It was Tripp who had encouraged Lewinsky to not dry-clean the blue Gap dress to ask the president for a job to use a messenger service to send him letters - all to build a body of evidence. The tapes confirmed the affair, but they also revealed Tripp’s sustained deception. Tripp was portrayed not as the hero but as the villain of the impeachment scandal at the time. So who was the horse? And who was drowning? Did anyone actually get saved in that story? Tripp made secret recordings of their conversations, which she then gave to Ken Starr, an independent counsel investigating the president.
Like the ducks that once landed in Tony Soprano’s pool, the horse story seemed to contain some key symbolism - but what was it exactly? To review: In 1996, Lewinsky, a former White House intern, found her way to Tripp’s cubicle at the Pentagon and soon began confiding in Tripp about her affair with the president.
A month later Oksana gave birth to a healthy foal.īefore Allison told me this story, I’d heard it from Leon Neyfakh, who interviewed Linda Tripp in 2018 for his podcast, “Slow Burn,” but ended up not using the anecdote. Eventually the fire department arrived and pulled Oksana out of the pool. After Rausch cut the pool cover, Tripp’s daughter, Allison, dived in to rescue Oksana.
Tripp called for help, but her property sits at the end of a series of gravel roads in rural Virginia. She and her husband, Dieter Rausch, ran out and found Oksana thrashing near the deep end.
Tripp, the former civil servant whose audiotapes of Monica Lewinsky led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton six years earlier, was at home. She had wandered into Tripp’s backyard and, mistaking a pool covering for solid ground, fell in. Late one night in February 2004, a pregnant horse dropped into Linda Tripp’s swimming pool. She was cast as the ultimate villain during the impeachment of Bill Clinton.