Played key role in Clinton sex scandal
Linda Tripp, a key figure in the presidential sex scandal that nearly brought down the administration of Bill Clinton over his affair with onetime White House intern Monica Lewinsky, leading to the president’s impeachment in 1998, died Wednesday. She was 70.
The death was confirmed by her son, Ryan Tripp. She had been treated for breast cancer in the past.
Tripp was praised as a whistleblower by some for calling out presidential misbehaviour with an intern in the Oval Office, and was vilified by others as a snitch who betrayed her friendship with Lewinsky in an effort to bring down a president.
Tripp had worked as a White House secretary during the George H.W. Bush administration and stayed on for the first two years of the Clinton presidency, in 1993 and 1994. She later told a grand jury that she was troubled by the president’s behaviour toward women.
After she was transferred to the Pentagon, Tripp befriended Lewinsky, a former White House intern who confided that she had a sexual relationship with Clinton while he was president. Tripp secretly recorded their telephone conversations.
Tripp later turned over the recordings to independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who convened a grand jury to determine whether the president had broken any laws.
Among other things, Tripp told Starr’s investigators about a navy blue dress Lewinsky had worn that was stained with the president’s semen. She had advised Lewinsky not to have it cleaned, in case she might need it as future evidence.
“I just, I don’t trust the people around him, and I just want you to have that for you,” Tripp told Lewinsky. “Put it in a baggie, put it in a Ziploc bag, and you pack it in with your treasures, for what I care.”
Clinton was impeached but later acquitted.
“I’m really sorry for everything that’s happened,” Lewinsky testified to the grand jury. “And I hate Linda Tripp.”