Linda Tripp
Pentagon staffer who exposed Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky
LINDA TRIPP, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 70, was the Pentagon employee whose clandestine taping of the White House intern Monica Lewinsky’s confessions of her affair with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment but won her the label “most reviled woman in America”.
In April 1996 members of Clinton’s staff decided to move Monica Lewinsky out of the White House and transfer her to the Pentagon amid growing concerns over her closeness to the president.
There she was befriended by Linda Tripp, a woman 24 years her senior working in the Pentagon’s public affairs office. Linda Tripp claimed later that she had decided to tape her chats with her young friend out of “patriotic duty” and out of concern for a “lost soul” who had been “abused, used [and] discarded” by the president.
On January 12 1998 Linda Tripp took her tapes, recording more than 20 hours of conversations, to the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who was making little headway in his investigations of Whitewater, a failed property development in which the Clintons had invested in Arkansas.
Armed with Linda Tripp’s information, Starr obtained permission to expand his investigation, and he arranged for Tripp to make more tapes with FBI help.
Clinton at first denied the relationship, but the recordings and the stained blue dress which Linda Tripp persuaded Ms Lewinsky not have drycleaned as an “insurance policy”, blew the case open.
Clinton was impeached for lying and obstruction of justice, but was eventually acquitted. Linda Tripp found herself depicted as a villain of the piece, receiving death threats and her stout frame inspired look-alike contests in gay bars.
In fact she was one of the few players in the drama to be prosecuted, when she was charged with illegal wire tapping, though the case was dismissed.
Linda Tripp’s claim that she was acting out of the best of motives rested uneasily with the fact that from 1994 she had been in discussions with Lucianne Goldberg, a vehemently anti-clinton literary agent, with a view to publishing a book about the administration; she was said to have raised suspicions about the death of Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel whose death in a Washington park had been declared a suicide.
Linda Tripp had pulled out after a few months, saying she was afraid she would lose her job. In 1996, however, she contacted Lucianne Goldberg again with news of her friendship with Monica Lewinsky,
Linda Tripp first made headlines in August 1997, when she gave an account to Newsweek that appeared to confirm reports from another woman, Kathleen Willey, of sexual advances by Clinton in November 1993. She had encountered Kathleen Willey coming out of the Oval Office, she said, dishevelled, with her lipstick smeared but looking happy.
Furious at such allegations coming at a time when Clinton was facing a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones, Robert Bennett, the president’s lawyer claimed Linda Tripp was “not to be believed”.
It was this that prompted Lucianne Goldberg to suggest that Linda Tripp should get proof of Monica Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton through tape recordings.
Linda Tripp was born Linda Rose Carotenuto on November 24 1949 in Jersey City, New Jersey. She worked as a secretary in Army Intelligence and in 1971 married Bruce Tripp, an army colonel. They divorced in 1990.
In 1987 she transferred to the Pentagon, moving to the White House under George HW Bush.
She was sacked from her job at the Pentagon in 2001, and later moved to Middleburg, Virginia, where she ran a Christmas novelty shop with her second husband, Dieter Rausch.
He survives her with a daughter and a son from her first marriage.
Linda Tripp, born November 24 1949, died April 8 2020