In May of 1994, a 28 year old woman by the name of Paula Jones filed a lawsuit against sitting president Bill Clinton, claiming that he had pulled out his dick and stroked it in front of her three years prior when he was governor. The charge came a few months after a pair of Arkansas State Troopers claimed that they had helped the president find random women to fuck, citing the first name of one such woman as Paula. The Jones lawsuit quickly became mired down in legal mumbo jumbo. Clinton attempted to claim presidential immunity, meaning that the case wouldn’t be allowed to proceed until he was no longer president, a maneuver that delayed the case for years as it worked its way through the court system. In May of 1997, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the court case could proceed. Throughout this period, Jones’ lawyers had her hitting the news and talk show circuit in hopes of getting more women to come forward. The lawyers hoped to establish a pattern of impropriety to help prove Jones’ claim. While no victims chose to come forward at the time, someone did leave an anonymous tip about a woman they should talk to. That woman was Monica Lewinsky.
In 1997, Monica Lewinsky was a 24 year old Pentagon employee who for a ten month period between 1995 and 1996 had worked as a White House intern. During this period, she began an affair with the president that involved blowjobs and putting cigars in places where cigars probably shouldn’t go. Worried about such behavior, the White House staff had Lewinsky transferred to the Pentagon, but the affair continued off and on. When Lewinsky was subpoenaed by the Jones case in January of 1998, she testified that no such affair had occurred. Within days, a so-called friend and confidante of Lewinsky’s, named Linda Tripp, approached Independent Counsel Ken Starr with over twenty hours of secretly taped conversations with Lewinsky talking about the affair, including claims that the president had asked Lewinsky to lie under oath.
It should go without saying that such news got Starr all sorts of hot and bothered. Working fast, he got permission from a judiciary panel to look into the matter, and then waited for Clinton to testify in the Jones case a few days later. In his testimony, the president denied having an affair with Lewinsky. For the beleaguered Ken Starr, facing a failing Whitewater investigation, it was a godsend. As news of the affair began getting leaked to the press, three more women came forward claiming that they had at one time or another been groped by Bill Clinton. Another woman would come forward a year later, claiming that Clinton had raped her. The president denied all of it, basically calling Lewinsky a lying slut, and his wife Hillary proclaimed a whole thing a massive right wing conspiracy. Over a six month period, Starr negotiated with Lewinsky in an attempt to get her to admit the truth, during which time she did a modeling spread for Vogue magazine. In July, she made a deal to testify in return for immunity, sweetening the deal by handing over a blue dress with a presidential cum stain. She soon after testified before a grand jury.
Ken Starr was undoubtedly enjoying the whole thing. President Clinton, facing insurmountable evidence, was subpoenaed by the grand jury and forced to testify that he had indeed had an affair. However, he refused to admit that he had lied under oath in the Jones case, claiming he did not consider a blowjob sex and arguing over the definition of the word ‘is’. Soon after, the independent counsel released his Starr Report, which contained every lurid detail of the Lewinsky affair, to the House of Representatives and to the public, calling for impeachment on the basis of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Judiciary Committee of the House began impeachment proceedings soon after, which stretched over the next several months. A period Clinton used to settle the Jones case out of court, Starr used to announce the Whitewater investigation as inconclusive, and Hustler magazine used to pay a bounty for proof of infidelity by any member of Congress. Due to Hustlers efforts, several Republicans were forced to resign, one of them being both Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his replacement as speaker.
In December of 1998, the Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment and the matter moved on to the full House. Though the vote was delayed by the president calling airstrikes on Iraq, a mission actually planned months earlier, the Republican led House voted to impeach President Clinton. The impeachment trial began in the Senate in January of 1999. After a month and a half of testimony and debate, the Republican majority Senate failed to meet the two-thirds vote required for impeachment. Many felt that lying about where you put your dick just wasn’t a good enough reason to declare somebody to be unfit to be president. Bill Clinton served out the remainder of his second term.
Ken Starr continued to pursue the Watergate investigation until late 1999, when he stepped down and was replaced by a federal prosecutor named Robert Ray. Under direction to wrap things up, Robert Ray announced in 2000 that there was not enough evidence to pursue a charge of wrongdoing by either Bill or Hillary Clinton in relation to any of the accusations. In total, 15 associates of the Clintons were convicted of over 40 crimes; including fraud, embezzlement, and conspiracy. In November of 2000, Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat in New York, launching her own political career. As for Bill, likely facing charges of perjury in relation to the Jones case as soon as he left office, he made a deal with Ray on his second to last day, agreeing to admit to making false statements in return for surrendering his law license. The next day he pardoned four of the people convicted by the investigation, including Susan McDougal.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Clinton_and_Monica_Lewinsky_on_February_28,_1997_A3e06420664168d9466c84c3e31ccc2f.jpg