Sarah Burgess first encountered details of President Bill Clinton’s sex life as a preteen in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, when they were pulled straight out of independent counsel Ken Starr’s report and splashed across the front page of her hometown newspaper. “My mom worked in the Pentagon, and I was waiting for her to drive me to school,” Burgess remembers. “She had a paper there in the front seat, and I remember being shocked.”
Twenty-two years later, she would be shocked again by the scandal.
Burgess grew up to become a playwright — her scathing satire of the private equity world, Dry Powder, debuted in 2016 and was nominated for several awards — before she was approached by Ryan Murphy’s team to write the newest season of the prolific producer’s American Crime Story series, Impeachment. Although her childhood had given her an appreciation for the motivations behind the lawyers who puddle around the Swamp, she initially was hesitant about taking on the project. That is, until her causal research morphed into what she terms an “obsessive fixation” with Linda Tripp — the confidant who recorded Monica Lewinsky as she spilled hours of intimate details about her relationship with Clinton.
“I wanted to write about the insanity of this office friendship almost taking down the president,” Burgess says, “and all of the tangled emotions and frustrations that led to that.”
The show’s 21 episodes trace the intertwined stories of three women: Lewinsky, Tripp, and Paula Jones, the Arkansas state employee who accused Clinton of exposing himself to her when he was the governor. (During the civil lawsuit, which was settled out-of-court, Clinton lied to be questioned under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky. This triggered a perjury probe and eventually led to his impeachment. Burges was able to draw on the valuable real-life experiences of Lewinsky, who joined the project in the role of executive producer. (Tripp passed away in 2020 from cancer. “The story of what happened to Monica was literally the story of someone who did not want this to become public, it became public, and everyone consumed it,” She says. “So for us to do that again without her would be horrible.”
For almost three years, Burgess immersed herself in the 1990s, excavating tidbits of Clinton-era arcana that are sprinkled throughout Impeachment. She spoke with Rolling Stone about the research that went into crafting major plot points, bit players whose profiles have only grown — Brett Kavanaugh, Ann Coulter, George Conway — and figures who’ve retreated into the recesses of history, like White House volunteer Kathleen Willey and Clinton’s personal secretary Betty Currie.
Your parents worked at the Pentagon at the same time as Linda Tripp — did they know each other?
The Pentagon is the United States’ largest office building. It’s like a small city. They had this thing in the Nineties called “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” — which is hilarious, like: That’s going to fix everything! — I went a couple of times with my mom to her office. She isn’t really a feminist, and is somewhat hostile towards those ideas. Yet all these men would have had to salute her as she was a commander. It was a wonderful experience. But my parents did not know her [or Moncia]. They may have easily passed them in that hall. They worked there at the exact same time.
How did you dive into developing Linda Tripp’s character?
Linda is a frustrated D.C. bureaucrat. She’s the woman you see in the Metro, who feels like a piece of furniture and also knows it. This emotional landscape is what drove me insane, and I was horrified at the amount of anger that can build up in women. Linda was quoted in The New Yorker in 1998 saying she saw Hillary use the public restroom in the West Wing. “Mrs. Bush would rather have been catheterized than use the public ladies’ restroom,” She said. This just made me feel so happy. This word choice is completely unnecessary. There’s the knowingness that Linda clearly had, the judgment on Hillary, but also the delight in seeing Hillary Clinton, one of the most famous people in the world at your office, [using the public bathroom]. I just I felt a real affinity for Linda’s intelligence, which must have been bottled up and frustrated.
This was a woman who took her job seriously. I think, if a lot of us are honest with ourselves, having a job that’s tied to a big institution — especially the White House, the most prestigious place there is — that does mean something to us, and we delude ourselves into pretending it doesn’t matter. It was clear that a large part of her identity was shattered when she lost the position.
Linda Tripp is a fascinating person. She went on to open a Christmas shop. You’ll see breadcrumbs scattered throughout the show.
Well, you’ll see even more of that!
Is the Christmas shop still available?
It is still there 100 percent. It is still in existence in Middleburg, Virginia. Linda remarried after the crisis — it’s actually a very sweet story: Deiter, a childhood sweetheart from Germany, and Linda re-connected, and he ran the store with Linda, and I think still runs it. It’s called the Christmas Sleigh.
It was difficult to keep your sympathy for Linda, after you had a good working relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
I tend to love characters, even if they do something wrong or questionable. Also, I can follow my instincts and get to the bad places. This allowed me to compartmentalize the terrible event. And Monica was a very generous producer and really understood that I had to write from multiple points of view, which includes not only Linda, but Bill — people who took actions that blew up her life.
I understand Monica was very involved in conversations about the script — what was that like? Did you ever find yourself at odds with each other?
You always find yourself at odds with producers. That’s part of the writer’s life: You never take every note. Monica and me had to have some intense, sometimes one on one conversations about how I managed to combine two events into one. I don’t want to speak for her, but [I assume] it is a very intense experience for someone to create a story, with all of these many threads that the show has, out of your own life experience.
Is there an example you can think of?
In Episode Two, she’s been told she will return to the White House after [Clinton’s] reelection; he’s reelected, and he doesn’t call her immediately. In my initial draft, I had her pretty bereft that she hadn’t heard about her job [right away]. And Monica was like, ‘No, no, no — multiple weeks passed, and only then, just like in real life, I realized they weren’t calling me.’ As a writer, you don’t tend to write that in. To be fair, that conversation was quite intense after the collapsing. I did revise it — I added a real detail that she wanted, which is that she was planning to go on a trip and that Linda Tripp told her to stay home [in case Bill Clinton called].
Tripp knew that Clinton would call Lewinsky this weekend.
I don’t think Linda had inside info, because she wasn’t that connected at a high level — much to her chagrin. But, according to Monica, Linda would talk about having a really good intuition, that it was a family trait, and Linda did tell her, perhaps just guessing or assuming: He will call. It just worked out this way. It’s a weird real-life thing that you would never [typically] write in drama.
The third episode starts with an employee at the CBS gift shop in L.A. berating his coworker — and the employee turns out to be Matt Drudge. I didn’t know Drudge worked at the CBS gift shop around the time he started the Drudge Report and broke the story that cracked the whole scandal wide open: the news that Newsweek killed a story about Lewinsky and Clinton.
This was something I discussed with my producer a lot. We both just loved the fact that, for someone who wants to be seen, and to matter, and wants to be this very important journalist like he’s seen in movies, the fact that Drudge works at the gift shop in the CBS studio lot — like, not on a show, not producing something, not an actor; he’s just in proximity to [stardom] — felt so right. Someone who just loved the media, and wills and works himself into a really important place in this culture where he’s the one who breaks that story.
Drudge is one example of many who want to be in that arena, to be in it, and to make a difference. That desperation to be seen, and to matter — it motivates a lot of characters in the show. There’s an unspoken part of American politics and democracy: this ambition to just be somebody. It’s not just a show business thing, it’s also something that happens in Washington, in the media.
And, as a playwright, I’m obsessed with how people talk. And Drudge’s odd way of speaking, like Linda Tripp’s odd way of speaking, really, really, really grabbed me. Because I was so excited about his unusual speech patterns, I gave Billy Eichner some of my most bizarre dialogue lines. It’s willful and intentional. It is so odd.
What do you think would have happened if the Clinton scandal had been reported by traditional media outlets?
Because of the involvement of [Ken] Starr, I think eventually this would have come out in the Washington Post. It is meaningful, however, that this is the first Internet-age story. And the fact that Drudge had this fig leaf of Oh, I’m just reporting on the fact that this story was killed, that did allow things to accelerate for sure.
All of these minor characters that appear in the show went on to become cultural icons: Ann Coulter, George Conway and Brett Kavanaugh. Did you find any stories or people that were surprising you as you researched the period?
There were these Georgetown parties of conservatives in the Nineties that inspired a scene in Episode Three — I remember reading Dinesh D’Souza was there, and David Brooks, and Christopher Hitchens would pass through. I’ve always been fascinated by the politically ambitious lawyer class in D.C. — these young, thirtysomething lawyers, some of them [at] corporate firms, some at white-shoe firms, some becoming media personalities — just having the time of their lives in D.C. and feeling like there are almost no consequences.
The fact that Conway and Coulter were friends and were able to sort of participate in this conspiracy, along with James Moody [Linda Tripp’s lawyer] — they get the tapes from him and listen to them secretly — that really grabbed me. And, like everybody, I was of course very interested in the fact that Brett Kavanaugh worked as an [Office of Independent Counsel] lawyer off-and-on, and worked at Ken Starr’s law firm. Starr and Kavanaugh were conservative lawyers who were being trained or prepared for the Supreme Court. This has been a fascinating operation to me.
Jake Tapper also makes an appearance later in the season — he went on a date with Monica Lewinsky right before the scandal broke. Monica was supportive of that detail.
Yes, in fact, my original draft of the episode didn’t include that scene, but Monica liked the idea of me adding it in. I think the audience might hope that Monica can move on with her life, so to show her taking those steps — being out in the world, meeting new people, meeting a guy — felt like an important side to show. And it’s so Washington, D.C., that it’s Jake Tapper. It’s such a surreal story because of how many people, as you say, have gone on to become so prominent.
But then there are these critical characters who have faded from history — Kathleen Willey, who alleged that Clinton assaulted her; Betty Currie, his secretary. How did you weave them into the story?
Betty Currie is a private person to me, and I obsessively research her. She was certainly dragged into real prominence, forced to testify before Ken Starr’s grand jury — there are images of her being dragged through a media circus. Betty Currie could have written an autobiography about Bill Clinton, but she didn’t. Her situation was impossible and she has kept her private and discrete since then.
The Kathleen Willey story is very sad. Kathleen Willey did some media about the impeachment Bill Clinton. However, her story didn’t seem to get much attention. It seemed like this was a story that many people didn’t want to hear. And I think Kathleen Willey’s story becomes quite sad as a result. I don’t know if you saw this Washington Post piece about her two years ago — she started a GoFundMe [to prevent her house from being foreclosed on] around the time of [Kavanaugh’s] confirmation hearings, and conservatives, who [had the] idea of sexual assault brought up to them by the Kavanugh hearings, directed their sympathy to Kathleen Willey as opposed to Christine Blasey Ford. She kind of vanished, as you said. Kathleen Willey is my sympathizer.
Annaleigh Ashburn’s turn as Paula Jones is so heartbreaking. How did the show break this storyline? Did you find a particular detail in your research that helped you unlock that information?
Paula’s story is a morally complicated one. It was a mistake. It did make her feel angry. She shared it with multiple people that week. By today’s standards, that should have been covered in the mainstream press, and taken very seriously, but it wasn’t. Perhaps it would have been today, I think. At the same time, her lawsuit moves forward for these morally complicated reasons, [including], I think, her husband’s out-of-control emotions about it, and eventually a right wing apparatus sort of takes hold. It is an unfortunate and complicated story.
I was able to see the actual CPAC press conference. Her emotions are so real and touching. She also speaks well about her excitement for Arkansas. Then, what happened? That’s the whole story right there: You feel excited and important to get this position, and then you end up in a situation that completely disrupts it, completely undermines the idea that you will be taken seriously at all as a professional.
Paula Jones was a great example of how MeToo cases are handled today. Did doing a deep dive into this era make you think, “Wow, we’ve come such a long way since the Nineties,” or do you think things really haven’t changed much at all?
The rise of social media has given the opportunity for some people to have a voice and a platform that they wouldn’t have had at all in the late Nineties, and there is robust journalism now around investigating sexual assault, and we’ve seen politicians resign because of sexual harassment and sexual assault claims.
It would be similar if it happened again. The way some of the mainstream publications handled it — there were op-eds in The New York Times that referred to Monica in completely inappropriate ways, for instance — I don’t think that would happen again.
But I don’t think political tribalism has gotten better in the United States. That was the reason for much of the criticism directed at Monica Lewinsky. She was blamed in large part for the president’s actions. She was blamed by the president for impeaching her and making him a weak politician. Unfortunately, that has not disappeared.