Impeachment: American Crime Story - Monica Lewinsky's Potential Jail Time
In Impeachment: American Crime Story, Monica Lewinsky is ambushed at the Ritz Carlton and held for 11 hours with exaggerated threats of prison time.
The latest installment of Impeachment: American Crime Story, episode 6, details the 11 hours Monica spent held in a hotel room by the Office of Independent Counsel after being told the amount of jail time she could be facing. January 16, 1998 was clearly a traumatizing day, as the real Monica Lewinsky, who serves as a producer on the show, even dubbed it “Survivor’s Day” (via Twitter) after the grueling psychological manipulation she was subject to. After being betrayed by coworker Linda Tripp, the Office of Independent Counsel and a group of FBI agents ambushed Monica and held her in a room at the Ritz Carlton for 11 hours trying to make her cooperate and take down other figures like Bill Clinton himself, Vernon Jordan, and Betty Currie.
There are plenty of disputes over what really happened that day, with Monica claiming Kenneth Starr’s office pressured her into not contacting her lawyer, bullied her, and implied that she would face more criminal action if she left. Ken Starr has firmly denied this and states they always told her she was free to leave and call her lawyer, but with the charges lobbied against Impeachment's young Monica Lewinsky, it really appeared she wasn’t going to leave without a fight. After several hours in the hotel room, Monica is escorted by Colin Hanks’ character Mike Emmick and an FBI agent to eat in the mall. It’s here that he nonchalantly tells her the many charges against her and the jail time she’d be facing, and this is where the fear for Monica really sets in.
According to American Crime Story’s episode, Monica Lewinsky was threatened with a 28-year jail term (it was widely reported at the time that the threat was 27 years). Mike Emmick explains that she would be facing five years for perjury (lying under oath), five years for subornation of perjury (trying to get coworker Linda Tripp to lie under oath), five years for obstruction of justice, five years for signing a false affidavit, and three years for witness tampering (trying to get Linda to lie for the Paula Jones case). To make it worse, Impeachment’s episode also shows the prosecutors threatening Monica’s mother with jail for obstruction of justice.
Ultimately, Monica Lewinsky never ended up serving jail time because she eventually gained immunity by cooperating with Ken Starr, but for a 24-year-old who had never faced such consequences, a possible 28-year term was a death sentence. In reality, legal experts now tend to agree that the 27 or 28 years in prison was a vast exaggeration, with the more accurate jail time estimate being far less. Additionally, since Bill Clinton was never convicted of perjury for signing the affidavits, Monica wouldn’t have been either.
In truth, hitting Monica Lewinsky with criminal charges and the jail time she was threatened with were all a moot point that day. The affidavit papers hadn’t even been officially filed yet and were still waiting to be delivered, so no crime had actually been committed at the time Lewinsky was held (via LA Times). If Monica had been able to call her lawyer Frank Carter, as she persistently asked to do both in real life and in Impeachment, she could have given him a heads-up and he would have known to just cancel the delivery. There was still time for the affidavit to be amended before being officially filed, and if the information had gotten to Frank Carter soon enough, Monica never would have needed immunity in the first place. As Impeachment: American Crime Story's season makes clear, the actual sexual relationship wasn’t the crime, it was the perjury on the affidavit–and arguably, the moral crime was how a high-powered office pressured a young girl into possibly falsely incriminating herself.