For a time, the only thing standing
between the president and a perjury indictment was a 52 year-old Republican
mom who'd never been active in politics and who'd never voted for Bill Clinton.
That would be Julie Hiatt Steele of Richmond, Va.,
the so-called peripheral figure in the Monica Lewinsky case and the only figure
in that investigation to go on trial.
She won - a jury deadlocked on whether she'd lied
to the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr - but for Steele, it's
not over yet. She lost her job. She lost her friends. She is losing her house.
She was threatened with losing her adopted son.
"It isn't that what happened was terrible - - - it's
that I'm still defending it" she said "... with no money and no job."
"Other than that, things are just terrific!"
Steele was in Lancaster this weekend, for a fund-raiser
Friday night to benefit her legal defense fund and for the Women's Democratic
Club corn roast Saturday. The corn roast, ironically, was the first political
event Steele has ever attended.
But ironies abound in her case, Steele said, in which "Miss Republican" ended
up as the biggest obstacle to an indictment of the Democratic president for
allegedly groping Steele's friend, Kathleen Willey.
"Only in America, I guess could that happen."
• Steele's Lancaster visit
was arranged by Garry and Darlene Sisco, who met Steele while Garry Sisco
was working on a story about her case for the Online Journal:
www.onlinejournal.com
Garry is the Democratic candidate for county
prothonotary in the Nov. 2 election - offered to stage a fund raiser to cover
some of Steele's $100,000. legal bill.
About 60 people attended the fund-raiser at
the Lancaster home of Dr. Lynette Ruch. Darlene Sisco said the $50-a-person
event brought in about $2,000.
Garry Sisco called Steele's predicament "a
particularly egregious example of Starr's excesses."
It started with a reporter.
In March 1997, as Steele tells it, her friend
kathleen Willey asked Steele to talk to a Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff.
Steele was supposed to tell Isikoff that Willey had indeed described to Steele
an unwanted sexual advance from President Clinton.
Willey's version, later recounted on "60 Minutes,"
was that Clinton had groped her against her wishes in the Oval Office. Linda
Tripp, who triggered the whole scandal by giving her tapes of Monica Lewinsky
to Starr's office, also saw Willey leaving the President's office that day
in November 1993 in a disheveled condition.
Steele said when asked for an explanation,
Willey told her that it would be all right to lie to Isikoff.
Steele did verify Willey's story but later
recanted. Starr subsequently indicted her for lying and obstructing justice.
In May, a jury in Alexandria, Va., deadlocked on the charges. Starr eventually
decided not to seek a retrial.
• Steele's lawyers
didn't present a defense at the trial. It was a legal decision, she said,
because her legal team felt that Starr's prosecutors hadn't made their case.
And it was the right moral decision, she said, because her defense would have
hurt other people.
But the fact that she wasn't acquitted means
that some of the taint still lingers.
The OIC (Office of Independent Counsel) does
not, by the way, go back and say 'No problem here!'" said Steele, a small
slender woman who tends to finish sentences with body language instead of
words.
"I think in some ways I'm perceived: 'Why should
they go do that? There must be something.'"
Acquaintances shy away from her. They're afraid,
she said, after Starr's investigators swept through Richmond with subpoenas
and, she later discovered, tapped her telephone.
"Adam has not been invited to a birthday party
since I was indicted," she said, referring to her 8-year-old adopted son.
Adam himself became an issue after Starr's
office hinted that his adoption in Romania wasn't legal.
When Steele talks about Starr, she doesn't
sound angry. But, when the adoption comes up, she repeatedly uses the word
"despicable" to describe the prosecutor.
He knew there was nothing illegal about my
adoption of Adam," she said. "Therefore, don't investigate: you might find
out what you already know."
Clinton's opponents have suggested that Steele
is either in the Democrat's pocket or had been threatened to withdraw her
support for Willey. She denies it all.
"I've never been to the White House, I've never
met the Clintons, I've never met anybody who worked there, certainly not ever
been threatened by anybody in the government other than Starr," Steele said.
"I've certainly been threatened by Starr."
• Although reporters
called her a peripheral figure in the Lewinsky scandal, Steel sees a bigger
picture.
"There is a reason," she said of her indictment.
It's not about scandal, it's not about blue dresses, it's not about Linda
(Tripp)it's not about Monica.
"It is about the desire to indict the president.
And what they needed was either to turn my testimony, which they ried, in
November, or to convict me as a liar, which came in May."
Starr wanted to indict Clinton based on the
president's grand jury testimony of Aug. 17, 1998, in which he denied any
groping, consensual or not of Willey, Steele said.
But her refusal to confirm Willey's story got
in the way.
"I was not going to lie for these people,"
she said.
•
Steele and son Adam still live in their house in Richmond. But she
has borrowed as much as possible on he home's equity to pay her living expenses
since she lost her job in the course of Starr's investigation.
The house
is being sold to pay that debt.
Her lawyers, from Reed Smith Shaw & McClay
LLP firm, have done much o their work pro bono, or free. Technically she owes
$800,000 in legal bills; in actuality she will have to pay about $100,000
of that.
Her experiences have taught her to be philosophical
about things like criminal investigations and legal debts.
"at first I was like:
appalling, horrifying, humiliating, and every other thing," she said.
"... I remember when I only owed $6,800. I thought I was going to die."
Her Web site:
www.juliehiattsteele.com
asks for contributions to her legal defense
fund.
"I have a hard time with that because it is
embarrassing, and it's embarrassing for me to be in a situation where I have
to ask for money," Steele said.
Her life, she said, has been "turned upside
down." "I try to look at it in a positive way, an I think there are positive
things," Steele said.
"And I think as horrible as it all has been,
I try to remember there were funny moments, there were poignant moments ...
moments that were not so horrific.
"But it has been a travesty."
