Lucianne Goldberg: In Pursuit Of Clinton
By John Cloud
(TIME, February 2) -- Before last week, Lucianne Goldberg may have been best known as
the author of a 1992 novel about a trio of high-class
prostitutes, Madame Cleo's Girls. Readers may have come across
other novels of hers as well, but not under her name: she has
been a ghostwriter for celebs, a behind-the-scenes player who
doesn't usually take the credit.
But when Goldberg turned out to be the brains behind Linda
Tripp's scheme to tape Monica Lewinsky, she didn't even try to
hide. Instead she said she was coming forward to defend a
friend. Tripp, she said, "is heartsick." Speaking on Saturday at
a frenetic news conference outside her New York City apartment,
Goldberg added, "If somebody takes a hit at Linda Tripp, they
will hear from me." She also expressed sympathy for Lewinsky,
but her words struck many listeners as insincere, since the
tapings have caused Lewinsky so much anguish.
Born Lucianne Steinberger in 1935, Goldberg grew up outside
Washington, where her father worked as a government physicist.
She wrote a gossip column for the local paper and worked for
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. (Of L.B.J., she told PEOPLE in
1992, "He used to twist your nipple in the elevator and think it
was a sexy move.")
At some point her political allegiances changed--Goldberg's
spying on behalf of the 1972 Nixon re-election effort has been
widely reported -- and she left politics for the more lucrative
world of publishing. It was no less a shark tank: tell-all
biographer Kitty Kelley, a former client, sued Goldberg in the
early 1980s for fraud and other infractions in connection with
Kelley's biography of Elizabeth Taylor. Although a judge
overturned the fraud portion of the jury verdict against
Goldberg, he awarded Kelley $41,000 in damages and costs.
During the Clinton years, Goldberg has been involved in
publishing efforts that, if fruitful, would mortify the
President. Goldberg has reportedly represented Dolly Kyle
Browning, yet another woman alleging a Clinton affair (one
debunked by critics). She also tried to get a book deal for the
Arkansas state troopers who said they procured women for then
Governor Clinton. Goldberg says she met Tripp in 1994 after she
found an author to write a book about the death of Vincent
Foster, which conspiracy theorists have deemed homicide, not
suicide. Goldberg might be one of them. She has played part of
the Lewinsky tapes for a friend, who describes them as "sexually
explicit." The friend says Goldberg told him that the release of
the tapes is "payback for Vince Foster."
Goldberg may have been trying to get the Lewinsky tale into the
tabloids as early as last fall. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who
helped break the current scandal, visited her apartment
frequently. She isn't squeamish about blasting Clinton openly.
"What I'm glad about is he's getting caught," she told the
Washington Post. "At something. If it took this to get him,
fine." If all the President's men come after her the way they've
attacked Tripp, she added, "I'd be on the lawn of the White
House with a deer rifle." She's prepared to weather criticism of
her motives. "I can take the hits," she told CNN. "I'm a rich
old lady."
--By John Cloud. Reported by Edward Barnes and Richard
Zoglin/New York
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