Speculative commentary on Bill Clinton's sexual conduct and risk assessment

4.2.12 WC: 191694 her conquest of the President as to engage in an intimate relationship. She really did want oral sex: she wanted to talk about it. And she did —to more than a dozen people. The President achieved immediate gratification while risking long term consequences to his marriage, his daughter, his presidency and above all the nation’s stability. At the time he began his sexual encounter with Lewinsky, Clinton knew that he might possibly have to testify under oath about his sex life. He knew that two sets of enemies had the powerful legal weapon of subpoena power aimed directly at his presidency. That is probably why he was reluctant to engage in sexual intercourse. He wanted sex with deniability. What he got was unsatisfying sex with unconvincing deniability. Or, as Maureen Dowd put it: “Mr. Clinton’s habit, with language and behavior, has been to try to incorporate his alibi into his sin. The result is more twisted than titillating.”*™ This was surely not the first time Bill Clinton put his future at risk for immediate sexual gratification. But in every other instance he was able to avoid the long term consequences. I am certain that he believed that this pattern of short term risk-taking and subsequent avoidance of long term consequences would be repeated. I doubt he believed, at the moment that he first allowed Lewinsky to touch him in a sexual manner, that this action would eventually lead to possible removal from office and damage to his family life. He surely would not have consciously taken such a knowing risk. But when people have succeeded so often in the past in achieving both immediate gratification and long term avoidance of consequences, they miscalculate the odds and act as if they can have their cake and eat it too. The history of many of my own celebrity clients is largely a history of defendants who for years — sometimes decades — have risked their careers, family lives, fortunes and freedom for some form of immediate gratification. Finally when they were caught, everyone asked the same question: “How could they have risked so much for so little?” What that question fails to understand is that the “little” thing for which they were eventually caught was usually only the tip of a very large iceberg of sin or crime which they had gotten away with for years. In their minds therefore, they were risking very little (the extreme unlikelihood that this time they would get caught) for a great deal (a lifetime of small, short term gratifications, which add up to something for which it is worth taking small risks.) In retrospect, we consider such actions reckless because we are running the video backwards: we know he was caught. But at the time Clinton made the decision, he probably did not regard it as any more reckless than the many similar decisions he had previously made, without destroying his career and his family. He had probably played the same sexual-verbal game before: limiting his sexual contact so that he could plausibly deny that he engaged in “sexual relationships” outside of his marriage,*° but he never before had to testify under oath about these relationships. What he failed to comprehend was how much the risks had increased as the result of the legal proceedings ** See Maureen Dowd, Maladroit Du Siegneur, N.Y.Times, 9/30/98, p.A23. (“He would be laughed out of any locker room in the country.”) 85 Prior to the Lewinsky matter becoming public, there were widespread reports that the President limited his extra- marital sex to oral gratification since he believed that it did not constitute Biblical adultery and it gave him verbal deniability regarding sexual relations. This history actually strengthens his legal claim that he did not commit perjury when he denied having what he regarded as sexual relations with Lewinsky. A 28 year old waitress was 268 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017355