WASHINGTON (AP) -- Monica Lewinsky, in her latest interview, says she betrayed the president by talking too much about their affair. Separately, her former friend Linda Tripp said Lewinsky's version of events was "revisionist history."
"I didn't have the maturity to realize exactly how serious this was," Lewinsky said in the issue of Time magazine on newsstands Monday. "Actually only telling 10 people was being pretty discreet for me. I still feel horrible about how indiscreet I was. That was a real betrayal," she said.One of her confidantes was Tripp, whose tapes of some of those conversations led to independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation and the subsequent impeachment of the president on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.
Tripp, appearing Sunday on ABC's "This Week," attacked a new biography of Lewinsky by British author Andrew Morton as "a romanticizing of a tawdry, abusive relationship." She added: "I see it as fiction, I see it as fable, fantasy, farce and fairy tale."
In particular, she said conversations with Lewinsky that she didn't tape make clear that Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan helped the former White House intern look for a job in exchange for her silence. "Had they been documented, Vernon Jordan would be facing legal consequences . . . for obstruction of justice."
Tripp, who was present when Starr's representatives and FBI agents first confronted Lewinsky about the affair, denied what she said were "scurrilous allegations" in the Morton book that Lewinsky was mistreated and denied access to an attorney. "They were gracious, they were polite at all times," she said.
Tripp said that if she were to write a book now, "Monica Lewinsky would be the last chapter." She said a main focus would be first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who "was complicit, in the time that I was there, in virtually every scandal."
Lewinsky, in her Time interview, said that while her affair with Clinton was wrong, "it was a private wrong." She noted that "it didn't affect his job, it didn't affect my job, we were together mostly on the weekends."
In London, meanwhile, Lewinsky temporarily fled the first stop on her two-week book tour of Britain after signing only a few copies of "Monica's Story." She seemed unprepared for the hundreds of photographers yelling and shouting her name in the book department of Harrods.
The 90-minute signing session resumed after the media was herded out of the room, as planned.