Ken Starr

Kenneth Winston Starr, President Bill Clinton's chief antagonist in the 1990s, graduated from Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas in 1964. Starr, the son of a Church of Christ minister, was president of his senior class and was a writer and photographer for the school's newspaper and yearbook. He was also active in theater and appeared on stage, at least once, in drag. A photograph of this youthful frivolty was resurrected by the National Enquirer during the height of the Clinton sex scandal which Starr investigated as Independent Counsel. From Duke University Law School, Starr went on to a distinguished legal career that included stints as a judge and as the Solicitor General in the George HW Bush administration. He was in private practice at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis when he was tapped to replace Robert B. Fiske as Independent Counsel in the Whitewater matter. Under Starr, and with the help of people like Linda Tripp, the Whitewater investigation turned into a salacious and extraordinarily detailed examination of Bill Clinton's sex life.

The fruits of the new Independent Counsel's snooping were presented in the sleazy tax-payer-funded page-turner known as The Starr Report. The report eventually led to Clinton's impeachment and Monica Lewinsky's short-lived careers as a best-selling author and handbag designer. Clinton survived removal from office and completed his term with record-high approval ratings. Starr became dean of the middling Pepperdine Law School and later argued in support of California's ban on same-sex marriage. He is now president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. If anyone has the photo of Judge Starr in drag, please e-mail it to mostlikelytokill@gmail.com!

Linda Tripp

Linda Rose Carotenuto (she took her first husband Bruce M. Tripp's surname when they married in 1971) graduated from Hanover Park High School (home of the Hornets) in East Hanover, New Jersey in 1968. Ironically, the "pet peeve" she cites in her senior yearbook entry is a "certain fair-weather friend." According to Jeffrey Toobin's book on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky saga, A Vast Conspiracy, Linda's adolescence, like Lewinsky's, was marred by the divorce of her parents. Her father, a high school teacher, had an affair with a co-worker which caused the break-up of the marriage. A year after her graduation from Hanover High, Linda was arrested for allegedly stealing cash and a watch from a Greenwood Lake, New York hotel room. When the arrest was publicized during the height of the Clinton scandal, Tripp's lawyer stated that his client was "set up" and that the charges against her had been subsequently dropped. However, according to the Smoking Gun, Tripp neglected to disclose the arrest on a 1987 Defense Department security clearance form.

It was, of course, her government secretarial jobs that allowed Ms. Tripp to meet President Clinton and, later, Monica Lewinsky. Tripp, divorced by the time she was working in the Clinton White House (she was seated just outside the office of George Stephanopoulos), became disgusted by the randy behavior of the president. In Ken Gormley's definitive account of the Clinton impeachment, The Death of American Virtue, Tripp claims that the president's adulterous liaisons in the White House were "common knowledge." Tripp was soon moved "upstairs" to work in the White House Counsel's office of Bernie Nussbaum. The impetus for this move, as recounted in Gormley's book, and perceived by Tripp, was that first lady Hillary Clinton wanted to remove temptation from her husband. Tripp, perhaps realizing the improbablity of this assertion, is quoted by Gormely as explaining: "In 1993 I looked significantly different than you've ever seen me... I was very tiny. I had long blond hair." Regardless of her appearance, Tripp, according to Gormley, was not well liked in the West Wing. She was viewed as a "woman with an attitude." By May of 1994 she was told by her supervisors that she would have to leave.

Tripp wound up in the Public Affairs office at the Pentagon where, in April of 1996, she would meet another White House cast-off, a certain lovelorn former intern. Tripp became the manipulative, conversation-taping confidante of Lewinsky, and, in time, the primary secret agent for Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr. After the scandal broke, Tripp quickly became reviled by the majority of the American public. The pop cultural apogee of this hatred was reached when the obese actor John Goodman began portraying Tripp in a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live. In 1999 Tripp claimed to CNN's Larry King that she found most of these appearances very funny.

In the years since the impeachment, Tripp re-married, had extensive plastic surgery and now runs a year-round Christmas shop in Middleburg, Virginia.

Monica Lewinsky

According to Andrew Morton's 1999 biography (Monica's Story), Monica Lewinsky graduated from Bel Air Prep (now Pacific Hills School) in Los Angeles in 1991. She had enrolled at the school after an unpleasant freshman year at Beverly Hills High School. According to Morton, Lewinsky gave the graduation speech at Bel Air Prep.

As a White House intern, Lewinsky, of course, helped cause a constitutional crisis with her thong-flashing fling with President Bill Clinton. Clinton's clumsy infidelity and "cover-up" deeply offended more skilled adulterers everywhere - especially Senator Henry Hyde, Rep. Bob Livingston and Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich all of whom helped engineer the randy president's impeachment.

Lewinsky faded into the background after several attempts to exploit her notoriety. She undoubtedly feels guilty about being the scoop (stolen, actually, from Newsweek's Michael Isikoff) that made Matt Drudge a household name.