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In 1993, after spending two years at Santa Monica College, Lewinsky moved to Portland, Ore., and enrolled at Lewis and Clark College, where she majored in psychology and made the dean's list in her senior year. Those who knew her describe Monica as a big-hearted and reliable friend. Recalls Dick Morgan, a former neighbor: "She was a listener who was interested in people." But some also remember her as sharp-tongued and talking too much. She liked name dropping, telling friends she knew Tori Spelling and the Menendez brothers back in Beverly Hills High. (Spelling said last week that she did not know Lewinsky.) She once spotted a teacher and student together in a convertible and promptly dished the tidbit to her friends. Yet a close friend says she was "very tight with a number of professors."
Her garrulousness was her most impressive trait. "She felt comfortable talking about just about anything to people," says a former classmate. "If something was on her mind, she'd just come up and start talking with you." But, says a close friend, she "just had a proclivity for indiscretion...she was definitely a gossipmonger." According to the friend, she openly told several people while in college that she was having an affair with a married man. "He gave her the standard 'I'm going to get divorced and we can be together,' which is obviously a load of crap, and she ate it up," says the friend. "And she got hurt a number of times. She'd say, 'What the hell am I doing with this married guy?'" She talked to a Beverly Hills therapist "quite a bit" and cried often. "She's a pretty fragile person, just emotionally fragile," her friend says. "She was not a depressed person, but it's just that she was pretty sensitive." Stephen Enghouse, a self-described classmate and friend, wondered aloud last week if she has been concocting the whole sordid saga involving the President, or at least dramatizing her role in it. He told ABC's Nightline that "She's kind of young and seeks attention...I think it's probably likely that yes, she's making it up." Enghouse, though, has not spoken to Lewinsky in nearly three years.
In Washington by the end of last year, Lewinsky was not having much fun with her Pentagon job. "She wasn't too thrilled with it," says a former co-worker. Bacon describes her as "competent" but says he urged her last year to begin looking for some other work. Vernon Jordan, the lobbyist who is a close confidant of the President's, passed her name along to Revlon in New York City. She was hired for a public relations job, an offer rescinded last week when the scandal broke--and Lewinsky got a graduate degree in American politics.
Some fellow psychology majors from Lewis and Clark have banded together--anonymously--to circulate a message of support: "Monica is the epitome of a true friend." A couple of Website fan clubs have also sprung up, but most of the Internet home pages that revolve around her name are sardonic depositories of tawdry humor. She faces countless depositions and grand-jury testimonies and the possible charge that she perjured herself in denying an affair with the President.