Secluded in her mother's apartment at the Watergate, away from the reporters and cameramen and curiosity seekers planted outside, Monica Lewinsky was said to have spent parts of last week quietly watching television and videos, writing letters, ordering out for chocolate-mousse cake, tuning in to the President's State of the Union address. "She thinks he did a good job," her lawyer William Ginsburg said. "She still considers him a friend." Cameras caught her joking with her attorneys on the limousine ride back from a strategy meeting last Thursday. But those moments were fleeting. Lewinsky remained besieged not only by journalists and investigators but also by figures who emerged from her short, eventful past to tell stories of old loves and ambitions, most of them heartfelt, some naive, many misguided, perhaps more hoped for than real. The tales did much to humanize Lewinsky, yet it is her convoluted pursuit of love that has left her credibility badly and perhaps irredeemably sullied. Late last week her lawyer reiterated that she was "totally reliable" but added that "there are people who talk a lot, and as part of the scenario...they may tell fibs, lies, exaggerations, oversell."
It had been a trying week. On Tuesday evening, 10 minutes before the State of the Union address, a slight, ponytailed man named Andrew Bleiler, 32, stood with his wife in front of their home in Portland, Ore., and confessed to a five-year affair with Lewinsky. He said it started when she was 19 and he was a stage-production teacher at Beverly Hills High, that he tried to end the entanglement in 1993 after both had moved to Oregon, but that Lewinsky threatened to tell his wife Kathlyn. And so the affair lasted until last April. The Bleilers' lawyer, Terry Giles, said that after moving to Washington, Lewinsky sent the couple letters and White House souvenirs. "Some of this stuff is very strange," he said. "Why did she send this stuff? Why was it so graphic?" On Wednesday he gave the independent counsel's office a safe-deposit box containing six letters and two dozen keepsakes, including documents from White House files and an autographed photo of the Clintons. Over the past two years, Lewinsky had kept the Bleilers posted on her exploits: she told them she was frustrated with dating an unnamed high-ranking White House official because he indulged only in oral sex, and that she had become pregnant by another man and had had an abortion. "I don't think there is any doubt," Giles told TIME, "that she had some sexual encounters with someone at the White House."