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Lawyers for each side traded blame for the sordid affair. Giles depicted his clients as the victims of a relentless infiltrator who tracked the family from Los Angeles to Portland, baby sitting the kids, befriending Kathlyn, all the while sleeping with Andy. Ginsburg, who acknowledged the affair happened, pointed out that Bleiler "is a former schoolteacher having sex with a teenager." Still, Giles maintains that Monica was "obsessed with sex. She went to Washington with the intent to have sex with the President." And, he charged, Monica had a "pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her own version of her self-image." Or, perhaps, to get closer to what she wanted. During her senior year at Lewis & Clark, Lewinsky allegedly drafted a fake letter to Bleiler on the college's letterhead suggesting that the school might offer him a job. At the bottom of the letter she forged a college employee's signature. The letter was returned to the employee as undeliverable mail; Lewinsky reportedly apologized to the employee. Last week the letter was in the FBI's hands.
Meanwhile, some of Lewinsky's former co-workers were telling the Washington Post that she was "besotted" with the President and, as early as the summer of 1995, fantasizing about having sex with him in the Oval Office. It was an unusual aspiration, since most interns were more interested in having sex with each other. Lewinsky reportedly found Vice President Gore fetching too, and excitedly recounted locking eyes with George Stephanopoulos at Starbucks. A friend told TIME that she remembers Lewinsky often bringing bagels and coffee to Stephanopoulos--unrequested. Last fall Lewinsky told a senior State Department official with whom she was friendly all about a relationship with a man in his mid-30s. "I got the impression several times from Monica that this was a serious relationship, that it had been going on for a while, and that the guy had broken it off," the official told TIME. "She was sad about that. I had the impression he had broken her heart." But the man, a former congressional Republican staff member, told the official and repeated to TIME last week that "there was no relationship." They had gone out once, had dinner and exchanged a few E-mails. "And that was it."