Ken Starr, US Prosecutor In Clinton-Lewinsky Case, Dies At 76
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – Starr passed away Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston of complications from surgery, his family said.
He came to national and worldwide prominence when he led the impeachment of President Clinton for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Lewinsky had a tempered, compassionate response to the death of Starr, about whom she once wrote made her life a “living hell.”
“As I’m sure many can understand, my thoughts about Ken Starr bring up complicated feelings,” she said. “But of more importance is that I imagine it’s a painful loss for those who love him.”
Lewinsky was a White House intern in the mid-1990s, in her early 20s, when she began a relationship with Clinton, one that Starr would document in exhaustive, explicit detail.
PRIVATE BEHAVIOR
Starr had initially been retained to look into an Arkansas real estate deal Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in. But his investigation shifted after he learned of allegations about the president’s private behavior.
Lewinsky denied their affair in an affidavit but did not know that her former colleague, Linda Tripp, had been taping their phone conversations about Clinton and would turn them over to Starr.
The investigation into Clinton’s affair with her produced a book-length official document for Congress that became a bestseller when commercially sold as “The Starr Report.”
It included explicit sexual details that investigators claimed were necessary to show Clinton’s attempt to cover up the affair offered grounds for impeachment.
Lewinsky later wrote that she was diagnosed with “post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracized,” and was for years subjected to crude jokes.
But starting with a Vanity Fair essay in 2014 and a TED talk in 2015 on “The Price of Shame,” she became a widely respected anti-bullying activist. Television personalities David Letterman and John Oliver are among those who have apologized for once mocking her.
IMPEACHING CLINTON
On December 19, 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton – only the second president until then to face this charge of wrongdoing. A subsequent Senate trial failed to remove him from office.
Starr said that no one, not even the U.S. president, was above the law.
Born July 21, 1946, in Vernon, Texas, Starr was a clerk to former Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1974 and 1975, and in 1981, he became a counselor to William French Smith, then-President Ronald Reagan’s first attorney general.
In 1989, he became solicitor-general, the U.S. government’s chief litigator. Before he became a special prosecutor, he was often mentioned as a Republican president’s potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In his job, he argued 25 cases, including lawsuits on abortion rights and school prayer.