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This Just In: Media

The return of the semen-stained dress

By Dan Kennedy

That mythical semen-stained dress allegedly worn by Monica Lewinsky made yet another notable nonappearance this week -- this time at Harvard's Kennedy School, where Newsweek sleuth Michael Isikoff squared off against Marvin Kalb, director of the school's Joan Shorenstein Center and an outspoken critic of the media's performance in the Clinton scandals.

Following a 35-minute exposition by Isikoff on Bill Clinton's long and varied sexual history, Kalb whacked him with a hostile question: why did "so many allegations" about the scandal "turn out to be wrong," especially the one about the dress?

Isikoff was ready, replying that, in December, Lewinsky's friend-turned-tormentor Linda Tripp told him Lewinsky actually showed her the dress (though of course Tripp had no independent knowledge of what bodily fluids might have been spilled on it), and suggested to Isikoff that she "lift" it from Lewinsky and give it to him so he could have it tested. "I said, 'Are you out of your mind?'" he recalled.

"It has not been disproven," Isikoff added. "It has not been proven to most people's satisfaction, but then again the jury is still out on a lot of these matters."

Isikoff could also have noted -- but didn't -- that Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, at one point confirmed in on-the-record interviews that independent counsel Kenneth Starr had told him he was searching for such a dress. In other words, the dress was a legitimate object of journalistic inquiry, regardless of Kalb's and others' understandable squeamishness.

Then again, the subject of Starr's conduct was something on which Isikoff clearly didn't want to dwell. Isikoff claimed that he was "floored" when he first learned Starr was looking into the Lewinsky affair, and that his first reaction was that "Starr is going to get reamed." He added, "Over time, I think that my initial instinct turned out to be right." Maybe so. But if either Isikoff or Newsweek had any misgivings about Starr's prosecutorial excesses during the first few weeks of Fornigate, the magazine's readers certainly never knew about it.