Linda Tripp, the woman who exposed President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky more than two decades ago, has died.
Tripp’s daughter said Tuesday in a Facebook post that her mother was near death.
“My mommy is leaving this earth. I don’t know myself if I can survive this heartache. Please pray for a painless process for the strongest woman I will ever know in my entire lifetime,” Allison Tripp Foley wrote, according to the New York Post.
A close friend of Tripp’s told the Daily Mail that she died Wednesday morning “with a smile on her face.” Her husband and daughter were at her bedside.
Tripp was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer less than a week ago after suffering from stomach pains.
Tripp, a former White House aide, secretly recorded conversations with Lewinsky, a White House intern who had an affair with Clinton. The tapes paved the way for perjury charges in 1998 against Clinton, who denied he’d had an affair. He was acquitted on articles of impeachment for lying under oath and obstruction of justice by the Senate in 1999.
“No matter the past, upon hearing that linda tripp is very seriously ill, i hope for her recovery. i can’t imagine how difficult this is for her family,” Lewinsky tweeted Wednesday.
no matter the past, upon hearing that linda tripp is very seriously ill, i hope for her recovery. i can’t imagine how difficult this is for her family.
— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) April 8, 2020
Tripp, 70, disappeared from public life after the scandal, moving to Middleburg, Virginia. She made her first public comments in decades in 2018 at an event marking National Whistleblower Day on Capitol Hill.
“It was about exposing perjury and the obstruction of justice,” she said. “It was never about politics.”
