Who was Linda Tripp? Sarah Paulson says she didn’t align with Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton whistleblower while portraying her in ‘Impeachment’

Sarah Paulson, who played the role of former American Civil Servant Linda Tripp in "Impeachment: American Horror Story," recently opened up about portraying the controversial figure in a conversation with Monica Lewinsky. According to Entertainment Weekly, Paulson, appeared on the Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky podcast on November 11, where she discussed approaching the role with much-needed grace. Linda Tripp rose to prominence for her involvement in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998, after she secretly recorded private conversations about the former President between herself and Lewinsky.

In her conversation with Monica Lewinsky, Sarah Paulson explained how proud she was of her performance in the show, saying:

"It was one of those sorts of things that will forever be something I'm the most proud of in terms of my performance, and I don't say that about, like, anything I've ever done. I did have to kind of commit to a certain internal motor about what was motivating her choices."

She further added:

"And I think this idea of really needing to be seen and recognized as a valuable member of society…or to make herself more important than she was because she felt so overlooked, I can understand all of that.It was an absolute inroad to figuring out how to play this person who did something that from a moral standpoint I could not align myself with."

More about Linda Tripp, as Sarah Paulson opens about playing the role in the 2021 FX drama

Linda Tripp, whose real name was Linda Rose Carotenuto, was born on November 24, 1949, in Jersey City. According to New York Times, her mother, Inga Beckwith, met her father, Albert Carotenuto, while he was a soldier stationed in Germany. The couple later married but separated in 1967 after Albert left his wife and daughter. They later divorced in 1968. In an interview discussing her early life, Linda Tripp recalled how she was raised, saying:

"I had an extremely strict upbringing and suffered through my parents' painful divorce.''

Linda Tripp later grew up in Whippany, graduating from Hanover Park High School in 1968. She began her career by working as a secretary at an army base in Fort Meade. According to The Washington Post, she later went on to work at the White House and eventually rose up to the position of White House Counsel.

Following this, she was transferred to the public relations office in Pentagon in 1994, though the exact reason for this move is not known. In a 2018 interview on the Slow Burn podcast hosted by Leon Nefakh, Linda Tripp explained why she went public in 1998 with Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton's secret relationship, adding that she did it to help Lewinsky. She said:

“To this day, I don’t believe she’s accepted her victimhood. He was just using and playing with and then disposing of a human being.”

Speaking on her Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky podcast, Lewinsky explained how apprehensive she was about Sarah Paulson's portrayal of Linda Tripp and how it would be recieved by the audience. She said:

"I was so afraid that you would do such a good job then that people—it was this irrational like 5-year-old fear of, ‘Oh no, now everybody’s going to like her’—and I remember you so generously said to me early on you were so assuring of like, ‘We’re not giving her the Marcia Clark treatment”

According to The New York Times, Linda Tripp was previously married to Bruce Tripp. The couple tied the knot in 1971 and welcomed two children, but later divorced after nineteen years of marriage in 1990. According to Middleburg Life, following her involvement as the key whistleblower in the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal, she moved to Middleburg in Virginia, where she married Dieter Rausch, an architect, who was orginally from Germany. The couple married in 2004 and ran a toy store together until her death from pancreatic cancer in April 2020 at the age of seventy.

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