Six months after her private life became grist for the world's gossip mills and made her the woman most hounded by the media since Princess Diana, Ms Monica Lewinsky is ready to talk. And what the 25-year-old has to say before a grand jury about her relationship with President Clinton has become a subject of frenzied speculation.
With prosecutor's agreement to give Ms Lewinsky immunity for her testimony before the grand jury, the end game of an extraordinary episode in American politics seems near.
Maybe.
Can the former Beverly Hills high-school student and junior college graduate, who used her socialite mother's political connections to land an intern's job in the White House, be believed?
And could the woman, who was just another face in the White House crowd until her "best friend" taped her intimate confessions, be the most serious threat to a presidency since the discovery that Richard Nixon taped his own conversations in the Oval Office.
For six months, ever since allegations surfaced that she had an affair with Clinton and became the subject of the independent counsel, Mr Kenneth Starr's, snail-paced, unrelenting grand jury probe, Ms Lewinsky has been a silent figure.
The full-figured brunette given to wearing hats from black berets to flower-bedecked straw chapeaus has been talked about publicly by everyone but herself. She is the subject of nightly tabloid TV talk shows, intense media scrutiny and bawdy fodder for comedians, who have broken all the barriers of good taste to tell 10,000 or more jokes about oral sex, the sex act she is alleged to have engaged in with the President.
Mr Clinton has denied having an affair with her when she was a 21-year-old White House volunteer. And she also denied an affair in an affidavit in the since-dismissed Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against Mr Clinton.
Mr Starr is investigating contradictory statements made by Ms Lewinsky on the tapes and claims that the White House pressured her to deny an affair.
Her parents' messy divorce allegations about each other have been aired and their bank accounts emptied by the need to pay high-price lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a young woman so far charged with nothing.
Even the menus for meals taken aboard flights from Washington to Los Angeles, where Ms Lewinsky sought sanctuary in her father's tiny Brentwood home, managed to make the papers. One night another famous former Brentwood resident, O.J. Simpson, made headlines for simply driving by.
While she remained silent, others spewed forth volumes. An ex-lover confessed an affair at a news conference, his wife by his side.
The person who has talked the most about Ms Lewinsky is her one-time friend and Pentagon coworker, Ms Linda Tripp, who taped her talking about her alleged affair and then gave the tapes to Mr Starr's office, while letting selected media hear snippets.
Ms Lewinsky's first lawyer, the LA medical malpractice specialist, Mr William Ginsburg, made contradictory comments about her, appearing one Sunday on all five major TV talk shows. At times he seemed more of a threat to Mr Clinton or his client than the Tripp tapes.
After one Ginsburg appearance, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared, "I sure hope he had sex with her. Because the alternative explanation offered by [Ginsburg] is far more disturbing. Asked why the president of the United States would spend so much time talking to an intern, Mr Ginsburg suggested that the two might have been working. `They were colleagues,' he told his new best friend, Barbara Walters."
And in an open letter to Mr Starr just before he was removed from the case, Mr Ginsburg declared that the prosecutor may have uncovered a consenting relationship between two adults but had violated everyone's rights in the process.