Matt Drudge’s Impeachment: American Crime Story Debut and Strange Origin Story

Matt Drudge makes a dramatic debut in Impeachment: American Crime Story’s third episode, “Not to Be Believed,” which premieres Tuesday night on FX. The character does not get an introduction so much as a down-and-dirty origin story. In the episode’s opening scene, set in 1995, Drudge (played by Billy Eichner) manages the gift shop at CBS Studios. The character is lit and scripted like a screen villain—perhaps not surprising, given the show’s creators have said the true crime of Impeachment is the way Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones were maligned by media.

During the five-minute opening sequence, Drudge locks up the gift shop, throws on a trench coat, digs sensitive information out from a studio dumpster, and returns to his small, drab apartment to publish the biggest scoop of his career at that point: Jerry Seinfeld’s negotiations for $1 million per episode. Three years later, Drudge would eclipse that news story with a political bombshell—breaking news of Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.

Ahead, a closer look at Drudge’s real-life beginnings and his role in making Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair the scandal spectacular that it became.

These days, Drudge is known for being a “mysterious media maven, conservative kingmaker, and arguably the most influential news aggregator in history,” according to a Vanity Fair feature last year. But in the early ’90s, his résumé was considerably less impressive.

Drudge grew up in the Maryland suburbs and graduated from high school 341st out of 355 students in 1984, according to Matthew Lysiak’s The Drudge Revolution. While many of his peers went to college, Drudge spent the following years drifting aimlessly between jobs like 7-Eleven night manager, telemarketer, and McDonald’s team member.

“Drudge’s father ultimately changed his life,” wrote New York magazine in 2007. “After high school, [Drudge] drifted to his father’s hometown, Los Angeles, where he worked for years in the gift shop at CBS studios. Worried about his son’s aimlessness, Bob Drudge insisted on buying him a Packard-Bell computer in 1994. The Drudge Report began as an e-mail sent out to a few friends.”

The Drudge Report started taking off in March 1995, and Drudge’s “first big break came straight out of the garbage” while he was working at CBS Studios, according to The Drudge Revolution:

Matt had been searching through the trash cans on the ground-floor Xerox room when he discovered the previous day’s Nielsen ratings, not yet released to the public, discarded below piles of trash.… For Matt, it was information gold, even if he didn’t exactly know what to do with the pilfered information.

Matt studied the schedule of the cleaning crew. He learned there was a short window of time in the morning after the Nielsen numbers were tossed into the garbage by the executive suits and before the crew would arrive to shred it.

Matt took his dumpster-diving routine elsewhere—including to Daily Variety. He began posting the Nielsen ratings and other tidbits of information he learned on various internet newsgroups, including pilfering Friday night’s box office take for newly released movies, which he would release the very next day, ahead of the studios.

Tuesday’s episode also flashes back to a trip Drudge made to the capitol—which Jeffrey Toobin described in his book A Vast Conspiracy, on which Impeachment is based. The trip would include a fateful conversation with Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff (Danny A. Jacobs), who was on the Clinton sexual harassment beat. While Drudge had been digging scoops out of the trash, Isikoff was operating on the opposite end of the reporting-morality spectrum—vetting sources and declining access to illegally recorded audio. Toobin writes:

In late June 1997, Matt Drudge visited Washington at a time when his celebrity was still rather modest. Two years earlier, Drudge had started posting various news items and gossip—mostly early reports of weekend movie grosses along with occasional news of show business contract disputes—on the fledgling World Wide Web. His popularity grew with that of the Internet, and Drudge soon developed a following in the tens of thousands, especially among journalists. Drudge wrote with a cranky anti-Clinton slant, but his juicy tidbits and old-time tabloid style made his intermittently reliable Drudge Report a must-read in political and media circles. By the time he toured Newsweek’s offices, in the summer of 1997, he could promenade through them like a visiting dignitary. (On the same trip to Washington, Drudge was a guest of honor at a dinner thrown by the ubiquitous David Brock.) In a conversation with Drudge at Newsweek, Isikoff accidentally confirmed that he was working on an article about a possible act of sexual harassment by the president in the White House.

In May 1997, The Washington Post formally introduced Drudge to the world in a profile entitled “The Dirt on Matt Drudge”:

He’s a one-man media machine, an obsessive gossip who cheerfully pleads guilty to occasional unethical behavior.

He’s a 30-year-old Takoma Park native whose last job was managing the CBS gift shop in Studio City, Calif.

He describes his gig this way: “I don’t have an editor. I can write whatever I want and 50,000-plus readers will see it within an hour.”

Matt Drudge would be possible only in the age of Web-surfing. From a cluttered apartment near Hollywood and Vine, he cranks out a World Wide Web site called the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com), a strange brew of media, political and show biz tidbits that has drawn all kinds of fans in high places.

Though Drudge had a reputation for being hit-or-miss with its news breaks—he incorrectly reported that Microsoft was buying Netscape, and that Independence Day would bomb at the box office, according to The Drudge Revolution—he managed to break the Clinton affair news.

On January 17, 1998, Drudge published the story with the headline “NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN:”

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine
killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its
foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the
President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed
the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits
hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with
the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she
was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent
visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to
have indulged the president’s sexual preference. Reports of the
relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job
at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month.

The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which
she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor
at the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs
as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57.

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone
conversations exist.

The relationship between the president and the young woman become
strained when the president believed that the young woman was bragging
about the affair to others.

The story set off a full-on media frenzy around the Clinton White House on par with the press circus around Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Days later, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and ABC radio followed with their own reporting that Kenneth Starr was investigating whether Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan encouraged Lewinsky to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether she had an affair with the president.

Incredibly, this was not the first time that Drudge scooped Isikoff. Drudge previously beat the Newsweek reporter to breaking the allegations that Clinton made advances towards another White House aide, Kathleen Willey. Speaking to press after breaking the Lewinsky-Clinton affair news, Drudge acknowledged his own controversial tactics in scooping Isikoff.

“There’s something in the culture of Washington where reporters share their stories, and now there’s an outlet, meaning me,” said Drudge. “Before we all talked about it, but who’s going to print it? … This thing just fell into my lap.”

The article not only opened the floodgates for political attacks, it also marked another important turning point. Per Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy, “By launching the story into the public discourse via the Internet, Drudge’s post announced a fundamental reordering of our media hierarchies, a process that has only accelerated in subsequent years.”

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