fact vs. fiction in the FX miniseries.

The third episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story shows the net starting to tighten on four women caught up in the scandal—Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Linda Tripp—as journalists start to pick up the scent. No one can be sure of who will back them up or who will betray them to deflect the wrath of the powerful interests for whom they are just pawns in a much larger game.

The Birth of Drudge

The episode starts out with what seems like a digression: A clerk in the CBS Studios gift shop hawks an Edward R. Murrow poster to a journalism student but says he prefers Walter Winchell, the feared gossip columnist known for his fast-talking, hard-boiled style who was the inspiration for J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success and who pioneered the blind item while moonlighting as an informant for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, with whom he shared a determination to root out alleged Communist sympathizers in showbiz. After work, Matt Drudge roots through the CBS garbage to unearth a thrown-away draft contract with Jerry Seinfeld and posts it on his America Online account (younger viewers may be dumbstruck by the accurate representation of just how long it took to get online in 1995).

Two years later and Drudge, now in trademark fedora and trench coat, visits reporter Michael Isikoff in the Newsweek offices. It’s a classic legacy media/new media confrontation, with Isikoff dismissing Drudge’s scoops as mere unsourced internet gossip and Drudge pointing out that unsourced internet gossip has cracked open the news business. He also says he didn’t go to college, unlike all the reporters at Newsweek, but the internet is leveling the playing field so qualifications no longer matter. He also tries to get Isikoff to confirm the rumors he’s heard (from one of Paula Jones’ lawyers) about Kathleen Willey’s allegations that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her in the White House.

While it’s not clear if Drudge ever had this conversation with Isikoff, he certainly expressed similar sentiments in a 1998 speech to the journalists of the National Press Club in which he said he used to “stare up at the Washington Post newsroom over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in. Didn’t go to the right schools. Never enjoyed any school, as a matter of fact. Didn’t come from a well-known family—nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty. … I would never be granted any access, obtain any credentials.”

He did work for eight years in the gift shop of CBS’s Hollywood studios before starting a gossipy email newsletter that quickly grew to more than 300,000 subscribers. Throughout the episode, people are constantly asking if Drudge’s voice and costume are for real, but it was an entirely constructed persona. As one of his friends told New York magazine, “His demeanor off the air could not be more different than what it…