The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The other story was another intern sexcapade, this time with a darker twist: On May 1, a twenty-four-year-old Washington, DC, woman named Chandra Levy inexplicably vanished (she’d been interning with the Federal Bureau of Prisons). Her neighbors claimed to have heard a scream coming from her apartment building at four thirty a.m. Levy’s father told police he believed Chandra had been having an affair with Gary Condit, a fifty-three-year-old married congressman who happened to represent the region of California where Levy’s parents lived. Condit unconvincingly denied the affair and was never officially connected to the disappearance, but their secret relationship was the center of the story. Certain qualities were reminiscent of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, though this was more of a classic true-crime scenario. Two days before her disappearance, Levy had called her aunt, a woman who served as her private confidante about Condit and knew all the details of their affair. Levy left a phone message that said she had “big news” to tell the aunt when she next saw her. What was the news? What did it imply?