Monica Lewinsky didn't know it, but her lunch meeting with Linda Trip was never gonna happen.

Lewinsky was waiting for Trip at the food court inside a shopping mall in Pentagon City, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC.

It was a typical suburban mall,

brightly lit with a movie theater, a macy's, and white tiles in the floor.

Lewinsky had come from the gym. She was still in her exercise clothes, and she was reading a magazine while she waited for her friend.

It was Friday, January 16th, 1998.

Lewinsky was 24 years old.

About two years earlier, she'd become involved in a precarious relationship with the president of the United States.

As Lewinsky later told her biographer, her relationship with Bill Clinton had come to overwhelm her life.

She found it hard to think about anything else.

Standing there at the Pentagon City Mall, Lewinsky looked up from her magazine, and she saw Linda Trip heading towards her on an escalator.

Suddenly, she gestures. I mean, Lewinsky was coming down on the escalator, and gestures towards men behind her.

That's journalist tornado Adler. She wrote about Monica Lewinsky, and what happened to her on this day in 1998, for vanity fair and the LA Times.

And suddenly these guys apprehend her, and they keep saying that she's already in steep trouble with the law, and it can only get more steep unless she does as they ask.

The two men who approached Lewinsky were wearing dark suits and carrying badges.

They said they were with the FBI, and that the Attorney General of the United States had authorized a criminal investigation into her actions.

The FBI agents invited Lewinsky to follow them to a room in a nearby Ritz Carlton hotel.

Though they told Lewinsky that she was not under arrest, and was free to leave at any time, she agreed to go with them.

Later, she said she went because she wanted to protect the President, that she was thinking, I have to fix this.

As the scene in the food court unfolded, Linda Trip tried to give Lewinsky a hug.

Monica, this is for your own good, she said, just listen to them. They did the same thing to me.

But like so much of what Trip had said to Lewinsky, that was a lie.

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