Ken Starr, the lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, has died at the age of 76, according to a statement issued by his family.
Starr was a prosecutor whose Whitewater investigation led to the impeachment of former Democratic president Clinton, in 1998. He died on Tuesday at Baylor St Luke’s medical center in Houston, of complications from surgery, the statement said.
A Reagan judicial appointee and US solicitor general under George HW Bush, Starr presented many arguments before the US supreme court.
Starr also served as independent counsel, president and chancellor of Baylor University and dean of the Pepperdine School of Law, the family statement said, and described their loved one as having had “a distinguished career in academia, the law and public service”.
He was later stripped of that university chancellorship, however, after the institution under his watch failed to take appropriate action over a sexual assault scandal involving 19 football players and at least 17 women.
In January 2020, Starr served as a member of Donald Trump’s legal team in the then president’s first impeachment trial over dealings with Ukraine. Trump was acquitted by the Senate before his historic second impeachment in 2021, accused of inciting insurrection in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and was also acquitted.
In the 1990s, Starr came to national prominence as the special prosecutor who investigated the sex-and-perjury scandal that led to only the second ever impeachment of a president in US history, against Clinton, the at-the-time hugely popular Democratic president.
The investigation into Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky when she was a White House intern produced a book-length official document for the US Congress that became a bestseller when commercially sold as The Starr Report.
Offering startling and lurid glimpses of sexual trysts intermingled with the densest legalese, the report found Clinton’s attempt to cover up the affair offered grounds for impeachment.
The impeachment charges stemmed from Clinton’s false denial of the relationship in his 1998 grand jury testimony and in a deposition in a sexual harassment case filed against him by Paula Jones of Arkansas, where Clinton had been governor.
On 19 December 1998, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton, following which a subsequent Senate trial failed to remove him from office.
Starr is survived by his wife Alice Starr, to whom he was married for 52 years, his three children and nine grandchildren, the family statement added. Starr will be buried at the Texas state cemetery in Austin.
The Kentucky Republican and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, issued a statement saying: “I am very sorry to learn of the passing of my friend Judge Ken Starr. He was a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot.”
Lewinsky tweeted a very measured message, saying Starr’s death brought up “complicated feelings” but sympathizing with his loved ones.
as i’m sure many can understand, my thoughts about ken starr bring up complicated feelings… but of more importance, is that i imagine it’s a painful loss for those who love him.
— Monica Lewinsky (she/her) (@MonicaLewinsky) September 13, 2022
Republican congressman Pete Sessions, representing Starr’s native Texas, tweeted that he was saddened, and called Starr “a great man”.
Last year it was reported that Starr had waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the late sex offender and billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a book by the Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown who uncovered how the law had gone soft on Epstein, before his arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2018, Starr declined to apologize to, and denied bullying Lewinsky over his harsh tactics with her when, in 1998 he arranged for her to be hustled by law enforcement to a hotel room where she was threatened with 27 years in prison – three more years than her age at the time – unless she wore a wire and snitched on Clinton, with Starr’s leverage over her being because she had lied about her affair with the president in a civil lawsuit.
In five years of pursuing Bill Clinton, the Lewinsky denouement ultimately stemmed from an earlier investigation by Starr into an obscure Arkansas land deal involving Bill and Hillary Clinton and others investing in a failed business venture, the Whitewater Development Corporation.
