00:06:56.420What she describes, according to her aunt, is not a fling. It's a plan, one to play out over the next five years, finish the internship, land the dream job in federal law enforcement, and then start the life she's been striving for.
00:07:13.300Her co-worker, Sven Jones, hears the same thing from Chandra and shares this with 2020.
00:07:18.820When she spoke of her relationship, she never offered a name.
00:07:25.140She's just a powerful person, someone who she was in love with, someone who she could
00:07:42.980By Zamsky's account, there are rules, and Chandra recites them to her.
00:07:47.940Allegedly, if she and Condit ride the elevator in his apartment building and someone else gets on,
00:07:53.360Chandra is to get off on a different floor.
00:07:56.000If anyone asks, she is to say she is visiting a sick friend.
00:07:59.720She is never to carry her identification when she goes to see Gary Condit.
00:08:04.380To reach him, her aunt says, Chandra dials a private line, waits through soft music, and leaves a message.
00:08:12.060And one rule, Chandra tells her, matters more than all the others.
00:08:15.240silence about their secret. If anyone ever finds out, her aunt says Condit is emphatic. It's done.
00:08:25.320Chandra sees a future together. Condit, in her telling, builds a system to make sure
00:08:30.520no one else sees the present. Gary Condit is 53 years old. He's been married to his high school
00:08:37.780sweetheart, Carolyn, for 34 years. They have two grown children, Chad and Katie. His wife lives at
00:08:45.000their home in California. Gary lives in Washington in his condo alone. Carolyn comes to visit that
00:08:51.640spring, but only briefly for a luncheon hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. Condit is the son of a
00:08:57.720Baptist preacher, a Democrat from Modesto. Condit helped found the Blue Dog Democrats, a block of
00:09:04.240fiscally conservative moderate Dems who broke from their party's left. A mural of a big blue dog
00:09:10.640hangs in his congressional office beside a photo of Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich. Condit is
00:09:17.120well-liked. He's telegenic, good-looking. Chandra thinks he looks like Harrison Ford. So well-groomed
00:09:23.740that colleagues call him Mr. Blowdry, and there is talk he could go higher still, which is the point.
00:09:30.300He is a man with a long marriage, a family, and a career he has spent decades building,
00:09:35.120all of it resting on a certain image, all of it at risk if the truth comes out about an affair
00:09:42.100with a missing intern. In public for months from the moment his name surfaces, he will not admit
00:09:48.520the relationship was ever romantic, not to the reporters camped outside his condo, not on national
00:09:55.000television, not to the country. The Washington, D.C. chief of detectives, Jack Barrett, sees his
00:10:01.500investigators pull toward Condit like magnets to steal for one reason. From the very beginning,
00:10:08.680he was trying to protect his professional reputation as a congressman. He was the one
00:10:14.320that created this problem for himself. We had no place to turn other than to try and focus on him.
00:10:19.920In private, however, the story is not quite so one-dimensional. Behind closed doors and
00:10:25.780interviews with police, Condit acknowledges more. When detectives first sit down with Condit,
00:10:32.240he acknowledges that Chandra had come to his apartment and on a few occasions had stayed the
00:10:37.840night. When a sergeant asks him point blank whether the relationship was intimate, Condit refuses to
00:10:44.300be explicit. Quote, I don't think we need to go there, he says, and you can infer what you want
00:10:50.420with that weeks later in a third police interview according to washington post journalists scott
00:10:56.340higgum and sorry horowitz gary finally admits to the detectives that there had been a sexual affair
00:11:03.140an admission that promptly leaks and that he never once repeats in public years later long after it
00:11:09.300no longer matters this is as close as gary condit would come to publicly admitting to an affair with
00:11:15.300Chandra. Here's what he tells Dr. Phil in 2016. I saw her one time outside the office at a restaurant
00:11:22.820and she came by my condo once. She came by your condo once? Well, maybe twice. I think it was
00:11:29.460twice she came by. And here is the distinction on which the rest of this story turns. A man who has
00:11:35.460something to hide is not necessarily the same as a man who knows what happened to Chandra Levy.
00:11:41.060but in the summer of 2001, the two appear identical to some. There is also the question
00:11:48.360of where Condit has been. By his own account, on the day Chandra vanished, Condit is on Capitol
00:11:54.080Hill. Around midday, close to the hour she logs off her computer for the very last time,
00:12:00.060Condit is in a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney about California's energy crisis.
00:12:05.520Cheney's office would later confirm the meeting took place. That afternoon, Condit casts two
00:12:10.560votes on the house floor those events place condit on capitol hill for portions of the day
00:12:16.080though they do not account for every hour that evening he says he is home at his dc condo
00:12:22.240with his wife carolyn who's in town the detectives are not the only ones pressing on gary condit
00:12:29.440chandra's mother susan comes to washington and will not leave quietly she goes on any program
00:12:35.360that will have her and turns to cameras with a plea mr khan would you please step forward and
00:12:42.080share whatever you know you may have been one of the last people to really have spent any time
00:12:47.840with chandra with the police producing no timely answers the levies hire a public relations team
00:12:54.000the strategy is deliberate release what they know a piece at a time keep reporters interested and
00:13:00.400make sure chandra does not vanish from public view it works almost too well chandra stays in the
00:13:08.160headlines in the small print below the actual headlines which are all about gary condit it
00:13:15.520soon becomes clear condit has many secrets as reporters dig into his private life other women
00:13:22.640begin to emerge the first is a former legislative aide named jolene argentini who had her own long
00:13:30.160relationship with condit years earlier and who once gave him an expensive watch the second is
00:13:36.080a flight attendant with united named ann marie smith who says she was involved with condit right
00:13:42.000up until that spring of 2001. she says that after chandra vanished condit's staff asked her to sign
00:13:48.800an affidavit swearing there had been no sexual relationship between her and the congressman she
00:13:55.440refused and she goes public telling fox news she was afraid i stayed in my own hotel rooms and my
00:14:02.960layovers uh i moved to a place where nobody knows my address nobody knows my phone number
00:14:08.960i was very concerned for my own safety these women have nothing to do with chandra's disappearance
00:14:14.640but each tells a version of the same story secrecy denial and the strict condit rulebook
00:14:21.120Together, they make Condit's insistence on privacy look less like respect for a grieving family and more like a habit of protecting himself.
00:14:30.680What none of it does is help anyone find Chandra.
00:14:34.660For weeks, Condit's affairs have been front-page news, but the relationship with Chandra remains just a rumor, much suspected, but technically unconfirmed.