The roommate says that the Star approached Smith several times, but Smith refused to speak to reporters. She ratted out her friend, the roommate says, "to help find this girl who is missing and help keep the people who live at our apartment and Anne Marie safe." Safe from what? She couldn't really say, but she added she felt safer now that Smith has a lawyer and that her name is public -- even if it's synonymous with the adultery.
She also defended her role with the Star as "a way of getting the correct version out there. Because they had one that they were going to put out there anyway." In fact, she minimizes her role as something along the lines of a paid fact-checker.
"Anything they were misled on I cleared it up," she says. "I didn't give them any information they didn't already have. And I didn't give them some stuff that I didn't think they needed to know," she says, striking a righteous pose. "I don't think that's anybody's business."
"I told [the Star], I'll confirm this or I'll deny this," she says. "They were going to go after her character in a way that wasn't true and would have made her look bad."
So, she thinks she actually saved Smith from a more damning fate in the tabs? "Well, I think it helped because she's out of danger. Because nobody knew about it but the people around her; her family didn't know, nobody. And she wanted to keep it that way," she says.
Then she shifted her story somewhat, suggesting that she and her roommates were actually just interested in protecting themselves. "You know, we lived there too. We were afraid, to be perfectly honest with you," she says. Then she settled on the safest excuse of all: "But we weren't just thinking about ourselves, and we weren't just thinking about Anne Marie, we were thinking about the girl that was missing.
"I knew that my relationship with [Smith] would be jeopardized after this," the roommate now says, "but I had to decide what was more important." Besides, she says, the Star's payment helped cover the expenses after Smith moved out. "You know, it covered her costs for moving out, because we have to cover her rent now."
After the Star finally published her name on June 22, Smith still kept a low profile, and didn't actually come forward until a July 3 appearance on Fox News, in which she claimed that Condit and his attorneys had asked her to sign an affidavit claiming that the two never had an affair. A week later, she went, with her attorney Robinson, on "Larry King Live," appearing convincingly human, uneasily answering King's questions and saying that she would continue to work on the federal investigation into whether Condit had possibly obstructed justice by asking her to sign the affidavit. She then vowed to make no more media appearances, and said she would attempt to return to her life as a flight attendant -- a promise, it appears, she has kept.
But if she had a yen for private life, she made a mistake hiring Robinson, who seems to have a yen for the spotlight -- and for airing the most lurid allegations about Condit. (The anecdote about the S/M-style ties under Condit's bed came from Robinson, as well as the news that discussing his homosexual fantasies was a turn-on for the congressman.)
Still, Smith's profile seemed to diminish with time, and it began to seem like the next time we might hear from Anne Marie Smith would be if she took our drink order aboard a cross-country flight on United.
Until Condit went after her in the Chung interview.
