Remember when people seemed to believe that John Kerry had had sex with an intern? We speculated endlessly, we Googled fitfully, we patted ourselves on the back for not naming names. . . pretty much. Matt Drudge was involved and the media got all hand-wringy about "the internet" like it was 1998 all over again. And now, only a little off schedule, the young woman at the center of the Kerry non-affair has stepped forward with a story in next week's New York magazine that refuses to name names either, pretty much. The mystery woman at the center of this non-Monica's tale is the loose-lipped Tripp whose exaggerations were Drudged into full-blown scandal.

The relevant excerpt detailing if not identifying the woman who fingered the reluctant media figure is after the jump. Ladies and gentlemen, start your search engines. . .

UPDATE: Another excerpt from the New York story at Gawker.

...of course, i still remained unsure how it was that I got dragged into this thing. My relationship with Peter [Maroney, Kerry's Finance Director] had put me close to the senator, and I certainly hadn’t kept it a secret that I had been excited to meet and talk to Kerry. The more people I talked to, the more one supposed source kept coming up, a woman whom Drudge had called my “close friend.” I won’t mention her name here, but she had worked for a Republican lobbyist—Bill Jarrell, who runs a firm called Washington Strategies, gives money to Bush, and had been a top aide to Tom DeLay. I called her immediately to ask her if she had been telling people I’d had an affair with Kerry. “I may have said you knew him,” she said, sounding as if she were choosing her words with great care. “I may have said you had dinner with him. But I never said you had an affair!”

Then another reporter also said she’d told him I had slept with Kerry. I couldn’t believe one of my closest friends would tell such a thing—we went all the way back to tenth grade. I had even asked her to be a bridesmaid. She denied it again, then softened her position. “I may have told Bill that you knew Kerry. Look, I was once with you when you phoned Kerry’s office and then he called you right back. And I thought, How amazing, and I got excited and I told friends about it.” She started to cry. “I’m very, very sorry,” she sobbed. “If all this leads back to me, it wasn’t intentional.”

I called Jarrell and asked him what he thought. “Come on Alex,” he said, “Who else could it be?”