Believe it or not, Linda Tripp is involved in a lawsuit over privacy, and, in an irony of injustice, she’s the one getting an award–$595,000, to be specific. Yes, you heard right. The same woman whose claim to fame was her proud and illegal tape recording of highly private and personal phone conversations with Monica Lewinsky. Her motives were far from honorable–she was being directed by book publisher and veteran GOP dirty tricks master Lucianne Goldberg, undoubtedly with dollar signs in her eyes at a prospective book deal–not to mention the personal and political motivations as well.

So despite the fact that this woman committed what is perhaps the most famous (or infamous) violation of another person’s privacy in the past fifty years or so, she’s the one getting paid–because someone leaked the fact that she was arrested but never charged for a crime she may have committed as a minor. Yeah. I’m sure that leak just ruined her whole life. I am absolutely certain that that leak about her past–which no one in the world remembers and most never even heard of–is the reason why people would not want to hire her in the future. Not because she is known for her felonious betrayal for base purposes. Of course not.

Isn’t the damage this woman did to Lewinsky, the president, and the country as a whole enough? But wait, there’s more–she somehow weaseled out a perk to the deal, in the form of three retroactive glowing reports on her performance at the DoD, where she was employed as she apparently spent a lot of time working sordid details out of Lewinsky. These evaluations will lead to greater retirement benefits. Yes, good work, Linda, for faking friendship, stabbing said friend in the back, and derailing the nation’s politics in one of the most toxic and wasteful dirty tricks campaigns in recent memory.

She cries poverty, saying that her legal bills hit half a million dollars, but gets little sympathy for that–she did, after all, commit far more than the two felonies she was charged with, and was eventually let off scot free. Her fault, no victim she. She was indicted and prosecution began, but she got off on technicalities as the prosecutor finally dropped the case. She also, bizarrely enough, was given, as a gift by an anonymous admirer, $30,000 so she could get extensive plastic surgery and afford a celebrity stylist.

This is one person who most definitely deserves no reward at all.