Monica Lewinsky reflects on 20th anniversary of ‘becoming public’
MONICA Lewinsky has written a revealing piece reflecting on her time with then US President Bill Clinton — and the hell she endured afterwards.
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MONICA Lewinsky has written a revealing insight into her life after the scandal involving former United States President Bill Clinton as she prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of “my name becoming public for the first time”.
Ms Lewinsky reflected on the “fog of 1998” in the latest issue of Vanity Fair and confessed that as the #MeToo movement picked up steam last year, a “private exchange” with one of the leading women of the movement “cracked me open and brought me to tears”.
“I’m so sorry you were so alone,” wrote the woman, who Ms Lewinsky kept confidential.
The piece is penned on the back of the anniversary of the Starr Report, a probe by independent prosecutor Kenn Starr that investigated accusations of sexual misconduct and obstruction of justice with then White House intern Ms Lewinksy — which eventually led to Mr Clinton’s impeachment. He was later acquitted of all charges.
“For two decades, I have been working on myself, my trauma, and my healing,” she wrote.
“And, naturally, I have grappled with the rest of the world’s interpretations and Bill Clinton’s reinterpretations of what happened. But in truth, I have done this at arm’s length.”
Ms Lewinsky wrote that at the time, she had been “abandoned” and “swimming in a sea of alone”.
“As I find myself reflecting on what happened, I’ve also come to understand how my trauma has been, in a way, a microcosm of a larger, national one,” she said.
“Both clinically and observationally, something fundamental changed in our society in 1998, and it is changing again as we enter the second year of the Trump presidency in a post-Cosby-Ailes-O’Reilly-Weinstein-Spacey-Whoever-Is-Next world.”
In the lengthy piece, Ms Lewinsky reflects on being “hustled into a hotel room near the Pentagon” by the FBI at the age of 24 and being threatened with 27 years in jail if she didn’t co-operate.
She discussed the first time she met Mr Starr, almost two decades after the investigation, despite the fact that in 1998, Mr Starr “decided that a frightened young woman could be useful in his larger case against the president of the United States”.
She made note of the “creepy” conversation on Christmas Eve last year, in which “he kept touching my arm and elbow, which made me uncomfortable”.
Ms Lewinsky writes that amid the #MeToo movement, she no longer feels alone, despite recounting when “the Republican-led Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives decided to publish Ken Starr’s commission’s ‘findings’ online — just two days after he had delivered them — it meant that (for me personally) every adult with a modem could instantaneously peruse a copy and learn about my private conversations, my personal musings (lifted from my home computer), and, worse yet, my sex life”.
She describes the time in 1998, when America “watched a beleaguered president” and “watched a First Lady and First Daughter move through the year with grit and grace”.
Ms Lewinsky also talked about her angst at the time her father was forced to take his daughter to be fingerprinted at the Federal Building and the “wholesale dissection of a young, unknown woman — me — who, due to legal quarantine, was unable to speak out on her own behalf”.
— Monica Lewinsky’s story appears in the forthcoming March 2018 issue of Vanity Fair.
Originally published as Monica Lewinsky reflects on 20th anniversary of ‘becoming public’