Monica Lewinsky should move on from Clinton scandal and we must let her

The world’s most famous intern has suffered enough for her Clinton dalliance. But it’s time for Monica Lewinsky to drop it.

Monica Lewinsky in 1998.

Do we owe Monica Lewinsky an apology? It’s a vexed question on a number of levels.

First up, who is we? We, the media? We, the women who didn’t stand up for her when she was being thrashed in the court of public opinion? We, the men who snickered over the tale of the damp cigar?

But also, for what? For laughing along with late-night comedians who made gags about the mess on her dress?

For bullying a 22-year-old for making a stupid, starry-eyed mistake? For continuing to do so? For shaping and participating in a culture that shames Lewinsky for her behaviour while allowing no easy path for redemption, and no ­recovery?

Maybe we do owe her an apology, for all that.

Do we also need to accept her as a victim of abuse? In light of the social movement known as #MeToo, that is what Lewinsky wants. In an elegant essay, published in this month’s Vanity Fair, she asks us — the voyeurs of the late 1990s, who feasted on her story — to reconsider her affair with US president Bill Clinton; to reclassify it as an “abuse of power” since she now sees that the “road to consent” — for she surely consented — was “littered with ­inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege”. There were “power differentials” that muddied the waters: “He was my boss, the most powerful man on the planet.”

She was 22. He was 49, married, a father. The US president. He had vastly more life experience.

He should have known better. Let’s all agree on that.

Lewinsky’s piece is well argued, and you would have to have a heart of stone not to feel some compassion for the woman at its heart, but is it also possible to become too revisionist here?

Because unless everything we’ve heard about the affair is wrong — always possible — this was not a case of the president chasing Monica around his desk.

This was Monica, an attractive adult woman, on the hunt.

Let’s look at the Starr report. Under the chapter headed “First Meetings With the President”, the report says Lewinsky began flirting with Clinton in the first month of her internship at the White House. She “made eye contact with him, made sure they shook hands, and she introduced ­herself”.

Then White House intern Monica Lewinsky works in a White House office as President Bill Clinton looks on. The picture was submitted as evidence in documents by the Starr investigation and released by the House Judicary committee on September 21, 1998.

She told a friend “she was attracted to (him) and she had a big crush on him”. She also told investigators that she made the first move — for the record, on Wednesday, November 15, 1995 — when she ran into him, alone in the chief of staff’s office, by raising “her jacket in the back, and showing him the straps of her thong underwear, which extended above her pants”.

She flashed him her knickers, in other words.

Later the same night, while en route to a toilet about 8pm, ­Lewinsky ran into the president again, and she “told him that she had a crush on him. He laughed … he asked if he could kiss me”.

She consented, and in the windowless hallway adjacent to the study they kissed.

And so it began, and you can read all about it, Mills & Boon style, in the official report that still sits there on the web: “She unbuttoned her jacket; either she ­unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up” and so on.

Yes, he was married and her boss, and she should have known better. But, as above, so should he.

What Lewinsky could not have known was how public the affair would become, with every intimacy not only recounted but also uploaded to the internet for public consumption. Paragraph 42 of the Starr report for example, reveals that “Ms Lewinsky performed oral sex on the president on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the president fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the president inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the president had brief genital-to-genital contact.”

Can you even imagine?

The humiliation must have been intense.

Not only Monica was embarrassed, of course. There is a paragraph about how the president laughed in a grateful way when ­Lewinsky performed oral sex on him, saying: “It’s been a long time since I’ve had that.”

He was married to Hillary at the time. Still is.

The fact Lewinsky fell in love with the president forms a key part of the report, too, as is her dismay when he wordlessly abandoned her, leaving her isolated as the mirth rained down.

“I didn’t expect to fall in love with him,” she told investigators, “and I was surprised when I did.” And then he made it look like “I was just servicing him, when it was much more than that to me”.

So, yes, this was a consensual affair, and it was one that she instigated, and lamented, in its demise, all of which is problematic — indeed, probably fatal — to the argument that Lewinsky is now making in Vanity Fair.

This isn’t a Weinstein-style situation.

We can’t call it harassment.

It’s a stretch, probably, to say it’s abuse even of power. As Lewinsky herself says, nothing “excuses me for my responsibility for what ­happened”.

One thing she is right about is the narrative. In the wake of the reckoning, it would be different today. She wouldn’t be the plump and needy flirt chasing around after a married man. She would not be called predatory, which was the word used by T he New York Times’ chief feminist columnist, Maureen Dowd.

We would be talking more about Clinton’s power, his prestige, his ability to hire and fire her.

“There was no support back then. I don’t believe I would have felt so isolated had it all happened today,” Lewinsky writes.

She is right. There were no feminist bloggers in 1998, no pink pussy hats.

That said, her lover was Clinton, not Donald Trump, and he still is Clinton, and not Trump.

One more thing: some commentators have tried this week to advance the argument that Lewinsky was shamed for her behaviour, while Clinton escaped scrutiny, but that is not true, either. Republicans tried hard in 1998 to make Clinton pay with his job.

In 2018, they would likely succeed.

The bigger question, probably, in light of #metoo, is #whatnow?

Lewinsky says she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, triggered by the trauma of the investigation.

She left the US briefly to escape scrutiny and to study abroad. She says she has not been able to find full-time work and lives on “loans from family and friends”. (There is a bit of revisionism here, too: she is known to have landed a $1 million book deal 20 years ago, when $1m was worth something.) She has tried her hand at designing clothes and handbags; more recently, she has taken up public speaking on the subject of cyber-bullying. It doesn’t always go so well. Who can forget the time she went to speak at a college campus and a dumb kid, egged on by his mates, stood and asked her how it felt to be the “blow job queen of America?”.

On some level, it is amazing that she has survived. This level of shaming — sexual humiliation, public mockery, abandonment by close friends and lovers — undoubtably kills people. Young men, in cases well documented in the US, have leapt from bridges.

Lewinsky did not die of shame. She thought she might but instead she has lived long enough for ­nuance to enter the debate.

She sees — surely we all do? — that her punishment has far outstripped the crime. Had she been drink-driving and killed ­some­body, there would be more sympathy than she finds when she steps from her apartment on to the streets of Manhattan.

And what did she do? She had a sexual relationship, not even sex, with a married man who was in a position of authority over her. She was young. He was dazzling. It must have been heady.

As sins go, it is well short of murder.

Yet Lewinsky has been followed into purgatory by many a mistress, here and abroad. It just keeps happening. The Times last May carried an interview with a former military intelligence officer, Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with a former CIA director, David Petraeus (she was also his biographer; with almost unimaginable kismet, her book, released just ahead of the scandal, was called All In). For Petraeus, the affair was a hiccup in a celebrated career. For her, it is a permanent stain on her good name.

Yet they were both married. Both committed adultery. But only she is home-wrecker, the stalker, the temptress, the mistress, a word for which, she noted, there is no male equivalent.

Broadwell wanted to know: “How long does a person have to pay for their mistake?”

Lewinsky has been paying for more than 20 years. Whose fault is that? Well, now it gets tricky.

As noted above, Lewinsky has tried her hand at different projects but she also likes to attend Vanity Fair parties. She poses for glamorous photo shoots and she turns up at celebrity events, such as the GQ Men of the Year awards, where she stands around gormlessly on the red carpet, and for what?

For being Monica Lewinsky.

As such, she’s still Monica ­Lewinsky.

That woman.

The other woman.

Can she help that? Yes, she can. She can stop being that Monica Lewinsky tomorrow. Key to anyone’s humanity, and therefore to their identity, is the idea that we all have agency. Human beings get to write their own story. If the time has come for anything, it is for ­Lewinsky to put the weight down.

Now leave it there.

Now walk away

Lewinsky says she is stuck on her knees, unable to rise. As above, she say she cannot even find a job, but come on. Ex-felons, people convicted of terrible crimes, do it every day. They wash dishes and mop floors because doing anything feels better than doing nothing, and the alternative is to stew in a narcissistic soup.

Nobody likes to land on the head of a snake and slide right back to the bottom of the board but, at some point, it happens to us all, and what can you do? You can pick up the dice and throw them anew. You can find the base of the ladder and get on the bottom rung. There is creative work out there, waiting to be done; there are children who need love; there are projects that require a second pair of hands, anything that is not an endless retelling of the same tale.

Yes, Lewinsky should be allowed to move on. She made a mistake. She apologised. She should give herself a second chance. That is what is overdue.