Monica Lewinsky stood on a stage in Vancouver, Canada, in 2015 delivering a TED Talk on the effects of public shaming. Breaking the ice with her audience, she told an anecdote about a young man who hit on her at a Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit. “You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was?” she offered. “He could make me feel 22 again.”
The audience laughed: “I am probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.”
And why should she? At 46, after nearly two decades of living under the dark cloud of the Clinton scandal of the 1990s, Lewinsky has recreated herself as a writer, an anti-bullying advocate, and the owner of a bitingly funny Twitter account. She’s co-producing the third season of FX’s American Crime Story, which will center on the Clinton scandal. Finally, she gets to tell her own story.
Lewinsky was the first victim of the internet’s public shaming ritual. That she has come out on the other side of this is an important counterpunch to the online world’s increasing degradation of public discourse. Fear of the Clintons led prospective employers to keep Lewinsky at arm’s length. But now, amid the #MeToo reassessment of Bill Clinton’s sexual misbehavior and Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election, marking the end of the power couple’s reign, it’s clear that Lewinsky has outlasted the Clintons.
The 2015 TED Talk was one of the first public addresses Lewinsky had given in nearly a decade. She had gone dark in the early 2000s and had been quietly living her life out of the public eye, to whatever extent the media allowed her. She earned a master’s in social psychology from the London School of Economics in 2007. In The Ted Interview, a podcast follow-up to her TED Talk, Lewinsky recounted that these years were, in many ways, more difficult than 1998, when she was under intense legal and public pressure. She had more time to sit and dwell on what happened, she had trouble finding work, and she was dealing with PTSD from the fallout of the scandal. Her friends were able to move on with their lives. She was stuck in 1998.
In a 2014 Vanity Fair essay, Lewinsky explained that in a job interview during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run, a potential employer told her she’d need to get a letter of indemnification from the Clintons because there was a “25 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton will be the next president.” Given the Clintons’ penchant for hiring private investigators to smear opponents, including women making claims against Bill, and the general scorched-earth tactics they tended to employ against foes both real and imagined, the sense of intimidation is easy to understand. Around the same time, Clinton was pulling in six figures a pop for speeches in front of fawning audiences who didn’t want to bring up his scandals and wouldn’t dare if they did.
During these years, the internet was growing. Social media was becoming a more prominent platform and was increasingly used as a tool for public shame. If anyone could understand this phenomenon, and empathize with its targets, it was Lewinsky. “When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it: Today, we call it online harassment,” Lewinsky said during her 2015 TED Talk. “I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantly.”
The way our society treats people who we believe deserve shame is often brutal, but when the mob came for Lewinsky in 1998, it was barbaric, and its methods unprecedented.
She was the internet outrage machine’s first victim. The story broke on the Drudge Report, and when Ken Starr’s report was released, explicit details about her affair with Clinton were easily accessible online. She got the lion’s share of the blame, the humiliation, and the terrible jokes. On his show Politically Incorrect in the late ’90s, Bill Maher said: “Monica Lewinsky is the one who should apologize to America. She’s the homewrecker. She blackmailed the president.” It didn’t seem to matter to him, or anyone else, that Clinton was the one who was married, nearly 30 years her senior, and, being the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.
In the six-part A&E documentary The Clinton Affair, an unidentified male reporter remarked, “What Lewinsky might find is that the public is fickle; that men in sex scandals often get second chances, but that women rarely do.” (Clinton, incidentally, never seemed to run out of chances.) The public was “fickle” indeed, but also bloodthirsty, feeding on the humiliation of an already-battered young woman like crows picking at a body.
Late-night talk show hosts delighted in Lewinsky’s ruination. They buried her in an avalanche of jokes about blow jobs and the blue dress that was a central piece of evidence in the case. They castigated her for her body, her sexuality, and the way she sounded on the now-infamous Linda Tripp tapes. Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, David Letterman, and so many others routinely degraded her as a homewrecker and a bimbo. Watching network TV monologues from the ’90s, it’s clear that the pinnacle of late-night humor at the time was misogynistic, lazy cheap shots at a woman still in her 20s, living out the most horrifying experience of her life in the public eye. She was the target du jour, and they never seemed to run out of ammunition.
Leno once held up a parody of a Dr. Seuss book featuring an animated Lewinsky with the title, Slut in a Hat. Letterman suggested possible first lines for her book, including “me and my big mouth” and “does this font make me look fat?” O’Brien suggested Lewinsky offered oral sex to a fan in lieu of an autograph.
Many of these comedians have since expressed regret, which is hardly compensation for the damage it did to her mental health, reputation, and humanity. In an interview with John Oliver earlier this year, Lewinsky explained the effects of the abuse from the media: “My identity was stolen,” she said. “It was this deconstruction of me.”
She had no allies on the Right, either. She was a casualty in a political war between two parties. Republicans were gleeful that the sordid details of the affair were public, and Democrats were more than willing to paint her as a ditzy, sex-obsessed neurotic who threw herself at their party’s president, the 50-something Peter Pan, who just couldn’t help himself. In a 1998 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd prophesied, “It is probably just a matter of moments before we hear that Ms. Lewinsky is a little nutty and a little slutty.” In a bit of irony, Dowd would later that same year compare Lewinsky to Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, a jilted lover out for revenge.
On The Ted Interview, Lewinsky described the media’s and politicians’ dissection of her as a split in her identity — the public created one version of Monica Lewinsky, whom she didn’t recognize, and she didn’t have the platform to fight against the narrative. The girl who was interested in law and psychology, who was smart and competent enough to get a White House internship at age 21 and a full-time position a year later, was lost to the media machine that was desperate to portray her as a caricature. As Lewinsky put it, “It was easy to forget that ‘that woman’ was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.”
Nearly two decades of her life were taken from her by a mistake she made when she was freshly out of college. She was publicly humiliated and mentally destroyed. Clinton left office with one of the highest approval ratings in history. The media, Democrats, and general public seemed content to ruin Monica for the sake of Bill. To preserve their idealized version of him as a boyish and essentially harmless playboy, they took out their anger, disgust, and sadistic tendencies on her. Clinton certainly didn’t try to stop them.
Then, in late 2017, the #MeToo movement exploded, and the conversation about Lewinsky began to shift. When actress and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted out a plea to other victims of sexual harassment and assault, Lewinsky responded: “#MeToo.” The inherent power imbalance of her relationship with Clinton was talked about for the first time on a national scale, and many people began to feel uncomfortable with the abuse she received at the hands of the media, politicians, and complete strangers.
In June 2018, Clinton claimed he wouldn’t have done anything differently had the scandal occurred during the height of #MeToo. Rebecca Traister responded with a piece for the Cut called, “Time’s Up, Bill,” knocking Bill for his tone-deafness. “Clinton’s feckless replies to questions about #MeToo revealed an unpreparedness that spoke volumes about why men have been able to abuse their power with relative impunity for generations, while the women around them have been asked to pay the price for them over and over and over again.”
During a conversation with NPR, Susan Glasser, who ran the Washington Post’s newsroom during the ’90s, told Mary Louise Kelly that “the culture has shifted” since the Clinton scandal. “Many people, myself included, believe that part of the sort of national furor over the #MeToo stories has been a response in some ways to the fact that there is another male president in the Oval Office who has been credibly accused of misconduct by numerous women,” she said. In 2018, Josha Kendall wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled, “Where is Bill Clinton’s #MeToo reckoning?,” not just about Lewinsky, but women who had credibly accused Clinton of sexual assault, even rape, and had been ridiculed and vilified for it: Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey. “Bill Clinton may no longer be president, but the #MeToo movement has taught us that we should have no tolerance for unrepentant predators in positions of power in media or politics,” Kendall wrote. “The companies that do business with Clinton should care if they are collaborating with a man who may well be a serial predator. And Democrats need to stop looking the other way simply because he was once a popular president.”
The tide had turned against Bill Clinton. The obvious question was being asked: Why was the culpability for the affair placed on a 22-year-old intern instead of the most powerful man in the world? Democrats’ fervor to protect Clinton faded into something like shame. Suddenly, it just wasn’t fashionable anymore to defend men who abused their power.
Meanwhile, our cultural dependence on social media and the rise of cancel culture, trolling, and viral shaming videos were coming to a boiling point. Lewinsky marked the story of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who committed suicide after a video of him becoming intimate with another man went viral in 2010, as an important moment in understanding how telling her story could help others.
“The darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming I experienced had mushroomed,” she said in 2015. “Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day. And some tragically don’t, and there’s nothing virtual about that.”
Many people are eager to hear Lewinsky’s story now, even if it is 20 years overdue. That 2015 TED Talk got more than 9.3 million views on YouTube. In addition to A&E’s The Clinton Affair and the forthcoming season of American Crime Story, Lewinsky’s story has also been tackled by Slate’s Slow Burn podcast. She’s a contributor to Vanity Fair. You’re more likely to see her in a headline for a self-deprecating joke on Twitter than anything else. In 2019, the only person who’s still making fun of Monica Lewinsky is Monica Lewinsky.
As for Lewinsky, it seems as though she’s finally found some peace and a purpose. Her 2015 explanation: “In the past nine months, the question I’ve been asked the most is: ‘Why?’ Why now? Why was I sticking my head above the parapet?’ Because it’s time. Time to stop tip-toeing around my past. Time to stop living in opprobrium, and time to take back the narrative. It’s also not just about saving myself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. You can insist on a different end to your story.”
But Lewinsky did save herself. She is no longer the girl in the black beret. She isn’t the punchline, political leverage, or front-page fodder. She’s a powerhouse and possibly the best living example of bouncing back, better than ever. If a life well-lived is truly the best revenge, Monica got hers. Clinton will probably never truly face the consequences of the affair, certainly not in the way Lewinsky has, but history books might shine on her with more favor. It’s Monica’s moment now.
Brooke A. Rogers is an editorial page assistant for the New York Post and a frequent commentator on Fox News.
