What to Know
Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky changed her life forever, and nearly ended it. Meanwhile, the former president didn’t seem nearly as affected. During a rent interview with The Times, Monica, now 52, spoke about how the scandal impacted her reputation, career, and her mental health. Though she admittedly hasn’t talked to Bill in “almost 30 years” and doesn’t “know what his internal landscape is,” she has reasons to think “he escaped a lot more than [she] did.”
Monica contemplated ending her life after the scandal.
As she explained to the publication, Monica never dreamed of being famous. But now, about 30 years after the start of her affair with Bill, she can’t escape references to the affair. At this stage in her life, hearing people talk about the infamous affair is a bit easier, but it wasn’t always this way.
“The public humiliation was excruciating; life was almost unbearable,” Monica told The Times, describing the more immediate aftermath of the affair coming to light in 1998. According to the publication, Monica considered suicide and her mom was so worried about her that she asked her to keep the bathroom door open every time she took a shower.
She described their relationship as consensual, but it was still “a gross abuse of power.”
At the start of their affair, Monica was a 22-year-old White House intern. Bill was 49 years old — and also president. At the time, Monica was young and thought she truly had feelings for Bill. Looking back on the relationship now, though, she’s able to see it for what it really was.
“My 22 to 24-year-old self experienced these things, believed there were these things,” she explained. “I still know that there were real emotions there, but what I attached to those emotions, what I thought those things meant — and I get why I thought that — I was wrong.”
As a 52-year-old woman who has grown and “healed,” she’s able to say, “This was a gross abuse of power. Full stop. That doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes, that I didn’t make wrong choices, that my behavior didn’t hurt other people. But at the heart of it was a gross abuse of power.”
The scandal followed her to graduate school and impacted her career.
Attempting to get away from it all, Monica decided to go to grad school in London in 2005, not realizing that she wouldn’t be able to escape her “dumb bimbo” reputation. Per People, her professors and classmates were not the issue. They were actually “welcoming and respectful,” but that didn’t change the way she thought about herself after the scandal. As she told The Times during the recent interview, the way people thought about her and spoke about her was “seared into [her] psyche and my soul.”
Because of this, she didn’t have the confidence to give presentations in class or seek out feedback on her assignments. Then, after she graduated, she applied to hundreds of jobs, only to be rejected by all of them. She felt she “had no purpose” and couldn’t get past the shame, which “sticks to you like tar.”
Eventually, Monica embraced the scandal instead of trying to distance herself from it. She’s an outspoken anti-bullying activist, and recently launched her podcast, Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky.
