Monica Lewinsky, the once White House intern for former President Bill Clinton, revealed during a podcast interview that she believed Clinton should have resigned over their affair.
“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” Lewinsky told Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper on Tuesday.
“Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who is just starting out in the world under the bus,” she continued.
Clinton admitted to having an affair with Lewinsky during his presidency, which became the focus of his impeachment in 1998.
During the interview, Lewinsky admitted that she really “didn’t know how to process anything” that was happening when the affair was discovered amid a sting operation.
“It was shocking. It was terrifying. I didn’t actually know how to process anything and really, it was a moment where life as I knew it was over,” the former White House intern said.
She reflected on the media being sympathetic toward her story for “for five seconds” but then after a week, she believed that “once the “White House got in gear, I was very quickly painted as a stalker, a whore, mentally unstable, a bimbo … not attractive enough to be pursued.”
“There was a creation, a version of me that I didn’t recognize,” she said. “And that’s what happens when you have a power imbalance in a story where the media is so integral into the story unfolding.”
Cooper asked about how the “slut-shaming” affected her. Lewinsky shared that she believed that many affairs with young women often start with already a certain level of “lack of self-esteem and self-worth.”
“So I already had issues. It’s kind of your worst nightmare,” she said.
Lewinsky said her family and friends helped her “make it through” the experience that felt like a “tsunami.”
“I was so humiliated,” she added.
Lewinsky said that she was “sadly” surprised to hear “worse things” said about her from women more than men. She said the men often told jokes but women “eviscerated” her.
“I think Bill’s behavior was more reprehensible than mine but I did make mistakes,” she continued. “I still did things that were wrong.”
The former intern said she saw the White House performing gaslighting to stay in power.
Lewinsky, now 51, reflected on how unique conditions of the growing internet and the changing 24-hour media landscape at the time in the late 1990s was an experience that was hard to process.
Lewinsky said that it felt “like the entire world was laughing at you.”
She felt “moments of grace” that helped her get through the traumatic moments but she actualized how much she lost in the experience when she graduated graduate school and couldn’t find a job. When she was job hunting, the former first lady Hillary Clinton was running for president and it complicated her ability to find work. She said some places wouldn’t even accept an interview with her for jobs that she was qualified to do.
Cooper asked her if she had pondered a name change, and Lewinsky said that she had played out all of the scenarios of how a name change would work in public interactions, job interviews, and dating but it just didn’t seem practical.
“I didn’t want to change my name. Why should I have to change my name?” she bluntly asked about the concept. “I bet nobody has asked Bill if he ever thought about changing his name.”
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She added reflecting on the hypocrisy, “Okay, I get because he was the most famous person in the world at the moment and was president, but even the idea would never cross someone’s mind to [ask] a man.”
Lewinsky said she was thankful to have come from an upper-middle-class family who helped support her through the times when she struggled to find work but also acknowledged that she is empathetic to women in scandal who have felt that their only choice in being able to survive financially was to “pose nude in a magazine” to pay rent and “put food on the table.”