Monica Lewinsky says in a new interview that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned over their affair, criticizing both his actions and the media’s treatment of her as a young White House intern.
“The right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” Ms. Lewinsky said, speaking with “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper on a newly released podcast episode, adding that she might be “naive” to say so.
“Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying, and not throwing a young person, who was just starting out in the world, under the bus,” she added.
Over the years, Ms. Lewinsky said a “handful of people” involved in the scandal have privately admitted they wish they’d handled things differently — but none of the key players have ever apologized.
“I’m at a place where I don’t need it anymore,” she told Ms. Cooper.
Mr. Clinton was 49 when he began a sexual relationship with the then-22-year-old intern in 1995. The former president, at first, insisted he didn’t engage in inappropriate behavior with her — but his denial infamously did not hold up and he later admitted to wrongdoing.
In the 2020 documentary “Hillary,” Mr. Clinton said he felt “terrible” that Ms. Lewinsky’s life was defined by the affair, but he has maintained that he never considered resigning.
“It was the younger generations that really insisted on reevaluating this story because you were all coming to it with just the facts, not having gone through the brainwashing or lived through that media lens,” Ms. Lewinsky told Ms. Cooper.
Ms. Lewinsky has spoken openly in recent years about the intense scrutiny she faced in the wake of the scandal, particularly how the media painted her as the primary villain while largely excusing Mr. Clinton. And she has long noted the affair’s power imbalance.
“It was wholly inappropriate as the most powerful man, my boss, 49 years old. I was 22, literally just out of college. And I think that the power differentials there are something that I couldn’t ever fathom consequences at 22 that I understand obviously so differently at 48.” she told CNN in 2021.
In the years since, Ms. Lewinsky had largely retreated from public life, though she has since reemerged as an anti-bullying advocate and public speaker.
She told Ms. Cooper that the initial sympathy for her after the scandal broke lasted for about “five seconds.”
“Maybe after about a week, once the White House got in gear, I was very quickly painted as a stalker, a whore, mentally unstable, a bimbo, I was very quickly painted as both the pursuer in this and also not attractive enough to be pursued,” she said. “There was a creation of a version of me that I didn’t recognize.”
But Ms. Lewinsky’s side of the story has seen air-time since then. She even served as an executive producer on the FX series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which dramatized the events of the Clinton affair from her perspective.
The consequence of the scandal, she said, was the shift in perspective for the women who were her age at the time of the scandal.
“I think there was so much collateral damage for women of my generation to watch a young woman to be pilloried on the world stage, to be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for my everything,” she told Ms. Cooper, promoting her own new “Reclaiming” podcast.
“I was lucky enough to hold onto a strand of my true self, but I lost my future,” Ms. Lewinsky added.
• Emma Ayers can be reached at eayers@washingtontimes.com.