It’s the fall of 2018. I’m sitting on the floor of my mom’s apartment surrounded by My Past. I’ve been dismantling boxes for hours in an attempt to organize, cleaning out things that once seemed important enough to save, but now no longer serve me. The stacks of CDs get tossed. All but one treasure: a long-lost recording of the workshop performance I attended of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway hit, In the Heights. (It was a “reading” in the basement of the Drama Book Shop in the early 2000s.) That was the best part of my organizing expedition. The worst was unearthing a stash of “memorabilia,” if you will, from the 1998 investigation: the front page of The New York Times from when I was forced to fly cross-country to be questioned by the House impeachment managers, a second front page with a grainy photograph of me being sworn in before my Senate deposition, and a faxed Xerox of a Los Angeles Times article with the headline: “The Full Monica: Victim or Vixen?”

Victim or Vixen? That’s a question as old as time immemorial: Madonna or Whore? Predator or Prey? Dressed scantily or appropriately? Is she telling the truth or lying? (Who will believe thee, Isabel?) And it’s a question that is still debated about women in general. And about me.

The debate over who gets to live in Victimville fascinates me, as a public person who has watched strangers discuss my own “victim” status at length on social media. The person at the epicenter of the experience doesn’t necessarily get to decide. No—society, like a Greek chorus, also has a say in this classification. (Whether we should or shouldn’t is a debate for another time.) And society will no doubt weigh in again on my classification—Victim or Vixen?—when people see a new docuseries I chose to participate in. (It’s titled The Clinton Affair. Bye-bye, Lewinsky scandal . . . I think 20 years is enough time to carry that mantle.)

Some closest to me asked why would I want to revisit the most painful and traumatic parts of my life—again. Publicly. On-camera. With no control of how it will be used. A bit of a head-scratcher, as my brother is fond of saying.

By Win McNamee/Reuters.

Do I wish I could erase my years in D.C. from memory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–style? Well, is the sky blue? But I can’t. And in order to move forward in the life I have, I must take risks—both professional and emotional. (It’s a combustible combination.) An important part of moving forward is excavating, often painfully, what has gone before. When politicians are asked uncomfortable questions, they often duck and dodge by saying, That’s old news. It’s in the past. Yes. That’s exactly where we need to start to heal—with the past. But it’s not easy.

As much as I agonized over whether to participate in the documentary, it paled in comparison to the agony of preparing to be interviewed—for what turned out to be over 20 hours. For context, the whole series is only 6.5 hours, with interviews from more than 50 people. There is irony to my statement in the series about falling down the rabbit hole at 22. Again and again over the course of filming the show, I would scoot off to storage, where I have boxes of legal papers, news clips, and all six volumes of the original Starr Report, to “quickly” fact-check something, only to spend three hours on the hard, cold concrete floor reading teeny-font print testimony—my own and others’—that harpooned me back to 1998. (The only interruption, as every storage-goer can attest, was the need to stand up and wave my arms every 10 minutes so the lights would come back on.)