'I am determined to have a different ending to my story,' she wrote. Lewinsky at 40

Her last full-time job was as a 24-year-old aide to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. She remains the object of crude and cruel jokes, as she was indirectly at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner just last Saturday night. In public perception, she is frozen as the temptress who almost toppled a president.

But Monica Lewinsky doesn’t want anyone’s pity, and says it is at last time to stop “tiptoeing around my past and other people’s futures,” and to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress.”


“I am determined to have a different ending to my story,” the 40-year-old former White House intern writes in a first-person essay in the forthcoming issue of Vanity Fair (with excerpts online). “I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out).”

( Also on POLITICO: Lewinsky speaks)

Lewinsky isn’t exactly “breaking her silence” as some reports would have it. In 1999, in the wake of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, she told her story to the British journalist Andrew Morton and sat for a prominent interview with Barbara Walters. But for the past decade, she has remained largely out of the spotlight, in a determined — if not always successful — effort to get on with her life, and her current reflections reveal a perspective that has been hard-won.

(Disclosure: About seven years ago, I spent perhaps five hours in an intense and fascinating conversation with Lewinsky in an attempt to persuade her to share her recollections with Vanity Fair. She ultimately decided against doing so at the time, in part because she did not want to become a football in the 2008 election.)

“Recently, I’ve found myself gun-shy yet again, fearful of ‘becoming an issue’’’ should Hillary Clinton run for president again in 2016, Lewinsky now writes, according to a Vanity Fair press release. “But should I put my life on hold for another 8 to 10 years?”

Lewinsky says that she was impelled to reconsider her stance on speaking out after the 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who was secretly captured on streaming Webcam kissing another man. She says she was moved to tears by the case, but that her mother was distraught, “replaying those weeks when she stayed by my bed, night after night, because I, too, was suicidal” in 1998.

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After Clementi’s death, Lewinsky says, “my own suffering took on a different meaning. Perhaps by sharing my story, I reasoned, I might be able to help others in their darkest moments of humiliation.”

Lewinsky has indeed endured a nearly two-decade ordeal, in which she went from the giddy high of her involvement with the president to becoming “possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” She has worked as a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig, played host of a reality television program called “Mr. Personality,” designed her own line of handbags, and finally earned a master’s degree in social psychology with a thesis on the effects of pre-trial publicity on jury selection. But her notoriety has also repeatedly cost her job opportunities with nonprofit organizations. Marriage (something she once told a co-worker’s wife she deeply wanted) has eluded her, and even her “blind dates” have been by definition only half-blind.

Lewinsky’s affair with the president has been widely caricatured as an adolescent infatuation (Hillary Clinton herself referred to Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon,” according to her old friend Diane Blair). But it is clear from even the most cynical reading of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s sensational and salacious report on the case that her relationship with Bill Clinton went well beyond sexual byplay and that they had become “soul friends” in the assessment of no less a close observer than Lewinsky’s former co-worker, Linda Tripp, whose secret recordings of Lewinsky’s accounts fueled Starr’s investigation.

“We spent hours on the phone talking,” Lewinsky told the grand jury investigating the case. “It was emotional. … I thought he had a beautiful soul. I just thought he was just this incredible person and when I looked at him I saw a little boy … ”

Lewinsky’s treatment at the hands of Starr’s investigators — their virtual entrapment of her at the Ritz-Carlton at Pentagon City; their intimidation and harassment of her mother; their threats to charge Lewinsky with a crime for what amounted to lying about her relationship with her married lover — resonates differently in the post-9/11 era of accusations of government overreach in the name of security than it did in the fevered days when she first made headlines. Starr himself — who famously declared at the height of the scandal, “You cannot defile the temple of justice” — never so much as introduced himself to Lewinsky throughout the whole ordeal, and investigators seized reams of personal files and materials not only from her but from her extended family as well.

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And whatever her acknowledged youthful lapses in judgment, Lewinsky is anything but a ditz. Her longtime personal email address is a sophisticated literary reference, and her latest musings make it clear that she is self-aware about what happened to her — and her own role in making it happen. “Sure, my boss took advantage of me,” she writes, “but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. …The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”

Lewinsky is also clear-eyed about Hillary Clinton, noting that if “narcissistic loony toon” was “the worst thing she said, I should be so lucky.” She adds, “Mrs. Clinton, I read, had supposedly confided to Blair that, in part, she blamed herself for her husband’s affair (by being emotionally neglectful) and seemed to forgive him,” and goes on, “Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress. She may have faulted her husband for being inappropriate, but I find her impulse to blame the Woman — not only me, but herself – troubling.”

Lewinsky’s summary of the affair that upended not only her own life but that of the nation is succinct. “I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton,” she writes. “Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”

Todd S. Purdum is a senior writer at POLITICO and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.