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‘How does it feel to be America’s premier blow-job queen?”
It was early 2001. I was sitting on the stage of New York’s Cooper Union in the middle of taping a Q&A for an HBO documentary. I was the subject. And I was thunderstruck.
Hundreds of people in the audience, mostly students, were staring at me, many with their mouths agape, wondering if I would dare to answer this question.
How naïve I was.
“It’s hurtful and it’s insulting,” I said, attempting to gather my wits. “And as insulting as it is to me, it’s even more insulting to my family. I don’t actually know why this whole story became about oral sex. I don’t. It was a mutual relationship.… The fact that it did is maybe a result of a male-dominated society.”
The audience laughed. Maybe they were surprised to hear these words coming from me.
I looked straight at the smirking guy who had asked the question. “You might be better poised to answer that.” After a pause, I added, “That’s probably cost me another year of therapy.”
Had that awkward moment at Cooper Union aired only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating. That clip would have gone viral on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TMZ, Gawker. It would have become a meme of its own on Tumblr. The viralness itself would have merited mention on the Daily Beast and Huffington Post. As it was, it was viral enough, and, thanks to the all-encompassing nature of the Web, you can, 12 years later, watch it all day long on YouTube if you want to (but I really hope you have better things to do with your time).
I know I’m not alone when it comes to public humiliation. No one, it seems, can escape the unforgiving gaze of the Internet, where gossip, half-truths, and lies take root and fester. We have created, to borrow a term from historian Nicolaus Mills, a “culture of humiliation” that not only encourages and revels in Schadenfreude but also rewards those who humiliate others, from the ranks of the paparazzi to the gossip bloggers, the late-night comedians, and the Web “entrepreneurs” who profit from clandestine videos.
Yes, we’re all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle achievements large and small. But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims. We may not have become a crueler society—although it sure feels as if we have—but the Internet has seismically shifted the tone of our interactions. The ease, the speed, and the distance that our electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this new way of being.
In my own case, each easy click of that YouTube link reinforces the archetype, despite my efforts to parry it away: Me, America’s B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, “That Woman.”
It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.
In 1998, when news of my affair with Bill Clinton broke, I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world. Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.
For several years I tried my hand in the fashion-accessory business and became involved in various media projects, including the HBO documentary. Then I lay low for the most part. (The last major interview I granted was 10 years ago.) After all, not lying low had exposed me to criticism for trying to “capitalize” on my “notoriety.” Apparently, others talking about me is O.K.; me speaking out for myself is not. I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Over time, the media circus quieted down, but it never quite moved on, even as I attempted to move on.
Meanwhile, I watched my friends’ lives move forward. Marriages. Kids. Degrees. (Second marriages. More kids. More degrees.) I decided to turn over a new leaf and attend grad school.
I moved to England to study, to challenge myself, to escape scrutiny, and to reimagine my identity. My professors and fellow students at the London School of Economics were wonderful—welcoming and respectful. I had more anonymity in London, perhaps due to the fact that I spent most of my waking hours in class or buried in the library. In 2006, I graduated with a master’s in social psychology. My master’s thesis examined social bias in the courtroom and was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of Pretrial Publicity and the Third Person Effect.” I liked to joke that I was trading the blue dress for blue stockings, and the degree provided new scaffolding to hang my life experiences on. It would also prove, so I hoped, to be a gateway to a more normal life.
In one promising job interview that took place during the run-up to the 2008 primary season, the conversation took an interesting turn. “So here’s the thing, Monica,” the interviewer said. “You’re clearly a bright young woman and affable, but for us—and probably any other organization that relies on grants and other government funding—it’s risky. We would first need a Letter of Indemnification from the Clintons. After all, there is a 25 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton will be the next president.” I gave a fake smile and said, “I understand.”
Another job interview, this one typical: walked into the stark, terminally cool reception area of a hip-yet-prestigious advertising agency in Los Angeles, my hometown. As always, I put on my best “I’m friendly, not a diva” smile. “Hi. Monica Lewinsky here to see So-and-So.”
I’ve had to become adept at handling any number of reactions in social situations and job interviews. I get it: it must be disconcerting to sit across from “That Woman.” Needless to say, I didn’t get the position.
I eventually came to realize that traditional employment might not be an option for me. I’ve managed to get by (barely, at times) with my own projects, usually with start-ups that I have participated in, or with loans from friends and family.
In another job interview I was asked, “If you were a brand, which brand would you be?” Let me tell you, when you’re Monica Lewinsky, that is one loaded question.
In September of 2010, the culmination of these experiences began to snap into a broader context for me. A phone conversation with my mother shifted the lens through which I viewed my world. We were discussing the tragic death of Tyler Clementi. Tyler, you will recall, was an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man. Days later, after being derided and humiliated on social media, he committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
My mom wept. Sobbing, she kept repeating over and over, “How his parents must feel … his poor parents.”
It was an unbearably tragic event, and while hearing of it brought me to tears, too, I couldn’t quite grasp why my mom was so distraught. And then it dawned on me: she was reliving 1998, when she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She was replaying those weeks when she stayed by my bed, night after night, because I, too, was suicidal. The shame, the scorn, and the fear that had been thrown at her daughter left her afraid that I would take my own life—a fear that I would be literally humiliated to death. (I have never actually attempted suicide, but I had strong suicidal temptations several times during the investigations and during one or two periods after.)
I would never be so presumptuous as to equate my own story with Tyler Clementi’s. After all, my public humiliation had been the result of my involvement with a world-renowned public figure—that is, a consequence of my own poor choices. But in that moment, when I felt the depths of my mother’s anguish, I wished I could have had a chance to have spoken to Tyler about how my love life, my sex life, my most private moments, my most sensitive secrets, had been broadcast around the globe. I wished I had been able to say to him that I knew a little of how it might have felt for him to be exposed before the world. And, as hard as it is to imagine surviving it, it is possible.
In the wake of Tyler’s tragedy, 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. The question became: How do I find and give a purpose to my past? It was my Prufrockian moment: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Or, in my case, the Clinton universe.
Sure, my boss took advantage of me, 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.
In February of this year, around the same time Senator Paul put me back into the unwanted spotlight, I became the “narcissistic loony toon,” the latest twist on Me as Archetype.
I hit the computer. Time for a little self-Google. (Oh, dear reader, please do not judge.) My heart sinks. There’s an explosion on Google News. I know what this means. Whatever day I’ve planned has been jettisoned. To leave the house—and risk a photo—only ensures that the story will stay alive.
The cameras have returned because of the headlines: a conservative Web site has gone poking around the University of Arkansas archive of one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends and admirers, Diane Blair, and has unearthed a cache of memos from the 1990s. In some of them, Blair, who died in 2000, quotes the former First Lady about her husband’s relationship with me. Though Hillary, according to Blair’s notes, claimed to find her husband’s “lapse” inexcusable, she praised him for trying to “manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon.’ ”
I field the usual calls from friends who lend moral support whenever these volcanic media stories erupt. They diffuse the tension with good-natured teasing: “So, are we changing your monogram to NLT?” I try to ignore the former First Lady’s long-buried comments. Given my experiences with Linda Tripp, I know better than anyone what it’s like to have a conversation with a girlfriend exposed and scrutinized, taken out of context. But, even so, it begins to gnaw at me. I realize that Hillary Clinton was—unlike me when Tripp was prying loose my innermost secrets and insecurities and recording them surreptitiously—fully aware of this documentation: she’s the one who, according to the memos, asked Blair to keep a record or diary of their discussions for archival purposes.
Yes, I get it. 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. And all too familiar: with every marital indiscretion that finds its way into the public sphere—many of which involve male politicians—it always seems like the woman conveniently takes the fall. Sure, the Anthony Weiners and Eliot Spitzers do what they need to do to look humiliated on cable news. They bow out of public life for a while, but they inevitably return, having put it all behind them. The women in these imbroglios return to lives that are not so easily repaired.
You might remember that just five days before the world had ever heard my name the F.B.I.—after my friend Linda Tripp approached Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s office with information about my affair with the president—entrapped me in a terrifying “sting” in the Pentagon City mall. At age 24, cornered in a hotel room on January 16, 1998, with mainly male interrogators taking orders from Starr, I was discouraged from contacting my attorney and threatened with 27 years in jail for filing an affidavit denying the affair with Clinton, among other alleged crimes. I was offered immunity from that threat if I agreed to place monitored calls and wear a wire in conversations with two of the president’s confidants and possibly the president himself. I refused. Confiding in Linda Tripp turned into an unintended betrayal. But this? The mother of all betrayals. That, I couldn’t do. Courageous or foolish, maybe, but narcissistic and loony?
These 16-year-old descriptions of me triggered memories of past anguish, particularly in the area of women lobbing derision at one another. So where, you might be wondering, were the feminists back then?
It’s a question that troubles me to this day.
I sorely wished for some sign of understanding from the feminist camp. Some good, old-fashioned, girl-on-girl support was much in need. None came. Given the issues at play—gender politics, sex in the workplace—you’d think they would have spoken up. They didn’t. I understood their dilemma: Bill Clinton had been a president “friendly” to women’s causes.
Oh, to have been at that cocktail party:
What you are also saying here is that the primary quality that would qualify a woman to have an intimate relationship with a powerful man is physical attractiveness. If that’s not setting the movement back, I don’t know what is.
Like many other Americans, I’ve been thinking about Hillary Clinton. What might happen, I’ve wondered, if she does run in 2016? And what if she wins—and then wins a second term?
So why speak now? Because it is time.
It also goes back to the personal and the political. I have lived many of the questions that have become central to our national discourse since 1998. How far should we allow the government into our bedrooms? How do we reconcile the right to privacy with the need to expose sexual indiscretion? How do we guard against an overzealous government demanding our private data and information? And, most important to me personally, how do we cope with the shame game as it’s played in the Internet Age? (My current goal is to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.)
So far, That Woman has never been able to escape the shadow of that first depiction. I was the Unstable Stalker (a phrase disseminated by the Clinton White House), the Dimwit Floozy, the Poor Innocent who didn’t know any better. 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. I became a social representation, a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.
Unlike the other parties involved, I was so young that I had no established identity to which I could return. I didn’t “let this define” me—I simply hadn’t had the life experience to establish my own identity in 1998. If you haven’t figured out who you are, it’s hard not to accept the horrible image of you created by others. (Thus, my compassion for young people who find themselves shamed on the Web.) Despite much self-searching and therapy and exploring of different paths, I remained “stuck” for far too many years.
No longer. It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress. And move forward.