Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern who was once at the centre of one of the most infamous political scandals in American history, has said that former US President Bill Clinton should have resigned from the Oval Office when Congress voted to impeach him for lying about his affair with her. In an interview on the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, Ms Lewinsky explained why the 42nd US President should have stepped down from his position instead of throwing her “under the bus” after their affair became public in 1998.
Ms Lewinsky said that the “right way” for Mr Clinton to have handled the fallout from their affair when she was a 22-year-old intern would have been either “to resign” or to have found a way to not throw a young person “under the bus”.
“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. 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,” Ms Lewinsky said on “Call Her Daddy” podcast, hosted by Alex Cooper.
“And at the same time, I’m hearing myself say that, and it’s like, OK we’re also talking about the most powerful office in the world. I don’t want to be naive either,” Ms Lewinsky, 51, added.
Ms Lewinsky’s remarks came in response to Ms Cooper asking her to reflect on the 1990s scandal and how the press and the White House should have navigated the situation when it came to light. “It’s really complicated because you are talking about issues and situations where so many people are impacted,” she said.
She acknowledged that she “did make mistakes”, however, she called Bill Clinton’s errors “more reprehensible” than her own. Ms Lewinsky also said that her relationship with Mr Clinton was not “sexual assault” because it included “a level of consensuality”. But she went on to clarify that it was Mr Clinton’s “responsibility” to never “put her in that position” as the most powerful man in the country.
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Bill Clinton was 49 at the time of the scandal. He initially denied that he engaged in a sexual relationship with Ms Lewinsky. However, he later admitted it occurred and stayed in office.
Mr Clinton’s denial, Ms Lewinsky said, felt like “gaslighting … on a grand scale.”
“I think there was so much collateral damage for women of my generation to watch a young woman to be pilloried on a world stage – to be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for my everything,” she noted.
“I was lucky enough to hold onto a strand of my true self, but I lost my future,” Ms Lewinsky said. “I’m so grateful for how my life has changed in the last 10 years. … But that certainly was not a given,” she added.