by Vanity Fair
Monica Lewinsky writes in Vanity Fair for the first
time about her affair with President Clinton: “It’s time to burn the beret and
bury the blue dress.” She also says: “I, myself, deeply regret what happened
between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply.
Regret. What. Happened.”
After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in
fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons
must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can
assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says
it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am
determined to have a different ending to my story. 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.)”
Clearing the Air
Job Hunting
After the scandal, writes Lewinsky, “I turned down
offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t
feel like the right thing to do.” After moving between London (where she got
her master’s degree in social psychology at the London School of Economics),
Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Oregon, she interviewed for numerous jobs
in communications and branding with an emphasis on charity campaigns, but,
“because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history,’”
she writes, “I was never ‘quite right’ for the position. In some cases, I was
right for all the wrong reasons, as in ‘Of course, your job would require you
to attend our events.’ And, of course, these would be events at which press
would be in attendance.”
Correcting the Record
Lewinsky writes that she is still recognized every
day, and her name shows up daily in press clips and pop-culture references. She
admits that she used to refer to Maureen Dowd as “Moremean Dowdy,” but “today,
I’d meet her for a drink.” And she requests one correction of Beyoncé,
regarding the lyrics to her recent hit “Partition”: “Thanks, Beyoncé, but if
we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,’ not ‘Monica
Lewinsky’d.’”
Lewinsky responds to reports made public in
February that Hillary Clinton, during the 1990s, had characterized her as a
“narcissistic loony toon” in correspondence with close friend Diane Blair. “My
first thought,” Lewinsky writes, “as I was getting up to speed: If that’s the
worst thing she said, I should be so lucky. 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.
Although she regarded Bill as having engaged in ‘gross inappropriate behavior,’
the affair was, nonetheless, ‘consensual (was not a power relationship).’”
Why She’s Going Public
When Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old Rutgers
freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man, committed
suicide in September 2010, Lewinsky writes, she was brought to tears, but her
mother was especially distraught: “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.” Lewinsky
clarifies that she has never actually attempted suicide, but had strong
suicidal temptations several times during the investigations and during one or
two periods after.
Lewinsky writes that following Clementi’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?”
She also says that, when news of her affair with Clinton broke in 1998, not
only was she arguably the most humiliated person in the world, but, “thanks to
the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global
humiliation was driven by the Internet.” Her current goal, she says, “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.”
The full story is available May 8 in the digital editions; subscribe now for access. The magazine will be on national newsstands and available in an audio edition on May 13.
No comments:
Post a Comment