Monica Lewinsky Is a Bully
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Monica Lewinsky can be mean. Well, at least to herself. You probably are too. That’s why the subject of her latest campaign against harassment and shaming is self-bullying, or that familiar phenomenon when the inner monologue in your head turns vicious. With her latest PSA, launching today, Monica is taking aim at what she calls “the harshest bully that many of us know—ourselves.” The message? Life is hard enough without constantly brutalizing yourself.
Few know this as well as Monica, who became patient zero for bullying and harassment in the early days of the internet, after details of her relationship with former president Bill Clinton became tabloid news. Monica tells Cosmopolitan that, at the time, she had lower self-esteem, and it was hard not to internalize the vile, misogynist pile-on she was subjected to when she was only in her 20s.
But she’s spent the past 25 years learning to be nicer to herself, and in the past decade, she’s become perhaps the highest-profile advocate against bullying—physical, emotional, online, and otherwise. And now, with the new Stand Up to Yourself campaign, she’s inviting people to think about the way they talk to themselves in their own minds. “We’re saying loud and clear: Self-bullying is still bullying, and if you wouldn’t say it to someone else, don’t say it to yourself,” she says.
Ahead of the campaign, Cosmopolitan talked to Monica about her painful experiences with self-bullying, how the world of AI and deepfakes would’ve made things worse for her in the ’90s, and why change doesn’t always happen as fast as we would like.
When you were experiencing bullying and harassment in the ’90s and early 2000s, how did the way others were speaking about you translate into negative self-talk coming from within you?
I went into 1998 with not the best self-esteem. Negative self-talk was certainly part of that. For me, what was so damaging was having the rest of the world reflecting—in a very loud, very public, and very permanent way—the worst things you think about yourself or fear could be true about yourself.
More recently, you took back the harsh words other people called you in a campaign. You even changed your IG handle to “Monica Chunky Slut Stalker That Woman Lewinsky.” That kind of reclamation is powerful, but what did you do to combat self-bullying?
I’ve spent the last 25 years working on reclaiming myself. About ten years ago, I took a seminar anonymously, and they put us into groups of three. We had to write down, analog-style on a pad, all the things the negative voice in our head says to us. I found it very easy, and wrote down page after page. When we were done, they had us read our list out loud to the other two people in our group. What was once an easy assignment became excruciatingly painful. To hear myself saying these things that are so easy to think in my head—and realizing I would never be that cruel to someone else—that gave me a level of understanding of the impact that our negative words can have. They’re literally poisonous thoughts.
How do you think the emergence of generative AI and deepfakes has made bullying more complicated? We’ve basically created a nightmare scenario where videos can be manipulated and ricochet around the internet in a matter of seconds. Do you worry this exacerbates online abuse and all of its terrible effects?
Absolutely. This is something I’ve been worried about. I’m concerned we haven’t focused enough on ensuring the protection of young people—and all people, really. Women, marginalized groups, the LGBTQ+ community—they’re all severely impacted by online bullying. And how that can happen with AI is terrifying.
Of course, there’s a beauty and a beast to new technology. There are ways we can improve apps and tools to help people who are suffering. We need to ask: Are we able to train AI to be more empathetic and more helpful? For example, I love this affirmations app called I Am. I imagine that AI could help target the messages I am receiving.
Have you ever reflected on what it would have been like if these AI technologies had existed back when you went through that ordeal in the ’90s?
The only tiny silver lining would have been that maybe, I would have had an understanding that these negative messages are not from real people but bots. But, by and large, artificial intelligence would have made an even bigger tsunami. It would have made it harder to survive. I’m glad it wasn’t around. And I don’t even want to think about what the deepfakes would have looked like.
In the last decade, we’ve reckoned a lot with the misogyny-tinged humiliation that we subjected women to in the 1990s and 2000s. But it keeps on happening, whether we’re talking about Amber Heard or Megan Thee Stallion or E. Jean Carroll. Why can’t we apply that critical lens to bullying and shaming in the present? Why is this work so hard, and bullying so persistent?
We all wish we lived in a world where, once we recognized something and had a quote-unquote-reckoning, that it changed. I think in years to come, we’ll look back on this period and be able to point to small shifts that might not have been the big gains we would have hoped for. But I think the shifts will still be there. I hope more people will stand up for someone faster than they would have in the past. The ability for a woman who’s been publicly shamed to get her career back on track—maybe that happens slightly faster than it used to.
But it’s frustrating….I constantly complain in therapy—why won’t this go away; why won’t things change faster? Change doesn’t always happen as fast as we hope. And when we’re living through the soup of change, the process of it, it becomes hard to stay hopeful. And we can end up with this culture of internalized misogyny.
Internalized misogyny is also part of our negative self-talk, right?
Many of us don’t know how impacted we are by what we see happen to other people. It’s hard to know how much Gen X women around my age were impacted by what they saw happen to me: their own feelings of self worth, their own feelings about their sexuality, their own concerns about what they were doing in relationships, or how they were in the workplace. There was this feeling of: If everyone is criticizing this woman and I have those traits, I’m also being criticized.
The CDC released a survey from earlier this year that found teenage girls are experiencing unprecedented levels of sadness and hopelessness, with 30% saying they’ve seriously considered dying by suicide. Why do you think teen girls are struggling with their mental health so much now? Does the way they speak to themselves have something to do with it?
The CDC also said in 2021 that the rates of suicide were so high—it was about 1 death every 11 minutes.
The numbers with young women and young people in general are staggering. It’s due to a combination of things. A filter on Instagram is nothing more than a pronouncement of: I don’t think I look okay without this. Young people are constantly seeing how much better someone else’s life might be than theirs. Young women are also experiencing bullying and harassment online and, when you add in the last several years with the pandemic—bullying didn’t stop even though the world outside people’s homes did.
Last month, Elon Musk said he was going to remove the block feature from X (Twitter) and you spoke out, saying it’s critical to have the feature to keep people who are being bullied safe. Have you used the block feature? How can it help?
I am a huge proponent of blocking. It’s a very empowering tool. With the concept of stopping someone from saying something, you step into a big First Amendment discussion. But I like the idea that I don’t have to listen to something. You should have a right in a public sphere to protect yourself. I don’t think it’s fair to say: Just buck up. Don’t pay attention or don’t let it bother you. When we don’t have the tools to protect ourselves online, it makes us not want to be there, and then we lose out on an opportunity to have our voices heard. So just block them!
You’ve been talking publicly and trying to find solutions to public shaming and bullying since 2014. How do you measure success and progress here? What keeps you going?
One wishes that you could turn around and say, “Because we did this, X, Y and Z are now infinitely better.” In reality, we find some things are getting better, but we also find there’s a lot more negativity happening out in the world. All we can do is keep chipping away. Even if it doesn’t seem like the work is as impactful as we might hope, we also don’t know how far back we might be pushed without it.
One win: Teachers show our PSAs in their classes for Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. One year, we heard that at the end of the school year, teachers gave a survey asking, “What was the most memorable thing they learned?” Kids mentioned the PSA. It was an extraordinary moment of impact. Those experiences keep propelling you forward when you don’t have an easy solution to a problem.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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