Monica Lewinsky Once Dressed Up as Herself for a ’90s Halloween Party
Monica Lewinsky just told John Oliver about one of the most badass, IDGAF moves history has ever seen undertaken by a victim of public shaming: She once dressed up as herself for Halloween, black beret and all. Lewinsky revealed the anecdote during an interview with Oliver on Last Week Tonight in which she spoke at length about how online outrage culture hearkens back to the sexist media spectacle that put her in society’s shaming crosshairs for decades.
If you’ve paid attention to Lewinsky’s writing and speaking over the last few years on the subject of public shaming, Halloween has long been a particularly painful source of humiliation for her, dating back to the fallout from her affair with President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. An army of Monica costumes popped up then and lingered even into the 2000s, which not only dredged up the incident yearly for Lewinsky but also made light of events that totally changed the course of her young adulthood (Lewinsky was 22 at the time of the affair). “One of the many things I never thought I’d grow up to be was a Halloween costume,” she wrote in Vanity Fair in 2015. She described going to see the film Made of Honor and being horrified at an opening scene in which Patrick Dempsey, dressed as Bill Clinton, “mingles at a Halloween party—with three Monica Lewinskys—all clad in blue dresses and berets, holding cigars. (Cringe Factor: 10.)”
The beret in particular represents a lot of what Lewinsky went through as the subject of public ridicule—not only was it an unfortunately memorable fashion choice enshrined forever, but Lewinsky was slut-shamed for her relationship with Clinton despite his (one could certainly argue) potentially greater culpability as the older party (who also happened to be the leader of the free world at the time). Lewinsky told Oliver that the fact that the scandal was named after her and not Clinton was evidence of the rampant sexism that plagued the media coverage of the event. “Bill Clinton didn’t have to change his name, nobody’s ever asked him did he think he should change his name,” she said.
How did Lewinsky get through it, and how was she eventually able to laugh about the whole thing after all these years? “I don’t really know,” she told Oliver, citing the support of family and friends. But she did say that at the aforementioned Halloween party, in which friends were celebrating the ’90s, she wore a black beret “for the first time in 18 years” to attend in the most ’90s costume she could think of: herself. The most baller way to stick it to the haters, it seems, might be to show them that you have the last laugh—and clearly the best Monica Lewinsky costume. But she draws the line at the black beret, making reference to the infamous “stained dress” that male late-night TV hosts in particular got plenty of mileage out of during the height of her shaming. “Beret things I can laugh at, other item-of-clothing jokes not as much.” Touché, Monica.
