Monica Lewinsky believes she wouldn't have felt so alone 'had it all happened today'
In the midst of our cultural reckoning with the abuses of powerful men, Monica Lewinsky is revisiting her own story, 20 years later.
In a new essay for Vanity Fair, Lewinsky looks back at her relationship with President Bill Clinton through the lens of the #MeToo movement, and the 1998 impeachment trial that put her – and the intimate details of her personal life – in the spotlight.
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Back then, she writes, she felt isolated and abandoned "by key figures in the crisis." Now, as more women come out in support of one another, Lewinsky thinks her experience would have been different had the trial happened in 2018.
She writes:
Though she writes that she's "in awe" of the women working to "confront entrenched beliefs and institutions," Lewinsky is still unsure of her own story's place in the movement, and is still "unpacking" what happened to her.
As the #MeToo movement has led to bigger public conversations about consent and power, Lewinsky says she finds herself grappling with newfound – and "complicated" – realizations about her relationship with the president of the United States as an intern in his White House.
She references an earlier piece she'd written for Vanity Fair in which she was adamant that her relationship with Clinton was consensual. Now, she says she's "beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast," between herself and Clinton at the time.
She writes:
Today, as the MeToo movement cracks open our ideas about sex and power, Lewinsky writes that she feels less alone in her story.
There's so much more in Lewinsky's fascinating essay, including the moment she confronted the independent prosecutor who, in 1998, turned her life upside down. Read it in full on Vanity Fair.
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