Monica Lewinsky believes former President Bill Clinton should have resigned after their affair came to light, the one-time White House intern revealed in a new interview.
During an appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy, host Alex Cooper asked Lewinsky, who over the past decade has emerged as a staunch advocate for victims of bullying and abuse, how she thought the White House should have handled things when the news broke.
“I think the right way to handle a situation like that would’ve been to probably say it was, you know, nobody’s business. And to resign,” she said during an appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy. “Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who is just starting out under the bus.”
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During their conversation, Lewinsky described a “dark decade” during which she struggled to get a job thanks to the infamy of her 18-month affair with Clinton, which began in 1995, when she was a 22-year-old intern. He was 49. In January 1998, Clinton famously denied being involved with her, eventually leading to his impeachment in the House of Representatives.
Lewinsky had to think for a minute about how she believed the White House should have handled the scandal. In the nearly 30 years since, nobody had ever asked her, she told Cooper.
“I’m hearing myself say that [he should have resigned], and it’s like, ‘OK, but we’re also talking about the most powerful office in the world, you know? So, I just don’t want to be naïve either,” she said.
After the scandal, Clinton publicly apologized to Lewinsky, but he maintained in 2018 that he would not have resigned even if the affair had happened during the #MeToo era. Lewinsky told Cooper that while she believed there was a level of consent in their relationship, because of the power differential, she “never should have been in that f---ing position.”
She also admitted the fallout was “complicated” because so many people were affected.
“There was damage no matter what. I think there was so much collateral damage for women of my generation to watch a young woman be pilloried on the world stage,” she said. “To be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for anything.”
Earlier in the conversation, Lewinsky had described feeling “gaslighted” by the White House. The media had been sympathetic to her for about a week, until the “White House got in gear,” she said.
“I was very quickly painted as a stalker, or mentally unstable, a bimbo, both the pursuer and not attractive enough to be pursued,” she said. “There was a creation of a version of me that I didn’t recognize and my family didn’t recognize.”
Gaslighting wasn’t the administration’s goal, she said, but rather the result of them trying to stay in power and avoid legal liability. Asked if she’d ever considered changing her name to avoid the infamy it brought, Lewinsky said there was “definitely a period of time that I contemplated it.”
Ultimately, though, she concluded it wasn’t practical—or what she wanted.
“I came to feel very strongly that I didn’t want to change my name,” she said. “Why should I have to change my name?”
After all, she pointed out, nobody asked Bill Clinton if he thought about changing his name to cope with the humiliation.
