Monica Lewinsky has penned a new tell-all about her affair with President Bill Clinton in which she describes how his powerful political machine ruthlessly made her a “scapegoat” to save his presidency.
Lewinsky, 40, says she decided to tell her story now because of the suicide of Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who jumped from the George Washington Bridge in September 2010 after he was secretly caught on a Webcam kissing another man in his dorm room.
Clementi’s suicide, she wrote, made her mother, Marcia Lewis, frantic because it dredged up memories of her fears for her own daughter after the scandal broke.
“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 wrote.
The former White House intern — dubbed the “portly pepperpot” for her full figure and undisguised lust for the married president — said she never tried to kill herself but had suicidal thoughts as the seamy details of their tawdry tryst emerged.
“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 wrote.
An excerpt of the article appeared Tuesday on the Web site of Vanity Fair magazine, which will publish Lewinsky’s full story May 13. Additional quotes came from a press release about her story.
Lewinsky admits the timing of her tell-all could prove awkward for the Clintons — with Hillary mulling a 2016 presidential run while facing renewed questions over her role in the Benghazi bloodbath.
But she said she’d remained silent during previous Clinton campaigns and decided now was the time to speak out.
“I remained virtually reclusive, despite being inundated with press requests. I put off announcing several media projects in 2012 until after the election. (They were subsequently canceled — and, no, I wasn’t offered $12 million for a salacious tell-all book, contrary to press reports.)
“And recently I’ve found myself gun-shy yet again, fearful of ‘becoming an issue’ should she decide to ramp up her campaign. But should I put my life on hold for another 8 to 10 years?” she wrote.
Lewinsky also brought up the files of Hillary Clinton’s close pal, Diane Blair, in which the first lady called Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” and in part blamed herself for Bubba’s philandering.
“Yes, I get it. Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress. She may have faulted her husband for being inappropriate, but I find her impulse to blame the Woman — not only me, but herself — troubling. Courageous or foolish, maybe, but narcissistic and loony?” she wrote.
“If that’s the worst thing she said, I should be so lucky,” Lewinsky wrote.
Lewinsky — who once boasted to a pal that she was bringing her “presidential kneepads” to the White House — wrote that her Oval Office affair with the Horndog in Chief was consensual.
“Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position,” Lewinsky wrote.
“The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”
She also whines about how the Internet magnified the story after it broke in 1998 in a way that would not have been possible just years earlier.
“Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet,” she wrote, adding that she wants “to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.”
She also said her decade-long silence fueled suspicions that she’d had been paid off to keep her yap shut.
“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,” she wrote.
Instead, she says, it’s all about her deciding that the time was ripe to revisit the scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment and almost destroyed his presidency.
“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” she says about her trademark topper and the infamous dress that was found to be stained by the president’s semen.
The dress came up in a suggestion she had for Beyoncé, who alluded to the affair on her single “Partition,” from her new album.
“Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,’ not ‘Monica Lewinsky’d,” Lewinsky cracked.
“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),” Lewinsky wrote.
The scandal, she says, ruined her chance at a normal career and life.
“I turned down [job] offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do,” she wrote.
After getting her master’s degree in social psychology at the London School of Economics, she bounced around Los Angeles, New York and Portland, Ore., looking for work.
“Because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history,’” she wrote, “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.”
Lewinsky wrote that people recognize her on the street every day and that her name is frequently in the media.
She also adds in a girlish style that she does regret the whole thing.
“I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”
