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After her essay was published in Vanity Fair last week, Monica Lewinsky can now be seen on camera for the first time in more than a decade.
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Monica Lewinsky is back in the news, and not in a good way. She is being lambasted for suddenly coming out with a new interview, after years of silence, and her new business venture is not getting such a warm welcome, either.
This week, the now 40-year old Lewinsky who became famous for her affair in the 1990s with then US President Bill Clinton (if you happened to be on a different planet at the time), gave her first televised interview since 2003 to the National Geographic Channel. It was part of that network’s two-part special, The 90s: The Last Great Decade?, and was actually filmed a year ago.
In it, she professes “to be called stupid, and a slut, and a bimbo, and ditzy, and to be taken out of context, it was excruciating, ” describing how she was portrayed by the American public.
“That was one of the worst days of my life. I was a virgin to humiliation of that level, until that day, ” she said of the day that special prosecutor Ken Starr released his report against Clinton in 1998. “To have my narrative ripped from me, and turned into the Starr Report, and things that were turned over or things they delved out of my computer that I thought were deleted. I mean, it was just violation after violation.”
Criticizing the American media for how it handled the coverage, she added, “To be in the vortex of this media maelstrom was quite alarming, and frightening. And confusing. I think a lot, too, had to do with the fact that I was a woman.”
Lewisnky is now being mocked for her declaration that she plans to reinvent herself as a self-help guru for women who are publicly humiliated. She is also hoping to get work on the lecture circuit.
That idea has been excoriated by experts who have said that she has no chance of getting any such work, seeing as Lewinsky has no major accomplishments to her credit. Some pointed out that Lewinsky has done nothing of note since she was involved in America’s most famous sex scandal in history.
Some have been almost as vicious to Lewinsky as were many at the height of the Clinton impeachment. One writer referred to her as a former beret-wearing, single, unemployed 40 year old woman with no marketable skills.
The former White House intern first resurfaced last month, when she wrote an essay for Vanity Fair magazine. In it she famously said, “It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.”
Lewinsky then proceeded on an extended session of self-pity, bemoaning that fact that her contemporaries had all moved on with their lives and started families, while she, for some reason, could not.
She also had the audacity to compare what happened to her to the plight of an 18 year old homosexual student at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, who committed suicide a few years ago after his roommate filmed him–without his knowledge–having gay sex, and posted the film on the Internet.
