Another job interview, this one typical: walked into the stark, terminally cool reception area of a hip-yet-prestigious advertising agency in Los Angeles, my hometown. As always, I put on my best “I’m friendly, not a diva” smile. “Hi. Monica Lewinsky here to see So-and-So.”
The twentysomething receptionist pushed her black-rimmed hipster frames up her nose. “Monica who?”
Before I could answer, another twentysomething, in skinny jeans, plaid shirt, and bow tie, rushed over and interrupted: “ Ms. Lewinsky.” Like a maître d’, he continued, “Pleasure to have you here. I’ll let So-and-So know you’ve arrived. Soy latte? Green tea? Filtered water?”
I found myself sitting at a small round table, face-to-face with So-and-So, the agency’s head of strategy and planning. We talked. She kept wincing. This was not going well. I tried to keep myself from getting flustered. Now she was not only wincing but also clearing her throat. Was that perspiration on her brow? It hit me: she was nervous, in full-tic mode.
I’ve had to become adept at handling any number of reactions in social situations and job interviews. I get it: it must be disconcerting to sit across from “That Woman.” Needless to say, I didn’t get the position.
I eventually came to realize that traditional employment might not be an option for me. I’ve managed to get by (barely, at times) with my own projects, usually with start-ups that I have participated in, or with loans from friends and family.
In another job interview I was asked, “If you were a brand, which brand would you be?” Let me tell you, when you’re Monica Lewinsky, that is one loaded question.
In September of 2010, the culmination of these experiences began to snap into a broader context for me. A phone conversation with my mother shifted the lens through which I viewed my world. We were discussing the tragic death of Tyler Clementi. Tyler, you will recall, was an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man. Days later, after being derided and humiliated on social media, he committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
My mom wept. Sobbing, she kept repeating over and over, “How his parents must feel … his poor parents.”
It was an unbearably tragic event, and while hearing of it brought me to tears, too, I couldn’t quite grasp why my mom was so distraught. And then it dawned on me: 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. (I have never actually attempted suicide, but I had strong suicidal temptations several times during the investigations and during one or two periods after.)
I would never be so presumptuous as to equate my own story with Tyler Clementi’s. After all, my public humiliation had been the result of my involvement with a world-renowned public figure—that is, a consequence of my own poor choices. But in that moment, when I felt the depths of my mother’s anguish, I wished I could have had a chance to have spoken to Tyler about how my love life, my sex life, my most private moments, my most sensitive secrets, had been broadcast around the globe. I wished I had been able to say to him that I knew a little of how it might have felt for him to be exposed before the world. And, as hard as it is to imagine surviving it, it is possible.
In the wake of Tyler’s tragedy, 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? It was my Prufrockian moment: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Or, in my case, the Clinton universe.
Despite a decade of self-imposed silence, I have been periodically resuscitated as part of the national conversation, almost always in connection with the Clintons. For instance, in January and February of this year, Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and a possible 2016 Republican presidential aspirant, managed to drag me into the pre-election muck. He fought back against the Democrats’ charges of a G.O.P. “war on women” by arguing that Bill Clinton had committed workplace “violence” and acted in a “predatory” manner against “a 20-year-old girl who was there from college.”
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.
So, trying to disappear has not kept me out of the fray. I am, for better or for worse, presumed to be a known quantity. Every day I am recognized. Every day. Sometimes a person will walk past me again and again, as if I wouldn’t notice. (Thankfully, 99.9 percent of the time when strangers do say something to me they are supportive and respectful.) Every day someone mentions me in a tweet or a blog post, and not altogether kindly. Every day, it seems, my name shows up in an op-ed column or a press clip or two—mentioned in passing in articles on subjects as disparate as millennials, Scandal, and French president François Hollande’s love life. Miley Cyrus references me in her twerking stage act, Eminem raps about me, and Beyoncé’s latest hit gives me a shout-out. Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant “Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,” not “Monica Lewinsky’d.”
With every man I date (yes, I date!), I go through some degree of 1998 whiplash. I need to be extremely circumspect about what it means to be “public” with someone. In the early years post-impeachment, I once left a front-row seat along the third-base line at a Yankees game when I learned that my date—a guy whose company I thoroughly enjoyed—was actually in another relationship. It was only a green-card marriage, but I freaked that we could be photographed together and someone might call the gossip rags. I’ve become adept at figuring out when men are interested in me for the wrong reason. Thankfully, those have been few and far between. But every man that has been special to me over the past 16 years has helped me find another piece of myself—the self that was shattered in 1998. And so, no matter the heartbreak, tears, or disenchantment, I’ll always be grateful to them.
In February of this year, around the same time Senator Paul put me back into the unwanted spotlight, I became the “narcissistic loony toon,” the latest twist on Me as Archetype.
A snapshot of a scenario I’ve grown all too accustomed to, even as I attempt to move on with my life: A shrill ring interrupts the rhythms of my day. The call—from the doorman of the apartment building where I’m staying in New York—leads me to an exasperated “What? Again?” They’ve reappeared: the paparazzi, like swallows, have returned to the sidewalk outside, pacing and circling and pacing some more.
I hit the computer. Time for a little self-Google. (Oh, dear reader, please do not judge.) My heart sinks. There’s an explosion on Google News. I know what this means. Whatever day I’ve planned has been jettisoned. To leave the house—and risk a photo—only ensures that the story will stay alive.
The cameras have returned because of the headlines: a conservative Web site has gone poking around the University of Arkansas archive of one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends and admirers, Diane Blair, and has unearthed a cache of memos from the 1990s. In some of them, Blair, who died in 2000, quotes the former First Lady about her husband’s relationship with me. Though Hillary, according to Blair’s notes, claimed to find her husband’s “lapse” inexcusable, she praised him for trying to “manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon.’ ”
My first thought, as I was getting up to speed: If that’s the worst thing she said, I should be so lucky. Mrs. Clinton, I read, had supposedly confided to Blair that, in part, she blamed herself for her husband’s affair (by being emotionally neglectful) and seemed to forgive him. Although she regarded Bill as having engaged in “gross inappropriate behavior,” the affair was, nonetheless, “consensual (was not a power relationship).”
