NEWS'An Abuse of Power': Monica Lewinsky Reveals Whether She Loved Bill Clinton Decades After Explosive Affair
Monica Lewinsky shared whether she loved Bill Clinton nearly three decades after their affair scandal.
Monica Lewinsky got candid about how she once felt about former president Bill Clinton.
Nearly 30 years after their infamous affair, Lewinsky, now an activist and public speaker, revisited the topic on Elizabeth Day’s “How To Fail” podcast. During the chat, she reflected on her feelings in the past and what she’s come to realize now.
Monica Lewinsky said her affair with Bill Clinton felt like love at the time.
“It was 22 to 24-year-old young woman's love,” she told Day when asked if she had feelings for the former president during their tryst.
“I think there was some limerence there and all sorts of other things, but that's how I saw it then. I think it was also an abuse of power,” she added.
The activist spoke out about her feelings toward the ex-president in a new interview.
Back in 1995, Lewinsky, who was just 21 years old at the time, landed an unpaid internship at the White House under Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. A few months into the gig, she began a sexual relationship with Clinton — details that later surfaced through secretly recorded audiotapes made by Linda Tripp, per CNN.
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Later that same year, Lewinsky was hired into a paid position in the Office of Legislative Affairs, where she regularly delivered mail to the Oval Office.
Now, she’s pushing back on the idea that she was just some naive intern who got there by chance.
Monica Lewinsky defended her White House job, saying she earned it on merit.
“My very first job out of college was working in the White House. I don't think that that's the kind of trajectory that someone thinks then 10, 12 years later, that person's not going to be able to get hired,” she vented. “Then I worked in the Pentagon as well and travelled the world with my boss, who is the Pentagon spokesman, and we traveled with the Secretary of Defense.”
“I'm by no means a genius, by no means going to be the cream of the crop but I wasn't a bimbo. I wasn't a dumb bimbo,” she continued. “So I was portrayed to be, and that was a big struggle for me to deal with that.”
Monica Lewinsky also pushed back on being called a 'bimbo' by the media and public at the time.
Day responded, “And you were often portrayed as that by other women.”
Lewinsky agreed, saying, “Often by other women, but I think that that was a narrative that was crafted and put out by the White House, so I think that mantle was picked up by a lot of women.”
As many recall, Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton rocked the nation and led to his impeachment in December 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. After the media frenzy, Lewinsky spent years trying to share her side of the story.
“Just because I wasn’t on the news every night for 20 years in the same way that I was in 1998 doesn’t mean that this story ended. Ten years on, I still could not get a job. I couldn’t support myself,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.
