Victimization narrative:
Monica Lewinsky was sitting in a Manhattan auditorium last month, watching teenage girls perform a play called “Slut.” Ms. Lewinsky was in blue jeans and a blazer, her hair pulled out of her face with a small clip. She was wiping away tears.
In the scene, a young woman was seated in an interrogation room. She had been asked to describe, repeatedly, what had happened on the night in question — when, she said, on their way to a party, a group of guy friends had pinned her down in a taxi and sexually assaulted her. She had reported them. Now everyone at school knew, everyone had chosen a side.
“My life has just completely fallen apart,” the girl said, her voice shaking. Her parents were in the next room. “Now I’m that girl.”
The play concluded, and Ms. Lewinsky fumbled through her purse for a tissue. A woman came and whisked her to the stage.
“Hi, I’m Monica Lewinsky,” she said, visibly nervous. “Some of you younger people might only know me from some rap lyrics.”
The crowd, made up largely of high school and college women, laughed. “Monica Lewinsky” is the title of a song by the rapper G-Eazy; her name is a reference in dozens of others: by Kanye, Beyoncé, Eminem, Jeezy. The list goes on.
The title of Ms. Lewinsky's 18-minute TED talk (and, perhaps, the line that best sums up her experience), which received a raucous standing ovation: “The Price of Shame.”Credit James Duncan Davidson/TED
“Thank you for coming,” Ms. Lewinsky continued, “and in doing so, standing up against the sexual scapegoating of women and girls.”
She walked back to her seat after speaking, and a woman behind her leaned forward. “I saw you, but I didn’t realize I was sitting next to Monica Lewinsky,” she said.
A line of girls soon approached. “Thank you for being here,” said a teenager in a striped shirt and gold hoop earrings. She asked if she could take a photo, and Ms. Lewinsky winced a little, then politely told her no. “I totally understand,” the girl said.
When she was asked later about her reaction to the play, Ms. Lewinsky said: “It’s really inspiring to hear people bring awareness to this issue. That scene in the interrogation room was hard to watch. One of the things I’ve learned about trauma is that when you find yourself retriggered, it’s helpful to recognize when things are different.”
A LOT IS DIFFERENT for Monica Lewinsky these days, starting with the fact that, until last year, she had hardly appeared publicly for a decade. Now 41, the former White House intern once famously dismissed by the president as “that woman” holds a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics.
She splits time between New York and Los Angeles, where she grew up, and London, and said it’s been hard to find work.
Mostly she has embraced a quiet existence: doing meditation and therapy, volunteering, spending time with friends.
But the quiet ended last May, when she wrote an essay for Vanity Fair about the aftermath of her affair with Bill Clinton — the story a result of a years-long relationship with the magazine and its editor, Graydon Carter. (She was first photographed in its pages by Herb Ritts in 1998.)
In the essay, which was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award, she declared that the time had come to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and “give a purpose to my past.”
That new purpose, she wrote, was twofold: it was about reclaiming her own story — one that had seemed to metastasize — but also to help others who had been similarly humiliated. “What this will cost me,” she wrote, “I will soon find out.”
It hasn’t appeared to cost her, at least not yet. In fact, the opposite has occurred.
Over the last six months, she has made appearances at a benefit hosted by the Norman Mailer Center (she and Mr. Mailer had been friends), at a New York Fashion Week dinner presentation for the designer Rachel Comey, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and as her friend Alan Cumming’s date at an after-party for the Golden Globes. (Mr. Cumming has known her since the 1990s.)
Recently, she took part in an anti-bullying workshop at the Horace Mann School, and joined a feminist networking group. (“I consider myself a feminist with a lowercase ‘f,’ ” she told me. “I believe in equality. But I think I’m drawn to the issues more than the movement.”)
Perhaps most interestingly, in October, onstage at a Forbes conference, she spoke out for the first time about the digital harassment (or cyberbullying) that has affected everyone from female bloggers to Jennifer Lawrence to ... her: “I lost my reputation. I was publicly identified as someone I didn’t recognize. And I lost my sense of self,” she told the crowd.
She just took that declaration one step further on the main stage at TED in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Thursday, where she issued a biting cultural critique about humiliation as commodity. The title of her 18-minute talk (and, perhaps, the line that best sums up her experience), which received a raucous standing ovation: “The Price of Shame.”
THIS IS NOT Monica Lewinsky’s first attempt at reinvention. But it’s also not the Monica of more than a decade ago: the one who created a handbag line and tried her hand at reality TV.
This iteration is a bundle of contradictions: warm yet cautious. Open yet guarded. Strong but fragile.
She is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control.
At 41, she doesn’t have many of the things that a person her age may want: a permanent residence, an obvious source of income (she won’t comment on her finances), a clear career path.
She is also very, very nervous. She is worried about being taken advantage of, worried her words will be misconstrued, worried reporters will rehash the past.
She is prepared, almost always, for doomsday: the snippet of a quote that might be taken out of context; questions about the Clintons, whom she declines to discuss. “She was burned ... in myriad ways,” said her editor at Vanity Fair, David Friend.
Ms. Lewinsky wouldn’t call this a reinvention, though. This, she says, is simply the Monica who in spite of the headlines, in spite of the incessant paparazzi-style coverage, “was seen by many, but truly known by few,” as she put it on the TED stage.
“This is me,” she told me. “This is a kind of evolution of me.”
I had approached her after the Vanity Fair essay in part because I was intrigued, but also because I had a tinge of guilt. I had come of age in the Lewinsky era; my first job out of college was at Newsweek, where the story of the reporter who had uncovered the affair — then saw his story leaked to the Drudge Report — was legend.
I distinctly remember my high school self, wide-eyed, poring over the soft-core Starr report with friends.
None of us had the maturity to understand the complexities, or power dynamics, of the president’s affair with a young intern. When I was 16, one dominating image of Monica Lewinsky seemed to overshadow all others: slut. Of course, that 22-year-old intern was only a few years older than me.
And so I emailed her. I told her I was interested in her effort to re-emerge, and had been particularly fascinated by the reaction to it, as if there were a kind of public reckoning underway. Feminists who had stayed silent on the first go-round were suddenly defending her, using terms like “slut-shaming” and “media gender bias” to do it.
The late-night host David Letterman was on air expressing remorse over how he had mocked her, asking, in a recent interview with Barbara Walters, “With some perspective, do you realize this is a sad human situation?” Bill Maher said of reading Ms. Lewinsky’s piece in Vanity Fair, “I gotta tell you, I literally felt guilty.”
Saffron Domini Burrows, Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming and Ms. Lewinsky at Mr. Cumming's book launch in October.Credit Brad Barket/Getty Images for Dey Street Books
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And young women were embracing her: rushing up to her after public events, messaging her on social media, asking if they could take selfies. (“Meeting her felt like meeting a pop culture icon,” said Amari Leigh, 17, a cast member in the “Slut” play. “It’s crazy to think that one thing she did, when she was not that much older than I am now, impacted her whole life.”)
“However you felt about the actual event, the way it played out was pretty grotesque,” said Rebecca Traister, a senior editor at The New Republic who was just out of college when the Clinton scandal broke and wrote about it later.
Ms. Traister said she was taken aback when she reread her own article: “Whether it’s guilt, or sophistication, or thinking a little harder about sexual power dynamics, I think people have started to think: ‘Oh right, she probably does have a right to tell her story. And that’s a good thing.’ ”
This time, Ms. Lewinsky appears determined to tell it on her terms. She has a P.R. agent screening requests and approaches media as one may expect: with the caution of a woman who has been raked over the coals.
She has reason to. Just weeks ago, a short interview with the artist Nelson Shanks was published online. In a question about which portrait subject he had found most difficult to capture, Mr. Shanks noted that his painting of Bill Clinton, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, had a shadow as a metaphor for Ms. Lewinsky — created from the shadow of an actual blue dress he had placed on a mannequin. The piece posted on a Sunday. By the next morning, it was everywhere.
Ms. Lewinsky woke up to a flooded inbox and panicked.
She was really, really sorry, she told me, but she simply couldn’t move forward with an article.
We exchanged emails and calls. The article was back on, no it wasn’t, yes it was.
You want to know what it’s like to live in Monica Lewinsky’s world? This is it.
I MET MS. LEWINSKY the following Tuesday at her apartment.
She was rehearsing in front of a small metal music stand. Her speech coach, Pippa Bateman, was on Skype from Britain.
I quietly sat on the couch and noted the details in the room: a bookshelf blocked off the bedroom area; on it, photos of friends and family, Monica as a child. On an end table were roses, crystals and a lit candle.
She handed me a script. “It’s changed a bit, so you can follow along,” she said. (By the time she appeared onstage at TED, in front of a pacpacked room, she was on Version 24 of her speech.) On the back, she had scribbled a reminder: “Push in arm muscles, engage back and neck.”
She was working through the middle of the speech, where she would describe her questioning by investigators in a room not unlike the one we saw portrayed in “Slut.” It was 1998, and she had been required to authenticate the phone calls recorded by her former friend Linda Tripp. They would later be released to Congress.
She glanced at the script, then looked forward.
“Scared and mortified, I listen,” she said.
“Listen as I prattle on …
“Listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self, being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth …
“Listen, deeply, deeply ashamed to the worst version of myself.” She paused. “A self I don’t even recognize.”
“How did that feel?” Ms. Bateman asked. “You’ve got to own it.”
Ms. Lewinsky doesn’t have a speechwriter; she wrote the speech herself. But she has plenty of advisers: journalists, editors, new friends, old friends, her lawyer, her publicist, her family. Which is great, if everyone is in agreement. Except that no one is ever in agreement.
The major disagreement was over the opening: a joke about a man 14 years her junior, who hit on Ms. Lewinsky after she spoke at Forbes.
“What was his unsuccessful pickup line?” she would ask rhetorically. “He could make me feel 22 again. Later that night, I realized: I’m probably the only person over 40 who would not like to be 22 again.”
It was funny, yes (even hysterical, judging by the reaction at TED). But did the joke sexualize her off the bat? For a woman ingrained in the public psyche as a “tart, slut, whore, bimbo,” as Ms. Lewinsky put it onstage, should she try to avoid the innuendo?
Maybe she should cut that part and go straight to the next line, somebody suggested: a question for the audience.
“Can I see a show of hands,” she would ask, “of anyone who didn’t make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?”
Ultimately, she stuck with the joke. (The question would stay, too.)
She performed that opening later that day in a practice session downtown, then again a few days later in front of a large gathering of friends, over wine and cheese. She would practice the speech walking down the street, running errands, on a flight from Amsterdam to Oslo. As she joked on Twitter: “If you see me walking down the streets of nyc muttering to myself, don’t worry ... just practicing my TED Talk.”
TED approached Ms. Lewinsky about speaking at the conference, whose theme this year is “Truth and Dare,” after watching her Forbes speech. Kelly Stoetzel, TED’s content director, said, “Part of what I think makes this story interesting is that people will get to see all the dimensions of Monica, not just the person who was reported on 17 years ago.”
The idea had been marinating for years. Ms. Lewinsky often thought about the toll that shame had taken on her own life; in graduate school, she studied the impact of trauma on identity.
Then Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman, killed himself after being recorded by his college roommate being intimate with a man. It was 2010, and Ms. Lewinsky’s mother was beside herself, “gutted with pain,” as Ms. Lewinsky said onstage, “in a way I couldn’t quite understand.”
Eventually, she said she realized: To her mother, Mr. Clementi represented her. “She was reliving 1998,” she said, looking out over the crowd. “Reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night. Reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open.”
She paused, becoming emotional. “And reliving a time both my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death.”
“It was easy to forget,” she said, “that ‘That Woman’ was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken.”
She doesn’t like to talk much about the past, but she will talk about residuals of her trauma: having to leave the movie theater every time a cop on a screen flashed a badge (a flashback to being ambushed by federal agents in the food court of the Pentagon shopping mall); the studying and reading about it, as a way to ease it.
“I had to do a lot of healing work and rehabilitation to get to what transpired over the course of the past year,” she said. “Anybody who has gone through any kind of trauma knows it doesn’t just go away with a snap of the fingers. It lives as an echo in your life. But over time the echo becomes softer and softer.”
And yet this isn’t simply about her story, she said. This was about using it to help others. As she put it, shame and humiliation have become a kind of “commodity” in our culture — with websites that thrive on it, industries created out of it, and people who get paid to clean up the mess.
What happened to compassion? she asked up on stage. “What we need,” she said, “is a cultural revolution.”
THE WAY MS. LEWINSKY tells it, she was “Patient Zero” for the type of Internet shaming we now see regularly. Hers wasn’t the first case ever, but it was the first of its magnitude. Which meant that, virtually overnight, she went from being a private citizen to, as she put it, “a publicly humiliated one.”
“She couldn’t go to a restaurant and order a bowl of soup — literally — without it being reported the next day,” said Barbara Walters, who said her interview with Ms. Lewinsky was one of the most watched segments in television history.
The story was the perfect combination of politics and sex. “It was like reading a really wonderful dirty book,” Ms. Walters said, “except it was her story and her mother’s story and her aunt’s story.”
It was before the days of the Internet sex tape, but barely: Princess Diana had been photographed with a hidden camera while working out at the gym; Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape was stolen from their home and bootlegged out of car trunks.
“It was at the tip of the spear of this invasive culture,” said Mr. Friend, who is working on a book about the 1990s.
And so it went from there. Ms. Lewinsky was quickly cast by the media as a “little tart,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” She was described by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as “ditsy” and “predatory.”
And other women — self-proclaimed feminists — piled on. “My dental hygienist pointed out she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong. Betty Friedan dismissed her as “some little twerp.”
“It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Gloria Steinem wrote me in an email, noting that in Ms. Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” “I’m grateful to [her],” Ms. Steinem said, “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”
Had the Lewinsky story unfolded today, certainly the digital reality of it would have been worse (or at least more pungent). “They would have dug up her private photos,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.” But there would have also been avenues to push back: more outlets, more varied voices, probably even a #IStandWithMonica hashtag.
“If it happened today, I think the consensus that she deserved to be thrown under the bus would be considerably weaker,” said Clay Shirky, a journalism professor at N.Y.U. who studies Internet culture. “And the key thing that’s changed is not information — there were credible press reports about Cosby for years, just as Clinton’s denial was ridiculous on its face — but the ability to coordinate reaction.”
In that respect, Ms. Lewinsky may finally be in a unique position to tell her story. “I don’t know … exactly how you combat cyberbullying,” Ms. Walters said. “But at least she’s fighting back. … I do think it’s about time we gave her a chance.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE TED, Ms. Lewinsky began a ritual. She lit candles. She set up a table of crystals. She debated which necklace to wear, then ordered dinner and tea.
She would be in bed by 9:30 and up at 5 a.m.; Amy Cuddy, the Harvard researcher whose TED talk on body language clocked nearly 25 million views, was meeting her in the morning. They would power-pose together.
Ms. Lewinsky had a friend from Los Angeles there with her, and Ms. Cuddy stopped by to wish her luck. The two had never met in person.
“If you had told me a year ago I was going to be delivering a TED talk, I would have laughed in your face,” Ms. Lewinsky said, seated on the carpet.
She looked at her friend.
“A year ago. …” she choked up. “Well, you were there. It was so, so hard. There were times I thought I wouldn’t make it.”
“I’m just so grateful,” she said. “I’m at once grateful and surprised.”
Earlier, I had asked Ms. Lewinsky what she hoped to accomplish with a platform like TED. She asked if I had read the David Foster Wallace book “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” In it, there is a chapter about suffering, and the story of a girl who has survived abuse.
What the young woman endures is horrific, said Ms. Lewinsky, but by going through it, she learns something about herself: that she can survive.
“That’s part of what I thought I could contribute,” she said. “That in someone else’s darkest moment, lodged in their subconscious might be the knowledge that there was someone else who was, at one point in time, the most humiliated person in the world. And that she survived it.”
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