Monica Lewinsky

Monica Lewinsky on her U.S. Government ID

Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973 in San Francisco) is an American woman with whom former United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an affair while Lewinsky worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996. Its repercussions in the Impeachment of Bill Clinton and the surrounding scandals of 1997-99 became known as the Lewinsky scandal, or "Monicagate." The scandal severely affected Clinton's second term and gave Lewinsky significant notoriety.

Early life

Monica Lewinsky grew up in Southern California on the west side of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills. Her father was born in El Salvador, but comes from a family of German Jewish immigrants, while her mother is of Russian Jewish descent. She attended the private John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air; among her classmates was Tori Spelling. After transferring from Santa Monica College, she graduated with a psychology degree from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 1995. Then Lewinsky moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the White House as an intern since July, getting a paid job there in November.

Scandal

Between 15 November 1995 and 7 April 1996, Lewinsky is believed to have had a sexual relationship with the President. She and Clinton later testified that the relationship involved oral sex, but not sexual intercourse.

Lewinsky was transferred to The Pentagon in April 1996 because her superiors felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. She had two more sexual encounters with him on 28 March and 29 March 1997. Since September 1997, Lewinsky's older colleague and confidante Linda Tripp was secretly recording their telephone conversations regarding the affair with Clinton. In January 1998, after Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, denying any physical relationship with Clinton, and attempted to persuade Tripp to lie under oath in the Jones case, Tripp gave the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and these tapes added to his ongoing investigation into the Whitewater scandal. Starr broadened his investigation to include investigating Lewinsky, Clinton, and others for possible perjury and subornation of perjury in the Jones case. Tripp, after speaking with Lewinsky, reported her findings to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg.

Admissions

Lewinsky admitted that her relationship with Clinton involved oral sex in the Oval Office and in adjoining rooms in the West Wing. This was documented in the Starr report, which eventually led to impeachment of Bill Clinton by the House and then acquittal by the Senate on the allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice regarding the affair.

Denials

Clinton had previously been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, most notably in regard to a relationship with singer and former Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers, and an encounter with Arkansas state employee Paula Jones (née Corbin) in a Little Rock hotel room in which Jones claimed that Clinton exposed himself to her. These affairs allegedly occurred during Clinton's time as Governor of Arkansas. Lewinsky's name actually surfaced during legal proceedings connected to the latter matter, when Jones's lawyers sought corroborating evidence of Clinton's conduct to substantiate Jones's allegations.

Clinton denied having had "a sexual affair," "sexual relations," or "a sexual relationship" with Lewinsky while under oath, and on 26 January 1998 claimed "I did not have sexual relations with that woman; Miss Lewinsky" in a nationally televised White House news conference. The line later became famous for its technical verity but deceptive nature, based on one's definition of "sexual relations."

Clinton also said, "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship" which he defended as truthful on 17 August 1998 hearing, famously arguing "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" (i.e., he was not, at the time he made that statement, still having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky). Under pressure from Starr, who as Clinton learned had obtained from Lewinsky a blue dress with Clinton's semen stain, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that the president had inserted a cigar-tube into her vagina, Clinton admitted that he misled the American people and that he had had an "inappropriate intimate contact" with Lewinsky. Clinton denied having committed perjury because, in the court's definition , oral sex was not "sex" per se.

In addition, relying upon the definition of "sexual relations" as proposed by the prosecution and agreed by the defense and by Judge Susan Webber Wright, who was hearing the Paula Jones case, Clinton claimed that because certain acts were performed on him, not by him, he did not engage in sexual relations. Lewinsky's testimony to the Starr Commission, however, contradicted Clinton's claim of being totally passive in their encounters. Clinton's lawyer later argued that different people can remember the same events in different ways.

After the scandal

The affair led to a period of pop culture celebrity for Lewinsky, both as a sex symbol and as a younger-generation nexus of a political storm that was both lighthearted, and extremely serious at the same time. It also contributed to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Around early 1999, Lewinsky reportedly said "I'm well-known for something that isn't great to be well-known for."

By her own account, Lewinsky survived the intense media attention by knitting; soon after the scandal she started a business selling her own brand of handbags online, but she closed it in 2004. In 2000 she appeared on The Tom Green Show in which the host took her to his parents' home in Canada in search of fabric for her new business. Lewinsky made a cameo appearance as herself in two sketches during the May 8, 1999 episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, a program that had lampooned her relationship with Clinton vehemently over the prior 16 months. She was also the host of the short-lived reality television dating program called Mr. Personality in 2003.

After Clinton's autobiography My Life appeared in 2004, Lewinsky said in an interview with the British tabloid Daily Mail:

"He could have made it right with the book, but he hasn't. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied. (...) I really didn't expect him to go into detail about our relationship (...) But if he had and he'd done it honestly, I wouldn't have minded.... I did though at least expect him to correct the false statements he made when he was trying to protect the Presidency. Instead, he talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking. I was the buffet and he just couldn't resist the dessert. (...) That's not how it was. This was a mutual relationship, mutual on all levels, right from the way it started and all the way through. ... I don't accept that he had to completely desecrate my character."

In December 2006, Lewinsky graduated with a master's degree in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics where she had been studying since September 2005. Her thesis was entitled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An exploration of the third person effect and pre-trial publicity.”

Further reading

• Andrew Morton: Monica's Story: an authorised biography/interview. St. Martin's Press, March 1999; ISBN 0-312-24091-0, mass-market paperback ISBN 0-312-97362-4
• One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism by Marvin L. Kalb
• Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the Public Interest (Sexual Cultures) by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan

External links

• A Guide to the Monica Lewinsky Story, also: The Starr Report; Tripp Tapes; Articles of Impeachment; The "Stalker" Tale
• Monica Lewinsky profile in the Washington Post (January 24, 1998)
• Timeline of the affair from Washington Post
• Lewinsky profile in New York magazine, 2001