Monica Lewinsky

Monica Lewinsky
Monica Lewinsky as she appeared on her U.S. Government ID in 1995
Born	(1973-07-23) July 23, 1973 San Francisco, California
Education	Bachelor's degree in Psychology (Lewis & Clark College) Master's degree in Social Psychology (London School of Economics)
Occupation(s)	White House intern entrepreneur

Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973) is an American woman with whom the former United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "inappropriate relationship" 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. The scandal affected Clinton's second term and gave Lewinsky significant notoriety.

Early life

Lewinsky was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in southern California on the west side of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills. For her primary education she attended the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air. She later attended Beverly Hills High School, but then left and graduated at Pacific Hills School, formerly known as Bel Air Prep, as salutatorian.

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 starting in July, getting a paid job there in November.

Scandal

Main article: Lewinsky scandal

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

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 alleged affairs would have 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.

Lewinsky left the White House in April 1996 because her superiors felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. 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 controversy. Starr broadened his investigation to include investigating Lewinsky, Clinton, and others for possible perjury and subornation of perjury in the Jones case. Noteworthy for its revelation of Tripp's motivations was Tripp's, after speaking with Lewinsky, reporting of their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. Tripp also convinced Lewinsky to save the gifts that Clinton had given her during their affair, and not to dry clean what would later be infamously known as "the blue dress."

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 "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.

Outcomes

President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives and ultimately acquitted by the Senate on all charges brought there: allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice regarding the affair and lying under oath in a civil lawsuit. The aspects of the President's behavior in the Lewinsky matter that exonerated him in the eyes of the Senate will never be known conclusively beyond Senators' apparent belief that the charges simply did not warrant removing a President from office.

Paula Jones' civil lawsuit against President Clinton, the matter in which President Clinton originally provided testimony that gave rise to his impeachment, was ultimately dismissed.

In the scandal's immediate aftermath Congress chose not to extend the legislation that empowered the driving force behind the investigation of the Lewinsky matter, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

After the scandal

The affair led to a period of pop culture celebrity for Lewinsky 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. After a 21-day trial, the Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction and removal from office under the Constitution.

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's capital city of Ottawa 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 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 dissertation 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
• Monica Lewinsky at IMDb

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