Hillary Clinton has said the ‘gutsiest’ personal decision she ever made was not leaving her husband.
“I think the gutsiest thing I’ve ever done, personally, was to stay in my marriage,” she told interviewer Amy Robach during an appearance on Good Morning America alongside daughter Chelsea Clinton, to promote their joint project The Book of Gutsy Women.
“Publicly, politically, [it was to] run for president,” she continued. “And keep going. Just get up every day and keep going.”
The former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has been married to ex-President Bill Clinton since 1975.
Yet the couple were forced to weather both a political and personal firestorm in the 1990s when Commander-in-Chief Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed.
Bill Clinton survived a 1998 impeachment inquiry but the furore placed his marriage under close media scrutiny.
"There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive,” wrote Hillary Clinton in her 2017 memoir What Happened.
“But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself -- twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness? The answers were always yes.”
In recent years, the #MeToo movement has reawakened discussion around Bill Clinton and Lewinsky’s involvement, including fierce debate surrounding power dynamics in the relationship between then-49 year-old Clinton and the 22 year-old Lewinsky.
Since losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has re-entered public life as a political commentator and author, most recently penning The Book of Gutsy Women, a collection of real-life stories of ‘inspirational women’, with daughter Chelsea.
She confirmed in March 2019 that she would not run for president in 2020.
