Monica Lewinsky believes former President Bill Clinton should have resigned from the White House after their affair.
Lewinsky, appearing on Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy, said Clinton did not handle himself appropriately when news broke that the two had an affair while she was a 22-year-old intern in the White House.
“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was, you know, nobody's business and to resign,” Lewinsky told Cooper, the most-listened to female podcaster in the world.
“Or, to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus,” she added.
Clinton famously lied about the affair, telling America he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” in 1998. Clinton was later impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate and remained in office.
Lewinsky, now an anti-bullying activist, has been very outspoken about the affair in recent years, often noting the power imbalance between her as a young intern and Clinton, then 49 years old and one of the most powerful men in the world.
“I'm very clear this was not sexual assault, and therefore there's a level of consensuality that was there — and at the same time because of the power dynamics and the power differential, I never should have been in that position,” Lewinsky told Cooper.
“I think there was so much collateral damage for women of my generation to watch a young woman be pilloried on a world stage, to be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for my everything,” she added.
Lewinsky echoed a similar point in a 2021 CNN interview: “I think what’s really important to remember in today’s world is that we never should have even gotten to a place where consent was a question.”
“So it was wholly inappropriate as the most powerful man, my boss, 49 years old. I was 22, literally just out of college,” she continued. “And I think that the power differentials there are something that I couldn’t ever fathom consequences at 22 that I understand obviously so differently at 48.”
Earlier this month, Lewinsky also spoke to Rolling Stone, explaining she will always remember January 16, 1998 as “Survivor’s Day” — the day she was detained by the FBI and questioned for 11 hours about the affair.
“There’s still things that I do on Jan. 16 every year – that was the day the sting operation happened,” Lewinsky said. “We celebrate.”
“Sometimes my mom buys me a gift or I buy myself a gift, and just make a moment of really acknowledging” it, Lewinsky continued.
“That’s when I connect to my past the most. That was the worst day of my life thus far. It’s connecting to that, but in a way that brings it back to myself.”
The Independent has contacted Clinton via the Clinton Foundation for comment.
