American news media has long thrived off of scandal and the respective cultural casualties it creates, and no one knows that more than Monica Lewinsky. It’s been 23 years since news broke of the Clinton affair, and the perfect storm of our nation’s political divide, hunger for tabloid gossip, and the economic prosperity of the 90s made for a country primed to eat up such a salacious story of the follies of the powerful. But in the over two decades since the story was the center of discourse, who we consider the villains and the victors has shifted. Monica Lewinsky has reemerged in the last several years to establish herself as the adult who has grown up out of that scandal, and her truth is one that holds up a mirror to our collective conscience and our tendency towards online mob mentality. Now that we are reacquainted with her, she is quickly establishing herself as a force for social good, and using her power to encourage meaningful change, most recently in her new HBO Max documentary 15 Minutes of Shame.
At the time that the affair was used to take down a president, Monica Lewinsky wasn’t given a voice. Overnight she went from being a private young woman in her early twenties attempting to establish a career in PR, to the butt of national jokes and extreme public scrutiny — all while being metaphorically muzzled. She’s spoken about the suicidal thoughts that the situation tragically inspired, and most recently she’s pointed out how absurd it was that she was labeled a whore and a tramp, while the powerful spin team of the White House protected Bill Clinton from being labeled a predator. As Ryan Murphy’s juggernaut American Crime Story franchise has begun airing its third season Impeachment, Lewinsky was involved as a producer, and America has been forced to revisit the scandal through the eyes of a young intern who was gobbled up by the obsessiveness of young love and the ruthless machine of Washington power dynamics. But Lewinsky hasn’t just stopped there in righting the wrongs of the past; she’s now focused on using her story as a case study to prevent history from repeating itself.
