Lewinsky, Monica (1973—)

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Lewinsky, Monica (1973—)

Monica Lewinsky has earned a permanent, unlooked for, and unwelcome place in the political history of the United States. Her naïve infatuation, at the age of 22, with American President William Jefferson Clinton, placed her at the center of a sordid White House sex scandal that dominated political news in 1998, plunged the American people into shock, confusion and disillusion, and culminated in the historic impeachment trial—only the second in American history—of the 42^nd President.

The privileged daughter of affluent Beverly Hills parents (her doctor father and writer mother divorced when Monica was 13), she graduated with a psychology degree from Lewis and Clark College in May of 1995 and became an unpaid White House intern a month later. She met President Bill Clinton in November of 1995 and became an employee in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs in December 1995. When, at that time, the business of government was temporarily suspended, leaving the White House dependent on interns for routine errands, Monica Lewinsky had an encounter with the President which resulted in a covert sexual relationship. She was transferred out of the White House to work at the Pentagon, but she and Clinton remained in at least telephonic contact until shortly after the 1997 presidential election.

In late 1997, Lewinsky confided details of the affair to Pentagon co-worker Linda Tripp who had befriended her, but who secretly tape-recorded their incriminating conversations and passed them to the officers investigating the Paula Jones case. In early 1998, attorneys for Jones, the plaintiff in a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, informed Lewinsky that she was on their witness list. Lewinsky provided them with a sworn affidavit denying a sexual relationship with the President, but when the story of the affair, the Tripp tapes, and independent counsel Kenneth Starr's expanded investigation into the matter became public on January 20, 1998, a political and media tumult exploded across America and the world.

Ms. Lewinsky's legal jeopardy, based on her affidavit for the Jones attorneys, faded in July when her attorneys negotiated an immunity agreement with the independent counsel's office. She was also ordered to turn over to Starr's investigators a blue dress, notoriously bearing the stains of a sexual encounter with the President. On August 17, 1998, President Clinton, following four hours of videotaped testimony before a Federal grand jury, confessed to the world in a televised address that, contrary to his own earlier public denial, he had indeed had an "inappropriate relationship" with Ms. Lewinsky. A comprehensive report written by Kenneth Starr's office and submitted to Congress and the American public gave intimate details of that relationship, each new revelation of which plunged the presidency into further disarray and disrepute, and visited successive humiliations on Ms. Lewinsky, who was secreted, ironically, in her Watergate apartment in between forays to face her own interrogation into the affair.

Charging the President with perjury before the grand jury and a pattern of obstruction of justice, on December 19, 1998 the U.S. House of Representatives passed articles of impeachment against him. The subsequent Senate trial was finally voted down on February 12, 1999, to the intense relief of Americans weary of the political circus. A chastened Clinton returned to the White House, his office tarnished but intact, while the British publishers of Diana: Her TrueStory by Andrew Morton, negotiated a $1.5 million contract with Ms. Lewinsky for Morton to write her story. On March 3, 1999, she gave an exclusive and searching in-depth interview to Barbara Walters for ABC Network television; on March 4, Britain's Channel 4 aired their exclusive interview, conducted rather less searchingly by Jon Snow, and hedged with legally imposed restrictions. She emerged, not as a depraved scarlet woman, but a pleasant 24-year-old, definitely sadder, possibly wiser; but it was evident that, for Monica Lewinsky, the consequences of her notorious love affair with the American president would resonate for some time to come.

—Philip L. Simpson