Monica Lewinsky announced recently that she was starting a new podcast. Vanity Fair did a profile/interview with her last month which gave this brief summary of her post Clinton-White-House years.

After years of shaming over the scandal that defined her public narrative, Lewinsky wrote about the personal trauma she had endured in a 2014 Vanity Fair essay. There, she declared it was time to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” Her subsequent redemption arc coincided with an increased cultural consciousness around sexual power dynamics. During that time, she has often written about the topic of reclamation, and also took literal ownership of her story: Lewinsky both participated in the 2018 documentary The Clinton Affair and served as a producer on the FX scripted series Impeachment: American Crime Story the following year.

Now Lewinsky gets to ask the tough questions in her new Wondery podcast, Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky, an interview-based talk series about taking back what has been lost or stolen. The show will be available weekly via audio and video formats, beginning on February 18, 2025.

I read Lewinsky's 2014 essay and thought it was pretty good. She's a good writer and she's been though some things that most people haven't. That said, what I see in the summary above are two things which are happening simultaneously. On the one hand, it has taken Lewinsky a really long time to get comfortable sharing her own story and understanding how people on the outside saw it at the time.

The other thing is that she's also traded on her story financially. To be clear I don't begrudge her that because it is her story and there's no one better to tell it, but I think it's worth noting there's a mix of motives here. 

And that brings us to a recent interview she gave to the “Call Her Daddy” podcast where she dropped a bomb on Bill Clinton.

Sitting down with “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper, Lewinsky responded to a question on how she thought the matter should have been handled by the media and the White House once the news broke that the former president had an affair with her when she was a White House intern.

“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” Lewinsky told Cooper. “Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who is just starting out in the world under the bus.”

I was one of the many conservatives who watched this story unfold when it happened. My take on it was always that Bill Clinton looked like a creep (not for the first time) and Lewinsky, who was 22 at the time, seemed more like a confused girl.

Apparently, what Lewinsky got from it was primarily that people were making fun of her look and her beret and turning her name into a verb for oral sex. I guess there was a lot of that sort of thing back then and I honestly don't remember who was saying what more than 25 years ago. But I think over time Lewinsky's understanding of what happened to her has shifted and is now a lot closer to what many on the right were saying and thinking at the time.

In 2021, Lewinsky told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Clinton’s role in their affair, which captured the nation’s attention for years and eventually led to his impeachment, was “wholly inappropriate.”

“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,” Lewinsky told Tapper.

“So it was wholly inappropriate as the most powerful man, my boss, 49 years old. I was 22, literally just out of college. 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.”

In short, Bill Clinton has a much larger share of responsibility because of his age and situation. This was the opposite of what most Democrats were saying at the time, i.e. it's just an affair and Europe is laughing at us for being prudes. It's never been clear to me why Lewinsky didn't get this at the time but her recent interview may have shed some light on that as well.

"In the moment I was split because I felt so guilty for everything," Lewinsky said about the aftermath of Clinton's initial public denial. "I felt like this having become public was my fault because I had confided in Linda (Tripp) and so if I had not confided in her, I felt as if this wouldn't have become public.

"So there was an enormous amount of guilt," she continued. "I didn't want him to lose his job, so there was a part of me that felt, 'Good, deny it, this is what you should do,' and then there was a part of me that was so humiliated to have the most powerful man in the world saying that basically you're damaged goods."

It has taken a long, long time for Lewinsky to realize that Bill Clinton was the bad guy here, but better late than never I guess. CNN contacted Clinton for comment so you can bet he's having a fun night at home with Hillary.

The last time Clinton commented on Lewinsky was back in 2018 when he was promoting a book he'd co-written with James Patterson.

“I asked if you’d ever apologized and you said you had,” NBC News’ Craig Melvin said.

“I have,” Clinton said adding, “I apologized to everybody in the world.”

“But you didn’t apologize to her,” Melvin asked.

“I haven’t talked to her,” Clinton said.

“Do you feel that you owe her an apology?” Melvin asked.

“No…I do…I, I do not…I have never talked to her, but I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry,” Clinton fumbled. “That’s very different,” Clinton added with a big grin. “The apology was public.”

“And you don’t think a private apology was owed?” Melvin asked.

At that point, James Patterson stepped in to defend the former president, “I think this thing has been—It’s 20 years ago. Come on. Let’s talk about JFK. Let’s talk about LBJ. Stop already.”

It really is old news at this point but Lewinsky is right. Clinton should have resigned instead of turning his own name into an adjective that means spinning and lawyering your own abysmal conduct.