The latest season of FX’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story” premiered on Tuesday night, and it tells the story of Monica Lewinsky’s affair with former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s during her time as a White House intern.
Take a look at the trailer right here:
Lewinsky Sounds Off
In an interview with People Magazine the next morning, Lewinsky opened up about how she found the courage to produce this series and take a look at what occurred “between the most powerful man in the world and an unpaid intern less than half his age.”
“For me, at 22 there was this combination of the awe of being at the White House, the awe of the presidency and the awe of this man who had an amazing energy and charisma was paying attention to me,” she recalled. “I was enamored with him, like many others. He had a charisma to him – and it was a lethal charm and I was intoxicated.”
“I think there are a lot of people who might find themselves in these situations,” Lewinsky continued. “It might be a professor or a boss, your immediate supervisor at your job. We think we’re on his terra firma in our early twenties and yet we’re really on this quicksand. [You think], I’m an adult now. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t get a rental car without a parental signature.”
Related: Monica Lewinsky Reveals The Hardest Part About Producing ‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’
She Disappears From Public Eye
After the scandal came to an end, Lewinsky disappeared from the public eye for years in the mid-2000s.
“In the first few years after the scandal, I ran away and went to graduate school and thought, I’ll go to another country and get a master’s degree and get a job,” he explained. “I’m going to get married and have kids and everyone will forget that Monica Lewinsky. But that didn’t work. A lot of what had to happen was integration. Well, this is what happened.”
These days, Lewinsky is living on the west coast, where she works as a public speaker and anti-bullying activist.
Despite everything that happened between them, Lewinsky said the she doesn’t feel like she needs an apology from Clinton anymore.
“If I had been asked five years ago, there would have been a part of me that needed something – that still wanted something,” she said. “Not any kind of relationship, but a sense of closure or maybe understanding. And I feel incredibly grateful not to need any of that.”
“A lot of people know about this story,” Lewinsky said. However, they may be “surprised” by some of the details when they watch the series.
In this clip, she talks about her behavior in her 20s:
“As a producer, I’m very proud … as a subject, I’m nervous.” -Monica Lewinsky on the anticipated series “Impeachment: American Crime Story.” pic.twitter.com/aahSYYBPpX
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) September 7, 2021
What Lewinsky Wants People To Learn From Her Story
As for what she hopes people will learn from her story, Lewinsky would like it to spark conversation about the dynamics between men in power and those less powerful.
“As we all came to see, it wasn’t just about losing a job but about the power to be believed, the power to be inoculated from the press, the power to have others smear someone’s reputation in all the ways that work, the power to understand consequence having held many important jobs where this was my first out of college,” she said.
“I can’t speak to how [Clinton] really felt or if what he has said over the years is true to him,” Lewinsky concluded. “At 22 years old, I mistakenly thought the sliver of him that I got to know was the whole of who he was. And with that, I thought I mattered more than I did. That’s not to say this was transactional. But he clearly didn’t care in the way I thought he did at the time and the way some of his gestures would have conveyed.”
Clinton has largely been given a free pass by society for what he did with Lewinsky simply because he is an establishment Democrat with tons of connections in both the political and entertainment world.
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We can only hope that this new “American Crime Story” series doesn’t given Clinton a pass and instead portrays him as the flawed individual that he is.
Given the fact that this series was undoubtedly made by Hollywood liberals, however, we won’t be holding our breath for that portrayal.