After decades of rebuilding her image, Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom former President Bill Clinton infamously had an affair, appears to have succeeded. Meanwhile, the Clintons’ popularity wanes by the day.
This unexpected role reversal, especially for all those who are old enough to remember the 90s, has been helped along by A&E’s recent docuseries, “The Clinton Affair,” in which Lewinsky is featured and celebrated.
From laughingstock to idol
Those who do recall the 90s will probably remember Lewinsky as being the butt of every joke. Just about every late-night comedian lined up to take a shot.
“Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, ‘that woman’,” Lewinsky explained in a TED talk in 2015.
Clinton, on the other hand, was portrayed as a flawed man, a characterization that seemed to make him all the more likable. His reputation did not suffer much, but Lewinsky’s did, and for decades.
Lewinsky has had to work for years to get her reputation back. In the years since the Clinton disaster, she started a handbag line, hosted a dating show, starred in a 2002 HBO documentary, earned a masters degree in economics — all without much success.
But things began to turn around in 2014 when she wrote a detailed, vulnerable essay on “the culture of humiliation,” published in Vanity Fair. It was then that the public began to empathize with what Lewinsky had gone through as the result of her affair with Bill, and it was then that public opinion about her began to shift.
Director Blair Foster explained how she wanted to work this into “The Clinton Affair.” “Clinton is always allowed to be portrayed in this dimensional, nuanced way and he can be this flawed character. I wanted to bring that to Monica,” said Foster. “She’s very open and honest about the mistakes she made, but what she suffered is very disproportionate to what the ‘crime’ was.”
Now Lewinsky is becoming a celebrated spokeswoman on bullying, power imbalances and personal growth. “We have all made a mistake in our career that had consequences. And we can all probably agree that when it comes to being in this room (my mistake wins),” she told an audience of celebrities and teen girls at The Hollywood Reporter’s Power Women in Entertainment event this week.
“We changed the narrative”
Although it is unlikely that anyone could have predicted this switch, at least in the 90s, the recent environment of the #MeToo movement has brought renewed attention, and sympathy, to Lewinsky.
It is no secret that the arbiter of pop culture, Hollywood, along with much of the media, leans left on the political spectrum, and as such has always favored the likes of Clinton, even with his known indiscretions. Hence, the portrayals of Clinton and Lewinsky in the 90s.
But, after #MeToo, Hollywood and the media have been forced to look in the mirror — and found some hypocrisy. After all, how can you simultaneously praise Clinton and condemn Lewinksy, while professing a belief in the need to recognize and stop the mistreatment of women by men?
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