Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973) is an American woman with whom then-United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "improper relationship while she worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996. The affair and its repercussions, especially the impeachment of Bill Clinton, became known as the Lewinsky scandal.
Scandal
Between November 1995 and March 1997, Lewinsky had an intimate relationship with then President Bill Clinton. She later testified that the relationship involved fellatio in the Oval Office and other sexual contact, but that sexual intercourse did not occur.
Clinton had previously been confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct, most notably in regard to an alleged long-term relationship with singer Gennifer Flowers and an encounter with Arkansas state employee Paula Jones (née Corbin); these events were alleged to have occurred during Clinton's time as Governor of Arkansas. Paula Jones filed a civil lawsuit against Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. Lewinsky's name surfaced during legal proceedings connected to the latter allegation, when Jones' lawyers sought corroborating evidence of Clinton's conduct to substantiate her allegations.
In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors relocated her job to The Pentagon because they felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. Lewinsky confided in a co-worker named Linda Tripp about her relationship with the President. Beginning in September 1997, Tripp began secretly recording their telephone conversations regarding the affair with Clinton. In January 1998, after Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any physical relationship with Clinton, and attempted to persuade Tripp to lie under oath in the Jones case, Tripp gave the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and these tapes added to his ongoing investigation into the Whitewater controversy. Starr broadened his investigation to include investigating Lewinsky, Clinton, and others for possible perjury and subornation of perjury in the Jones case. Noteworthy for its revelation of Tripp's motivations was her reporting of their conversations to literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. Tripp also convinced Lewinsky to save the gifts that Clinton had given her during their affair, and not to dry clean what would later be known as "the blue dress." While under oath, Clinton denied having had "a sexual affair," "sexual relations," or "a sexual relationship" with Lewinsky.
Subsequent life
Lewinsky was the host of the reality television dating program Mr. Personality on Fox Television Network in 2003. There she advised young women contestants who were picking men hidden by masks. Some Americans tried to organize a boycott of advertisers on the show, in protest of Lewinsky capitalizing on her notoriety. Nevertheless, the show debuted to very high ratings, and The New York Times said that "after years of trying to cash in on her fame by designing handbags and other self-marketing schemes, Ms. Lewinsky has finally found a fitting niche on television. However, the ratings slid each successive week, and after the show completed its limited run it did not reappear. The same year, she appeared as a guest on the programs V Graham Norton in the UK, High Chaparall in Sweden, and The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the U.S.
After Clinton's autobiography My Life appeared in 2004, Lewinsky said in an interview with the British tabloid Daily Mail:
He could have made it right with the book, but he hasn't. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied. I really didn't expect him to go into detail about our relationship.But if he had and he'd done it honestly, I wouldn't have minded. I did, though, at least expect him to correct the false statements he made when he was trying to protect the Presidency. Instead, he talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking. I was the buffet and he just couldn't resist the dessert. This was a mutual relationship, mutual on all levels, right from the way it started and all the way through. I don't accept that he had to completely desecrate my character.
By 2005, Lewinsky found that she could not escape the spotlight in the U.S., with both her professional and personal life difficult. She stopped selling her handbag line and moved to London. In December 2006, Lewinsky graduated with a master's degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics where she had been studying since September 2005. Her thesis was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third-person effect and Pre-Trial Publicity”. She has since tried to avoid publicity.
Lewinsky did correspond in 2009 with scholar Ken Gormley, who was writing an in-depth study of the Clinton scandals, maintaining that Clinton had lied under oath about his relationship with her: "There was no leeway there on the veracity of his statements because they asked him detailed and specific questions to which he answered untruthfully.
