It is not only the legislators’ sense of proportion that is out of kilter, however, for when all is said and done, what has riveted the world for the past year is the microscopic analysis of an office romance between a very junior employee and her boss. It was Monica’s folly—and, one might add, her bad luck—to fall in love with a powerful man whose enemies are both zealous and unforgiving. In any other circumstances, after the affair had ended she would have been allowed to pack her bags and move on.
In any other circumstances, may be—but, as her mother sees only too clearly, “If she had not been such a caring, romantic and vulnerable young woman, it would have been a very different story. In the normal course of events this would have been one of those lessons in life that women learn privately in the process of growing up. Instead, her private pain became entertainment for the masses, and this was the cruelest, cruelest thing. What enormous crime did she commit that made it necessary to destroy her, to strip away every last vestige of dignity and privacy from this young person’s life?”
Thrown into the political piranha tank, Monica’s personality was quickly picked clean in a media feeding frenzy, every imperfection and shortcoming stripped bare by columnists, photographers, comedians and amateur psychologists. Just as Dale Bumpers reminded the nation that the Clintons were human beings, so too, in a lesser arena, Monica’s father let a major California radio station know that its airing of off-color remarks about his daughter was hurting not just her, but her entire family.
It is only in the last few months—now that the world realizes that she had not been living in a world of make-believe and that her testimony was a fair record of her relationship with the President—that the unbridled hostility towards her has diminished. Many now recognize that she is a woman who has been cruelly traduced, by Linda Tripp, by Kenneth Starr, by Bill Clinton, and by the world’s media. In a tale already rich in ironies, it is an abidingly rich, if uncomfortable, one to consider the moral code of the former intern against those of the three people who have betrayed, denied or used her.
Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan has observed: “For a very long time she did all she could to avoid betraying her lover, even to the point of signing an affidavit that denied the affair. Once cornered, she resolved to tell the whole truth. The most stunning aspect of the Starr Report is how far this young woman was prepared to go to abide by the law, even to the extent of opening herself up to grotesque public scrutiny. What a contrast with the President. If this morality tale is essentially about honesty, then Ms. Lewinsky is its heroine.”
Yet she has paid a very high price—too high—for that honesty and openness. In the weeks I spent talking to her, the one question to which Monica could not find an adequate answer concerned the humiliation she has endured throughout the scandal. “For the last ten months I have seen the Special Prosecutor, the press, the White House and the public ripping apart layer upon layer of my soul. I don’t know what I did to deserve that humiliation. Certainly I made mistakes and foolish judgments, but did they warrant this level of abuse? Yes, I probably am the most humiliated woman in the world, but I just can’t deal with that thought. I have to block it out because it is too much to handle.”
For just as the O.J. Simpson trial exposed the racial fault line running through American society, so the Monica Lewinsky saga has spotlighted the underlying misogyny that still permeates American life, and particularly the media. Clinton the adulterer and liar is a forgiven man; Monica Lewinsky the temptress is a scorned woman, derided by feminists and conservatives alike. Her loyalty, her honesty and her silence are qualities deemed to be without merit. As far as modern moral America is concerned, for her to be female, young, confident, well groomed, at ease with her sexuality—and loved—constitutes some sort of crime. What is far worse, however, she has committed the greatest sin of all: she is overweight.
Her punishment is to be followed by paparazzi who jostle and harass her, calling her vile names in an attempt to reduce her to tears and thereby win a more saleable picture. Once the photographers have snared her, the columnists and editors take over, subjecting her to a verbal lashing. Described as “the portly pepperpot,” and worse, by the tabloids, she was then routinely berated by columnists like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. As one British commentator, Anne McElvoy, wrote: “Monica must do what America expects, indeed demands. She must lose weight. Monica’s increased size is a sign of her moral laxity or divine punishment.” Lest non-American journalists become too self-congratulatory, however, it is worth noting another report, printed in a leading British newspaper. On 26 January, under the portentous sub-heading “Trial of the President—Day 9”, the Guardian had this to report: “Ms Lewinsky had two pancakes and orange juice, a witness said, and was dressed in a dark trouser suit.” Diet and dress sense, it seems, were as important as her evidence in the impeachment debate.
In her own willfully principled way, Monica has tried to take the moral high road ever since the scandal broke, rejecting, for example, a five-million-dollar offer from Fox TV, a tabloid network, for interviews, a book and a hair commercial. Even though there were many who advised her to take the money and run, she did not want to become involved with the “sleaze merchants” who had made her life a misery for the last year. Instead, although she considered an offer from TV superstar Oprah Winfrey, she decided to give her first television interview to Barbara Walters—for free.
With the passage of time, what was initially notoriety has inevitably mutated into an unwanted celebrity. “I don’t want to make a career out of being Monica Lewinsky,” she says, adding, “I haven’t done anything to be proud of.” Much as she resents this cloak of fame, it is now a fact of her life, as her stepfather Peter Straus, a former director of Voice of America, has explained to her. He is, he says, “leaning on her hard to develop a thicker skin, not to read the tabloids in the morning.” There are upsides, however. Certainly it amused Monica and her family—and this author—when, in the New York Times in December 1998, a Gallup poll of the ten women Americans most admired ranked her alongside Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.
Besides the price she has paid emotionally, and in the utter disruption of her life, fame has also come at a savage cost in financial terms, not just for her but for her family and friends. It is a price they are still paying. Over the last year this $40,000-a-year office worker has been landed with a million dollars’ worth of legal bills, as well as being forced to watch in helpless silence as the lives of her family and friends have been ravaged and exploited.
It has been her fate to be a pawn in a power struggle between two mighty foes, President Clinton and Judge Starr. One broke her heart, the other tried to break her spirit, and it is the latter of whom she is most wary. Even today, Monica lives in dread of the Special Prosecutor, fearing that at any moment he will revoke her immunity and send her to jail. Certainly he keeps her on a remorselessly tight rein.
The events of 1998 have made Monica and others closely associated with the scandal far more skeptical and critical of the nature of government in America. “Justice in this country is a joke,” she maintains, adding, “Our tabloid TV has now spawned tabloid government.” Her mother, who has been almost equally battered by the scandal, sees all too clearly the damage not just to her daughter, but to her innocent friends, many of whom have faced unnecessary legal bills, unwanted media harassment, and even investigation by the FBI. There is a sorrowful weariness to Marcia Lewis’s view of America now: “Before all this happened I thought of the government as a friend, never as my enemy, but I now realize it has the power to frighten and to threaten. I don’t think I will ever look at my country, my homeland, in quite the same way again.” She adds, of the President and the Special Prosecutor, the twin causes of most of her daughter’s troubles: “I hate Starr and the others for what they did to my daughter, for the threats and fear and how they have ruined her life. It was they who made her go through this living hell. That does not for a moment excuse Pr
esident Clinton for the way he behaved.”
Indeed, the implications of this whole sorry saga reverberate way beyond those of a simple sex scandal. As David Remick commented in The New Yorker: “Monica is the woman of secrets who no longer has any. Her eyes are not windows but mirrors, and what we see in them is awful. Yet we go on staring.”
It is an episode in American history that, as far as Billy Martin is concerned, reflects badly on the legal system he has worked inside for more than twenty years. As he says: “At the moment I am not proud of the law in my country that can allow this miscarriage of justice, where an Independent Counsel can be appointed to prosecute matters that would not be worthy of prosecution by the US Department of Justice.”
His colleague Sydney Hoffmann, who watched Monica being subjected to days of humiliating questions by middle-aged men, echoes the feelings of the First Lady, who described the process as a “right-wing conspiracy,” Hoffmann says: “This investigation was politically motivated. This whole scandal is not the stuff of a criminal case.”
Although Monica’s indomitable will, helped by her gallows sense of humor, has enabled her to survive the most tumultuous year of her life, the feisty young woman who dared call the President of the United States “Butthead” has been chastened and bruised by the experience. Her friend Lenore Reese, who saw her last fall for the first time since their days at college, remembers from their meeting that “there was a sadness about her; she was nervous and far more cautious because for the last year her freedom has been taken away. One of the most attractive things about her was her light-hearted spirit, but this whole episode has ended her innocence.”
Neysa DeMann Erbland, who has frequently picked Monica out of the emotional troughs during the last few months, has also seen the changes in her friend. “She sounds like an older woman, a weary woman, a woman who has had her heart destroyed, along with her reputation, on prime-time TV. She is twenty-five, an age that should be filled with the delicious discomfort of finding oneself. Instead, Monica spends her time knitting scarves and sweaters. She dreams of a time when she can have the privately tumultuous life of a twenty-something again. She wants her life back.”
Emotionally exhausted she may be, but much of the pre-scandal Monica, with all her flaws and foibles, remains. She is still the impatient, headstrong, self-willed and fiercely loyal young women her friends know and love; moreover, she is still, in spite of everything, surprisingly trusting and naive. Yet those same qualities that gave her the strength to survive the onslaught of Starr and the media, make it more difficult for her to cope with her current life in limbo. “She is not a patient person and her life now means that she has to learn patience,” Catherine Allday Davis remarks.
The unresolved emotional problems Monica faced before the scandal, issues linked to her weight and her relationships with men, have only been exacerbated by the attention she has attracted. Until the media caravan moves on—presumably after the end of the Clinton presidency—Monica will remain in the limelight, waiting for the time when, in Barbara Lewinsky’s words, “the name Lewinsky doesn’t make people jump out of the swimming pool.”
For someone by nature impatient, this period in purdah merely compounds the difficulty of fulfilling her rather prosaic ambitions; to find a loving partner, start a family, begin a useful career. She has talked about returning to graduate school to take a PhD in forensic psychology, or a degree in law—she has certainly had a crash course in that during the last year—and even of undertaking volunteer work with disadvantaged children, teaching them reading skills.
Undoubtedly her ability to marshal cogent arguments, her capacious memory and her analytical mind make Monica eminently suited to a career as an attorney. Even so, she feels very strongly that, if anything good is going to come out of this horror, then she should attach her name to a worthwhile cause, especially one that concerns children. “Maybe if I do good, good will come to me one day,” she says. Yet the truth is that, whatever her friends and family suggest, she has still to overcome the trauma of the recent past before she can rationally consider a way forward. Her father has no doubts about her most pressing needs: “My initial fear for Monica was the prospect of jail. Now I worry about where she goes from here. Certainly she will need long-term counseling to get over the post-traumatic depression that is inevitable as she faces up to the full horror of the last year. She also needs to have healthy relationships with single guys.”
The last recommendation is easier said than done, however. As a girl who has always had problems reading the road map of romance, the way forward is filled with all kinds of false trails. Until she can break the emotional cycle that has led her into two dead end relationships with married men, she will find it difficult to choose the path to lasting happiness. These days, she needs her emotional compass, never previously a particularly reliable mechanism, to guide her as never before. Her problem is that she is now an uncertain witness to her own perceptions, the betrayals of the last year by lovers and by others whom she trusted making her as unsure of her own instincts as she is now wary of others’ motives.
Surprisingly, however, she has recently enjoyed the companionship of a young single man. It is a relationship that she has allowed to develop at its own pace, something helped by the fact that, for a while at least, she was able to keep his name out of the headlines. For her, the friendship has been both a revelation and a reassurance, a first step into the real world of male—female relationships.
These are her first faltering steps on a very long road to recovery, an emotional convalescence that will have to resolve the issues of her family life and discard the emotional detritus, the hurt, the humiliation and the anger, of the past year.
Her life in limbo, her future uncertain, Monica is anxious to move on, to find a companion and start a family. Understandably, she wonders: “When will all this be over? I want my life back and at the same time I’m scared I will never be able to have the life I dream of—a full, rich life with a loving, tender husband, the laughter and joys of children and maybe, just maybe, contentment.”
On a warm November night in 1998, Monica is gently swaying to and fro on a swing in Holmby Park playground, near her apartment in Los Angeles, where she and her brother Michael played when they were young. Ever since she was a child she has enjoyed swings and tonight is no different. As she sways gently in the moonlight she talks wistfully about what might have been; her dreams of marrying by the time she was twenty-four, and of having a brood of children before she was thirty.
For whatever her professional ambitions, her personal goals are thoroughly old-fashioned: to find a husband and have children. She will make a loving mother, and one who, Marcia Lewis, believes, will be able face her own children and tell them her story without embarrassment, admitting her mistakes but emphasizing that she betrayed no one as she was betrayed.
Monica’s dreams remain unfulfilled, however, for this essentially traditional, middle-class American girl is today reduced to hiding in the shadows, a fugitive in her own land. As a result, she exists in a modern-day Orwellian nightmare that has become, for her, a daily reality. Each move she makes is monitored, either by the paparazzi or the FBI, her diet is picked over by pundits, her every purchase becomes a matter for international reportage.
Above everything, though, stands the moon-faced figure of Kenneth Starr, the man who has effectively made himself the puppet-master of her life. When he pulls the legal strings, she is forced to dance to his command. The bland, tightly-smiling, face of the Special Prosecutor is almost a personification of the “Big Brother” of Orwell’s future, a no longer fanciful scenario in which the state can search a person’s thoughts and soul as easily as their house and computer. Monica, her family and her friends know that all too well.
Earlier that night in November 1998, the face of the man Monica at once fears and reviles had filled the television screen in her apartment. Feeling she had to escape his eye, she left her apartment like an escaping prisoner, gi
ving her “guards,” the ever present paparazzi, the slip. Donning a baseball cap as a disguise, she roared off in her leased four-wheel-drive, nervously checking the rear-view mirror in case she were being tailed by the photographic predators who pursue her everywhere. So it came about that, at nine in the evening, she was able to escape the Special Prosecutor and the media, and enjoy a few furtive moments of freedom, swinging in the night air and dreaming of what might have been.
This, then, is the fate of Monica Lewinsky, a child-woman searching for a future and trying to obliterate a past, an obliging, intelligent, well-mannered girl who could be anybody’s sister, anybody’s daughter. She is a prisoner in the land of the free, every move she makes served up for the masses. And so it will remain until, one day, the media circus moves on.
Photograph Acknowledgments
The majority of photographs in this book have kindly been provided by Monica Lewinsky, her father, Dr. Bernie Lewinsky, her uncle, Dr. Bill Finerman, Jr., and friends. Otherwise, the picture credits are as follows:
PA News; AP; Rex Features.
Author’s Acknowledgments
It took a leap of faith and trust for Monica Lewinsky to sit down with a relative stranger from another country and culture to discuss every detail of her short but eventful life. That by the end she only saw me as the irritating elder brother she never had is a testimony to her patience and endurance after days of probing and sometimes pointless questions.
Her mother, Marcia Lewis, and her father, Dr. Bernie Lewinsky, showed similar fortitude, particularly when talking about the pain and humiliation their family have faced over the last year.
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