Lewinsky stated that she had nine sexual encounters with President
Bill Clinton in the
Oval Office between November 1995 and March 1997. According to her testimony, these encounters involved
oral sex and other sexual acts, but not sexual intercourse. Clinton had previously been confronted with
allegations of sexual misconduct during his time as Governor of Arkansas. Former Arkansas state employee
Paula Jones filed a civil lawsuit against him alleging that he had sexually harassed her. Lewinsky's name surfaced during the discovery phase of Jones' case, when Jones' lawyers sought to show a pattern of behavior by Clinton which involved inappropriate sexual relationships with other government employees. In April 1996, Lewinsky's superiors transferred her from the White House to the Pentagon because they felt that she was spending too much time with Clinton. and in January 1998 submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying any physical relationship with Clinton. Though she attempted to persuade Tripp to lie under oath in that case, Tripp gave the tapes to Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr, adding to his ongoing investigation into the
Whitewater controversy. Starr then broadened his investigation beyond the Arkansas land use deal to include Lewinsky, Clinton, and others for possible perjury and subornation of perjury in the Jones case. Tripp reported the taped conversations to literary agent
Lucianne Goldberg. She also convinced Lewinsky to save the gifts that Clinton had given her during their relationship and not to dry clean a blue dress that was stained with Clinton's semen. Under oath, Clinton denied having had "a sexual affair", "sexual relations", or "a sexual relationship" with Lewinsky. News of the Clinton–Lewinsky relationship broke in January 1998. On January 26, 1998, Clinton stated, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" in a nationally televised White House news conference. which he defended as truthful on August 17, 1998, because of his use of the present tense, arguing "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is". Starr obtained a blue dress from Lewinsky with Clinton's semen stained on it, as well as testimony from her that the President had inserted a cigar into her vagina. Clinton stated, "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate", In addition, he relied on the definition of "sexual relations" as proposed by the prosecution and agreed by the defense and by Judge
Susan Webber Wright, who was hearing the Paula Jones case. Clinton claimed that certain acts were performed
on him, not
by him, and therefore he did not engage in sexual relations. Lewinsky's testimony to the Starr Commission, however, contradicted Clinton's claim of being totally passive in their encounters. Clinton and Lewinsky were both called before a grand jury. Clinton testified via closed-circuit television, while Lewinsky testified in person. She was granted
transactional immunity by the Office of the Independent Counsel in exchange for her testimony.
Life after the scandal Lewinsky's immunity agreement restricted what she could talk about publicly, but she was able to cooperate with
Andrew Morton in his writing of ''
Monica's Story'', her biography which included her side of the Clinton affair. On March 3, 1999,
Barbara Walters interviewed Lewinsky on ABC's
20/20. The program was watched by 70 million Americans, which ABC said was a record for a news show. Lewinsky made about $500,000 from her participation in the book and another $1 million from international rights to the Walters interview, but was still beset by high legal bills and living costs. sexologist
Susie Bright, and author-host
Abiola Abrams arguing from three generations of women whether Lewinsky's behavior had any meaning for feminism. Also in 1999, Lewinsky declined to sign an autograph in an airport, saying, "I'm kind of known for something that's not so great to be known for." She made a cameo appearance as herself in two sketches during the May 8, 1999, episode of
NBC's
Saturday Night Live, a program that had lampooned her relationship with Clinton over the prior 16 months. In September 1999, Lewinsky began to sell a line of handbags bearing her name, under the company name The Real Monica, Inc. They were sold online as well as at
Henri Bendel in New York,
Fred Segal in California, and The Cross in London. Lewinsky designed the bags—described by
New York magazine as "hippie-ish, reversible totes"—and traveled frequently to supervise their manufacture in
Louisiana. The $1 million endorsement deal, which required Lewinsky to lose 40 or more pounds in six months, gained considerable publicity at the time. The company stopped running the Lewinsky ads in February 2000, concluded her campaign entirely in April 2000, and paid her only $300,000 of the $1 million contracted for her involvement. In March 2002, Lewinsky, no longer bound by the terms of her immunity agreement, Lewinsky hosted a reality television dating program,
Mr. Personality, on
Fox Television Network in 2003, where she advised young women contestants who were picking men hidden by masks. Some Americans tried to organize a boycott of advertisers on the show, to protest Lewinsky's capitalizing on her notoriety. Nevertheless, the show debuted to very high ratings, 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: By 2005, Lewinsky found that she could not escape the spotlight in the U.S., which made both her professional and personal life difficult. Her thesis was titled, "In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third-Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity". For the next decade, she tried to avoid publicity. Lewinsky did correspond in 2009 with scholar
Ken Gormley, who was writing an in-depth study of the Clinton scandals. Lewinsky wrote to Gormley that Clinton had lied under oath when asked detailed and specific questions about his relationship with her. In 2013, the items associated with Lewinsky that Bleiler had turned over to Starr were put up for auction by Bleiler's ex-wife, who had come into possession of them. During her decade out of the public eye, Lewinsky lived in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Portland but, due to her notoriety, had trouble finding employment in the communications and marketing jobs for nonprofit organizations where she had been interviewed. She continued to maintain that the relationship was mutual and wrote that while Clinton took advantage of her, it was a consensual relationship. She added: "I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened." In July 2014, Lewinsky was interviewed in a three-part television special for the
National Geographic Channel, titled
The 90s: The Last Great Decade. The series looked at various events of the 1990s, including the scandal that brought Lewinsky into the national spotlight. This was Lewinsky's first such interview in more than ten years. In October 2014, she took a public stand against
cyberbullying, calling herself "
patient zero" of online harassment. In March 2015, Lewinsky continued to speak out publicly against cyberbullying, delivering a
TED talk calling for a more compassionate Internet. In June 2015, she became an ambassador and strategic advisor for anti-bullying organization
Bystander Revolution. The same month, she gave an anti-cyberbullying speech at the
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In September 2015, Lewinsky was interviewed by
Amy Robach on
Good Morning America, about Bystander Revolution's Month of Action campaign for National Bullying Prevention Month. Lewinsky wrote the foreword to an October 2017 book by Sue Scheff and Melissa Schorr,
Shame Nation: The Global Epidemic of Online Hate. In October 2017, Lewinsky tweeted the
#MeToo hashtag to indicate that she was a victim of sexual harassment or sexual assault, but did not provide details. She wrote an essay in the March 2018 issue of
Vanity Fair in which she did not directly explain why she used the #MeToo hashtag in October. She did write that looking back at her relationship with Bill Clinton, although it was consensual, because he was 27 years older than she and in a position with a lot more power than she had, in her opinion the relationship constituted an "abuse of power" on Clinton's part. She added that she had been diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress disorder due to what she had experienced after the relationship was disclosed. In May 2018, Lewinsky was disinvited from an event hosted by
Town & Country when Bill Clinton accepted an invitation to the event. In September 2018, Lewinsky spoke at a conference in
Jerusalem. Following her speech, she sat for a Q&A session with the host, journalist
Yonit Levi. The first question Levi asked was whether Lewinsky thinks that Clinton owes her a private apology. Lewinsky refused to answer the question, and walked off the stage. She later tweeted that the question was posed in a pre-event meeting with Levi, and Lewinsky told her that such a question was off limits. A spokesman for the
Israel Television News Company, which hosted the conference and is Levi's employer, responded that Levi had kept all the agreements she made with Lewinsky and honored her requests. In 2019, she was interviewed by
John Oliver on his HBO show
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where they discussed the importance of solving the problem of
public shaming and how her situation may have been different if social media had existed at the time that
the scandal broke in the late 1990s. On August 6, 2019, it was announced that the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal would be the focus of the third season of the television series
American Crime Story with the title
Impeachment. The season began production in October 2020. Lewinsky was a co-producer. It consists of 10 episodes and premiered on September 7, 2021. Lewinsky noted that: In October 2021, she was executive producer of an HBO documentary
15 Minutes of Shame, directed by
Max Joseph, which focused on public shaming,
online shaming, and
ostracism. Lewinsky started her own production company, Alt Ending Productions, and signed a
first look deal with
20th Television in June 2021. In February 2025, she launched her podcast,
Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky. ==References==