Monica Lewinsky gets emotional talking about what happened after 1998. (Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images)
Nearly 30 years after one of the most infamous presidential scandals in US history, Monica Lewinsky is making it clear that the emotional fallout never fully went away.
On a recent episode of her podcast, Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky, the 52-year-old sat down with actress Jameela Jamil, and the conversation quickly turned personal. Instead of focusing on Jamil’s story, the actress flipped things around and asked Lewinsky to reflect on how she feels today about her affair with then-President Bill Clinton and the brutal backlash that followed.
Jamil, 39, didn’t sugarcoat the question, asking Lewinsky directly, “How do you feel now? Having your life, your identity, your appearance in particular picked apart, where are you at with all of this?”
Lewinsky answered with surprising honesty, explaining that she’s in a better place than she used to be, but that healing has been a long process.
“I think I fall in a place where I feel more confident in myself as a person … I feel like every time I’m able to be more myself in the world and have it reflected back to me that that’s what’s been received, I think that I shed skin of trauma for myself from the older days,” Lewinsky said.
It’s a powerful statement, especially considering how publicly she was torn apart after the scandal exploded in 1998. And when Jamil pointed out that Lewinsky now has a platform to defend herself in a way she didn’t back then, Lewinsky admitted that even with everything she’s built, the fear still sticks with her.
“Yes. But I don’t always [push back]… I still live in a lot of fear … It just may sound crazy, which is almost like an earthquake will happen and everything I’ve built in the last 11 years—oh gosh, it is making me emotional—will be taken away again, and I’ll somehow find myself without purpose or, you know, without an income,” Lewinsky said.
That moment hit especially hard, because it shows that even decades later, the experience still feels like something that could come crashing back at any moment.
So how does she deal with that kind of anxiety? Lewinsky says she tries to stay grounded in the present instead of letting the past take over.
“I think … it’s just trying to hold on to what’s now and not what was,” Lewinsky said.
