Steady work has proved elusive for Monica Lewinsky in the 16 years since news of the Clinton sex scandal broke.
The most famous intern in history laments her unemployment in a forthcoming Vanity Fair essay, revealing how her career in communications and branding has failed to take off thanks to “what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my ‘history.’”
“I was never ‘quite right’ for the position,” Lewinsky, 40, writes. “In some cases, I was right for all the wrong reasons, as in, ‘Of course, your job would require you to attend our events.’ And, of course, these would be events at which press would be in attendance.”
Lewinsky broke her silence about her sexcapades with President Bill Clinton in a 1999 Barbara Walters interview. She cooperated with author Andrew Morton on his book, “Monica’s Story,” sat for an HBO documentary and gave other interviews.
But she later ducked the media glare to attend the London School of Economics, earning a graduate degree in 2006.
I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship
In excerpts of her essay posted Tuesday, Lewinsky says she stayed silent during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential race to avoid becoming a distraction. With another Clinton campaign possibly looming, she found herself “gun-shy yet again.”
But she decided to stop “tiptoeing around my past — and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet.”
She said the 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after he was outed, moved her to break her recent silence. She explained that Clementi’s death had her mother “reliving 1998.”
“She was replaying those weeks when she stayed by my bed, night after night, because I, too, was suicidal,” Lewinsky writes, adding she never tried to commit suicide.
Lewinsky says she is ready to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” She says she “deeply” regrets the scandal, and insists her romance with Clinton was consensual.
“Sure, my boss took advantage of me,” she writes, “but I will always remain firm on this point: It was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”
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