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Monica Lewinsky
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Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973) is an American woman with whom then-United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "inappropriate relationship" while Lewinsky 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.
ca Lewinsky was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Southern California on the west side of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills.
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Encyclopedia
Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973) is an American woman with whom then-United States President Bill Clinton admitted to having had an "inappropriate relationship" while Lewinsky 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.
Biography
Early life
Monica Lewinsky was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in Southern California on the west side of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills. She is of Russian Jewish descent. Her father is Dr. Bernhard Lewinsky, an oncologist; her mother, Marcia Lewis, is an author. Her parents are divorced. Her stepfather, R. Peter Straus, is a media executive. For her primary education she attended the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air. She later attended Beverly Hills High School, but transferred to and graduated from Pacific Hills School, formerly known as Bel Air Prep in 1991.
She attended two-year community college, Santa Monica College, and completed her undergraduate studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, graduating with a psychology degree in 1995. Lewinsky moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the White House as an unpaid summer intern starting in July 1995, moving to a paid position there in December 1995.
Scandal
Between November 1995 and March 1997, Lewinsky had an intimate relationship with President Bill Clinton. She later testified that the relationship involved oral sex 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 and former Arkansas state employee 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. Lewinsky's name surfaced during legal proceedings connected to the latter matter, when Jones's lawyers sought corroborating evidence of Clinton's conduct to substantiate Jones's 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 infamously known as "the blue dress."
While under oath, Clinton denied having had "a sexual affair," "sexual relations," or "a sexual relationship" with Lewinsky, and on January 26, 1998 claimed "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" in a nationally televised White House news conference.
Clinton also said, "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship" which he defended as truthful on August 17, 1998 hearing because of the use of the present tense, famously arguing "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" (i.e., he was not, at the time he made that statement, still having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky). Under pressure from Starr, who as Clinton learned had obtained from Lewinsky a blue dress with Clinton's semen stain, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that the President had inserted a cigar into her vagina, Clinton admitted that he lied to the American people and that he had had inappropriate intimate contact with Lewinsky. Clinton denied having committed perjury because, according to Clinton, the legal definition of oral sex was mutually exclusive of "sex" per se. In addition, relying upon 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 because certain acts were performed on him, not by him, 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.
Both Clinton and Lewinsky were called before a grand jury; Clinton testified via closed-circuit television, Lewinsky in person. Given an opportunity to offer final words on the matter, Lewinsky told the jury, "I hate Linda Tripp."
After the scandal
The affair led to a period of pop culture celebrity for Lewinsky as a younger-generation focus of a political storm. Around early 1999, Lewinsky reportedly said "I'm well-known for something that isn't great to be well-known for."
On March 3, 1999, she appeared on ABC's 20/20. She also appeared on MTV's The Tom Green Show in which the host took her to his parents' home in Ottawa in search of fabric for her new business. Lewinsky 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 sixteen months. She was also the host of the short-lived reality television dating program called Mr. Personality in 2003.
After Clinton's autobiography My Life appeared in 2004, Lewinsky said in an interview with the British tabloid Daily Mail:
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 at the LSE was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third-person effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”
Further reading
- Berlant, Lauren, and Duggan, Lisa. Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the Public Interest (Sexual Cultures). New York: New York University Press, 2001.
- Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. New York: Knopf, 2004.
- Kalb, Marvin. One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism. New York: Free Press, 2001.
- Morton, Andrew: Monica's Story. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. An authorized biography with interview.
External links
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