2/1/2024 0 Comments Is susan monica a manYet, even after that was established, the raw hatred of Lewinsky didn’t dissipate. Most of this troubling ambiguity, of course, came from the fact that Clinton wasn’t telling the truth. There was a relentlessness to the attacks on Lewinsky, though, which partly resulted from the way the picture refused to cohere: was she a strategic, self-interested genius or a delusional, naive idiot? Was she a slut or a fantasist? If she was a spoilt brat who got everything she wanted, how had she ended up with nothing? The smear even had a name: “A little bit slutty, a little bit nutty”, as coined by the team who used it against Anita Hill in 1991, when she accused the would-be supreme court justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. This was a well-worn way to discredit a woman who might reveal the sexual improprieties of a man in public office. Clearly, she was power-mad, her grandiosity and narcissism conveyed by the fact that, for her, only the president would do. This interpretation – that the intern was problematically promiscuous and “basically blackmail the president of the United States”, in the words of the talkshow host Bill Maher – was not uncommon, from Democrats as much as Republicans. Katie Couric, a mainstream news anchor, described her as a “predatory girl who had set her sights on the president”. Even before – long before – any truth in the affair had been established, Lewinsky became a hate figure. Lewinsky’s affair with Clinton was revealed by the Drudge Report, a US news-aggregation website, on 17 January 1998, the day after the FBI had detained Lewinsky in a sting operation known as Prom Night. ‘Slut-shaming’ was big in the 90s – and didn’t pretend to be anything else Now, though – thanks in part to the podcast Slow Burn, which in 2018 built an intricate, magisterial portrait of the scandal – the blaring questions mostly boil down to: is that really how we used to think? Did we genuinely find it that easy to blame a woman, any woman, for anything? Were we really so credulous in the face of powerful men that their word was untouchable by anything short of DNA evidence?Īs the US TV channel FX revisits the scandal in a 10-part drama, Impeachment: American Crime Story, soon to be shown on BBC Two, here are eight lessons we can draw from the ugly mess. What implications did it have for the policy environment? Could Clinton have got more done without it? To what degree were Starr’s tactics in pressing the impeachment part of a wider play to kill the administration by a thousand insinuations? Later, in the 00s, people started to consider the political dimension more searchingly. If impeachment was such a huge deal – the first time in more than a century it had happened to a president – how did Clinton remain in post afterwards, apparently untouched by it? It was incredibly arresting at the time, partly because of the lurid details – the stains on Lewinsky’s dress, the cigar that reportedly featured in a sex game – and partly because it was such a baffling snapshot of US politics. This apparent perjury later gave Starr grounds to argue for his impeachment. He denied any sexual activity with Lewinsky. The fallout almost cost Clinton the presidency. Tripp then passed the tapes and intel to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating the Clintons over historical property investments in Arkansas, the president’s home state. When Lewinsky, who had transferred from the White House to the Pentagon in April 1996, began confiding in her colleague in late 1997, Tripp recorded their conversations and persuaded Lewinsky to keep safe a dress with Clinton’s semen on it. Tripp, a former White House official then working at the Pentagon, already had a dim view of the Clinton administration. But perhaps it didn’t seem that high-risk to either of them: Clinton had got away with much longer affairs before – and Lewinsky didn’t see Linda Tripp coming. It was a high-risk enterprise, occurring at the president’s official residence and at a time when Clinton was accused of sexually harassing a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones. The relationship, such as it was, continued until March 1997. As an official investigation would later reveal, these included fellatio, but not penetrative sex. In November 1995, a 22-year-old White House intern called Monica Lewinsky had the first of nine sexual encounters with Bill Clinton, the 49-year‑old US president.
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