American activist, television personality, fashion designer, and former White House intern. President Bill Clinton admitted to having had what he called an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky while she worked at the White House in 1995–1996. In 1998 she thus became the focus of a sex-scandal that rocked the presidency. The affair and its repercussions (which included Clinton’s impeachment) became known later as the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal.
Monica’s parents had been married four years when she was born and her brother Michael followed on 30 December 1977. The two kids grew up with a life of privilege in Beverly Hills, California. When she was 14, on 21 September 1987, her parents had a messy divorce. Her mother got a restraining order to keep her father from “threatening and assaulting the family.” He acknowledged that they lived beyond their means and owed more than $100,000 in back taxes, but denied abuse.
Her mother, Marcia Lewis, is an author of an unauthorized tell-all book, “The Private Lives of the Three Tenors,” about the alleged sex lives of Pavarotti, Jose Carreras, and Placido Domingo. Her dad was a radiologist and both had a taste for high living.
In Beverly Hills high school she appeared in school musicals and was named in the year-book, “the girl most likely to get her name in lights.” A pretty girl, she was always a bit on the heavy side, with big, lustrous black hair. Monica graduated from a posh prep school in 1991 that cost $12,000 a year tuition. She briefly went to Santa Monica college before transferring in 1993 to Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR where she made the dean’s list.
In May 1995, she earned a degree in psychology and moved to Washington DC where her mom was living. She began a job at the White House as a staffer, a 21-year-old political intern. In 1997, she became buddies with another White House employee, Linda Tripp, and they became confidantes. When Tripp told attorney James Moody what she knew about Monica’s alleged affair with the President, he set up Tripp’s first meeting with special prosecutor Ken Starr’s people on 12 January 1998. On the following day Tripp was “wired” with a tape recorder strapped to her body in order to record what Lewinsky said about her sex life. On 20 January 1998, Clinton categorically denied any trysts, “I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman.”
Ken Starr had been deeply involved in an investigation of President Clinton for the past four years. He needed Lewinsky’s testimony, and on 28 July 1998, he granted Monica and her mother full immunity in exchange for testimony. She had fired her attorney William Ginsburg on June 2 and hired Jacob Stein and Plato Cacheris. On 6 August 1998, she testified about her relationship with Clinton before the grand jury. She related how she began work at the White House in July 1995, and began to make eye contact with the president, a mutual flirtation. On 15 November 1995, he invited her into his private study where they kissed. They had their first sexual encounter that evening with the second two days later and a third on New Year’s Eve. The testimony included details of an 18-month affair with over a dozen sexual encounters in which she performed oral sex, and included the physical evidence of a semen-stained dress which she had kept. There were some exchanges of gifts. In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon.
On 17 August 1998, Clinton testified that he had “misled people” and had indeed had “an inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky. On 9 September 1998, the Starr report reached Congress, recommending impeachment of President Clinton for lying under oath, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Lewinsky gave her deposition for the Impeachment Proceedings on 1 February 1999. On 12 February 1999, President Clinton was acquitted.
In March 1999, Lewinsky appeared on TV in her first interview, conducted by Barbara Walters and attracting 70 million viewers. She described her near-suicidal depression, her lifelong struggle with weight, an abortion and her obsessive sexual attraction to the president. At times she seemed a love-struck adolescent and at other times the wounded victim of a cruel prosecutor. Her book, “Monica’s Story,” is pending, having already brought her $1.5 million in advances.
In 2003, she landed a new job–this one as host of FOX network’s reality show, “Mr. Personality,” featuring average-looking young men wearing masks as they pursue a gorgeous woman. The show made its debut on 21 April 2003.
By 2005, Lewinsky found that she could not escape the spotlight in the U.S., which made both her professional and personal life difficult. She stopped selling her handbag line and moved to London. 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 was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third-person effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”
Lewinsky decided to leave the public spotlight to pursue a master’s degree in psychology in London. In 2014, she returned to public view as a social activist speaking out against cyberbullying, from which she personally suffered when publicly ridiculed on the internet regarding the scandal.
Link to Wikipedia biography