For those of you who were alive in 1998, not just followed politics or read the news, but simply had a heartbeat and were old enough to talk, Monica Lewinsky was an omnipresent figure. The White House intern whose affair with the president led to an impeachment, countless hours of congressional hearings, and millions of magazine and internet headlines, was mentioned so much in casual conversation you would be forgiven for thinking that she was a close friend or coworker. Her fashion choices were front page news. She was on SNL and in music lyrics. Her last name became synonymous with oral sex. There was no escaping her even if you tried, and by the end of that year, we sure did try (there's a reason the Democrats did well in those Midterms despite their party's president getting impeached). The reality is that by the end of 1998 we all pretty much wanted to be rid of Monica Lewinsky. Whether or not we agreed with what happened or our opinions of her, she was someone we wanted lining the pop culture waste bin, who would disappear without a trace, a scourge that we wanted outside of all sight.
Except, of course, we forgot that Monica Lewinsky was not just a headline, not just a late night punchline, not just the owner of the world's most famous blue dress. She was also a person. And not a movie star or a president or a queen or a star athlete, someone who was well-suited for the rigors of such public intensity, who had years of public goodwill to fall back upon. She was just a person like you-and-me that, overnight, became the most famous woman on earth. We'll likely never see something like it again. And being that she was a person, one who had no say in what would happen with the rest of her life, we should have had more empathy for her. She was 22-years-old when she made a mistake. As she speaks to in her TED talk, how many of us have done things that we wouldn't want to be defined by at 22? All of us do. All of us did stupid things at 22 that we regret, that we would hate to have in public, that we would hate being our signature act on this planet. Youthful indiscretions are frequently brushed aside with pity for the situation. I don't know what it was about Monica Lewinsky that made us forget that, but we did, and we continually do it. We get people shaming Jennifer Lawrence for having nude photos on her phone despite the fact that she was hacked. We frequently brush aside empathy for mistakes and dismiss valid charges of discrimination in the name of what? Moral prudence? Glad-it's-not-me? Because it could be, and that's really the horrible thing here-it's not just compassion we should be feeling for Monica Lewinsky, it's also a bit of self-preservation. There-but-by-the-grace-of-God-go-I. If you don't have a skeleton or two in your closet, go ahead and cast a stone, but I doubt anyone would be willing to take that karmic risk.
The reality is that even now, over a decade later, Ms. Lewinsky still has to be double-and-triple-guessed by the media and public. People frequently say "why now?" to her, assuming that she's trying to squeeze a little bit of publicity out of a potential run for president by Hillary Clinton. To them I have two responses: one, when did Monica Lewinky EVER seem like a publicity hound? This is a woman who basically took on celebrity jobs initially just to pay off her legal fees. Whose return to the private sector led to her seemingly being unemployable despite having credentials that would normally have afforded her employment. Her hopes of a relationship were dashed-who wanted to bring home the most famous adulteress of the 20th Century? Had she wanted to, she could have made a small fortune becoming a celebrity shill, smearing the Clintons (it's hard to imagine that there isn't more to her story than hasn't been released to the media). She didn't though, and the reality is that she's displayed a lot more dignity in the face of a scandal than most people would have been able to muster.
And secondly, Bill Clinton, whom I have great admiration for as a president and public servant, got to rehabilitate himself. He stayed on as president. He became the face of the Clinton Foundation, and watched as his presidency was vindicated throughout the Bush years. He's the most popular living politician in America. He got transformed from Slick Willy to the Secretary of Communicating Things, a voice of rationality and bipartisanship in a political world where only the cruel and nasty survive. He got redemption and got to be one of the great presidents. Monica Lewinsky, though? She had to remain a whore.
So this is why we owe her an apology. Yes, she made a mistake, one that she regrets perhaps more than anyone (including Bill Clinton). But we should have been better. We should have seen that the internet, the media, the country had taken it too far. She didn't deserve what we did to her reputation and her life. And thankfully she seems to have turned the other cheek, realizing this before even we did-that she shouldn't have had to endure what happened in 1998, and that countless other people who watch nude photos and personal details and their deepest secrets spill onto the internet and social media are victims, not people who deserved it for having secrets and photos and a private life. In perhaps the most-telling and intimate moment of her fantastic TED speech, she talks about her mother demanding she shower with the door open, how her mother wept for Tyler Clementi twelve years later because that so easily could have been her daughter lost in a sea of self-righteousness and internet clicks, quite literally dying from embarrassment. This had me in tears not just because it was sad, but because we all did it. We owe her an apology not because she had sex with the president, but because we made sure she got treated like a leper, a criminal, a pariah for it. That was wrong, and it opened up a world where cyber-bullying, where the Tyler Clementi's of the world get defined by shame and self-hatred and pay a price for it. That's on us as much as it is on anyone else, and enough is enough. To use a quote from her speech, shame cannot survive without empathy, and Monica, though it's seventeen years later than it should have been, you have my empathy. For your newfound cause, you have my respect. And, most definitely, you have my apologies.
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