Monica Lewinsky is ready to speak her truth in a way she never has before, she revealed in a new profile in Rolling Stone.
To promote her new Wondery podcast, Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern opened up about her dating life. It’s been tough at times, she said, since “I still have lots of issues.”
“I’m not on the apps,” she explained. “I am like, ‘I can’t. I’m going to be catfished. I am so gullible.’ I think it’s a level of trust that is just not quite there yet.”
She said most of her connections come through friends, “mainly setups,” but she described an active dating life.
“I date. I have relationships, situationships, all the things,” she said. “I’ve had connections with some extraordinary men. I’ve been really lucky. Not lucky enough that it’s been with someone where it’s worked out at the right time. It just hasn’t.”
When Lewinsky’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton came to light in 1998, her life changed forever at age 24. The mostly negative media frenzy that followed engulfed her and made turning over a new leaf difficult. She told Rolling Stone, however, that society at large has since been a lot kinder to her.
“A lot of people talk to me about wishing they had made different choices at the time, the jokes they told or the way they thought about it,” she said.
In the immediate wake of the scandal, Lewinsky leaned into fame by making appearances on television and launching a line of handbags. But she disappeared from public life soon thereafter because, “ultimately, it didn’t feel satisfying.”
She told Rolling Stone that she tried to start over by moving to England and going to grad school there, but “it didn’t work.” She still couldn’t get a job because of the “stigma” attached to her name. Also, it was 2008, she added: “Hillary was running.”
Lewinsky has since made other forays into public life with her “Price of Shame” Ted Talk, essays in Vanity Fair, modeling to get out the vote, and co-producing Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series about the scandal.
But she admitted that she still holds back.
“The part of me that makes a joke on Twitter or can write an article, it’s hiding still a little bit,” she said. “I am excited but terrified about doing a podcast. This is a big thing for me.”
