Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern whose affair with Bill Clinton nearly brought down the then US president, says her boss took advantage of her, but the affair was consensual. Saying “It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress”, she breaks her silence over the affair in the 1990s with an unmistakable reference to her dress stained with presidential semen.
“I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton,” says Lewinsky after keeping virtually silent for over ten years on the political scandal that followed. “So silent, in fact,” she writes in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out?” “I can assure you that nothing could be farther from the truth,” she says.
Clinton at first denied a sexual relationship with Lewinsky while she worked as an intern at the White House in 1995 and 1996.
But once it became known that she had kept “the blue dress” without getting it dry-cleaned, Clinton admitted to having had an “inappropriate relationship” with her.
In 1998, Republican-led House of Representatives impeached Clinton on the grounds that he had lied about the affair. But the Republicans failed to oust him as Clinton was subsequently acquitted of all impeachment charges during a trial by the Senate.
Washington Post opinion writer Ruth Marcus suggested that Lewinsky “may not have intended it this way, but she just did Hillary Clinton a big favour”. The “timing of Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair piece -- as the political world awaits Hillary Clinton’s presidential determination, as Chelsea Clinton prepares to have the first child -- would seem not exactly fortuitous for the Clintons,” she says. But in Marcus’s view, Lewinsky’s piece defuses Republican Senator Rand Paul’s line of attack -- whether Democrats in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, should consort with a “sexual predator” like Bill Clinton.
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