It’s the fall of 2018. I’m sitting on the floor of my mom’s apartment surrounded by My Past. I’ve been dismantling boxes for hours in an attempt to organize, cleaning out things that once seemed important enough to save, but now no longer serve me. The stacks of CDs get tossed. All but one treasure: a long-lost recording of the workshop performance I attended of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway hit, In the Heights. (It was a “reading” in the basement of the Drama Book Shop in the early 2000s.) That was the best part of my organizing expedition. The worst was unearthing a stash of “memorabilia,” if you will, from the 1998 investigation: the front page of The New York Times from when I was forced to fly cross-country to be questioned by the House impeachment managers, a second front page with a grainy photograph of me being sworn in before my Senate deposition, and a faxed Xerox of a Los Angeles Times article with the headline: “The Full Monica: Victim or Vixen?”
Victim or Vixen? That’s a question as old as time immemorial: Madonna or Whore? Predator or Prey? Dressed scantily or appropriately? Is she telling the truth or lying? (Who will believe thee, Isabel?) And it’s a question that is still debated about women in general. And about me.
The debate over who gets to live in Victimville fascinates me, as a public person who has watched strangers discuss my own “victim” status at length on social media. The person at the epicenter of the experience doesn’t necessarily get to decide. No—society, like a Greek chorus, also has a say in this classification. (Whether we should or shouldn’t is a debate for another time.) And society will no doubt weigh in again on my classification—Victim or Vixen?—when people see a new docuseries I chose to participate in. (It’s titled The Clinton Affair. Bye-bye, Lewinsky scandal . . . I think 20 years is enough time to carry that mantle.)
Some closest to me asked why would I want to revisit the most painful and traumatic parts of my life—again. Publicly. On-camera. With no control of how it will be used. A bit of a head-scratcher, as my brother is fond of saying.
Do I wish I could erase my years in D.C. from memory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–style? Well, is the sky blue? But I can’t. And in order to move forward in the life I have, I must take risks—both professional and emotional. (It’s a combustible combination.) An important part of moving forward is excavating, often painfully, what has gone before. When politicians are asked uncomfortable questions, they often duck and dodge by saying, That’s old news. It’s in the past. Yes. That’s exactly where we need to start to heal—with the past. But it’s not easy.
As much as I agonized over whether to participate in the documentary, it paled in comparison to the agony of preparing to be interviewed—for what turned out to be over 20 hours. For context, the whole series is only 6.5 hours, with interviews from more than 50 people. There is irony to my statement in the series about falling down the rabbit hole at 22. Again and again over the course of filming the show, I would scoot off to storage, where I have boxes of legal papers, news clips, and all six volumes of the original Starr Report, to “quickly” fact-check something, only to spend three hours on the hard, cold concrete floor reading teeny-font print testimony—my own and others’—that harpooned me back to 1998. (The only interruption, as every storage-goer can attest, was the need to stand up and wave my arms every 10 minutes so the lights would come back on.)
Filming the documentary forced me to acknowledge to myself past behavior that I still regret and feel ashamed of. There were many, many moments when I questioned not just the decision to participate, but my sanity itself. Despite all of the ways I tried to protect my mental health, it was still challenging. During one therapy session, I told my therapist I was feeling especially depressed. She suggested that sometimes what we experience as depression is actually grief.
Grief. Yes, it was Grief. The process of this docuseries led me to new rooms of shame that I still needed to explore, and delivered me to Grief’s doorstep. Grief for the pain I caused others. Grief for the broken young woman I had been before and during my time in D.C., and the shame I still felt around that. Grief for having been betrayed first by someone I thought was my friend, and then by a man I thought had cared for me. Grief for the years and years lost, being seen only as “That Woman”—saddled, as a young woman, with the false narrative that my mouth was merely a receptacle for a powerful man’s desire. (You can imagine how those constructs impacted my personal and professional life.) Grief for a relationship that had no normal closure, and instead was slowly dismantled by two decades of Bill Clinton’s behavior that eventually (eventually!) helped me understand how, at 22, I took the small, narrow sliver of the man I knew and mistook it for the whole.
The process became meta. As the project re-examined the narratives, both personal and political, surrounding the events of 1998, so did I. I revisited then-President Bill Clinton’s famous finger-wagging Oval Office interview from early 1998, in which I was anointed “That Woman,” and was transported to my apartment in the Watergate apartment complex. Sitting on the edge of my grandma’s bed and watching it unfold on TV, 24-year-old me was scared and hurt, but also happy that he was denying our relationship, because I didn’t want him to have to resign. (“I didn’t want to be responsible for that,” I thought at the time, absolving anyone else of responsibility.)
Forty-five-year-old me sees that footage very differently. I see a sports coach signposting the playbook for the big game. Instead of backing down amid the swirling scandal and telling the truth, Bill instead threw down the gauntlet that day in the Oval Office: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” With that, the demonization of Monica Lewinsky began. As it so often does, power throws a protective cape around the shoulders of the man, and he dictates the spin by denigrating the less powerful woman.
But memories are a funny thing. There is footage in the series that, at the time, had not been seen publicly before—from a presidential radio address I attended. The documentary team asked me to watch it so they could get my reactions. In the days leading up to that viewing, I realized what a strange experience it was to see footage of something which, for two decades, had lived only as a memory. I worried that I would be confronted with a vastly different reality. Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—it was not. I grew wistful watching a young me who was so excited at the time (though for all of the wrong reasons). A young me unaware that within six months, someone I considered a friend would begin surreptitiously recording our private chats—and unaware that in a year’s time, the life I had known would be over.
Memories also surprised me. Ones from earlier times in D.C. seem unmarred by the tragedy they literally caused. Watching myself on-camera, I was disconcerted with a side of embarrassment to realize that I still smile, and even light up at times, while sharing those recollections. In much the same way that divorced parents, no matter how contentious the separation, look back fondly on memories of falling in love and raising their children, I still cherish those memories. They haven’t been totally annihilated by the complex and painful events that followed.
Even as I began my own self-reckoning, in 2018, another shift occurred. After occupying distant orbits for two decades, we finally reached the perigee. For the first time in more than 15 years, Bill Clinton was being asked directly about what transpired. If you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesn’t want to answer. But in June of this year, during an interview on NBC, Craig Melvin asked Bill Clinton those questions. Was I owed a direct apology from him? Bill’s indignant answer: “No.”
He contended that he had apologized publicly in 1998. I did as well. My first public words after the scandal—uttered in an interview with Barbara Walters on March 3, 1999—were an apology directly to Chelsea and Mrs. Clinton. And if I were to see Hillary Clinton in person today, I know that I would summon up whatever force I needed to again acknowledge to her—sincerely—how very sorry I am. I know I would do this, because I have done it in other difficult situations related to 1998. I have also written letters apologizing to others—including some who also wronged me gravely. I believe that when we are trapped by our inability to evolve, by our inability to empathize humbly and painfully with others, then we remain victims ourselves.
So, what feels more important to me than whether I am owed or deserving of a personal apology is my belief that Bill Clinton should want to apologize. I’m less disappointed by him, and more disappointed for him. He would be a better man for it . . . and we, in turn, a better society.
In 2004, while promoting his autobiography, My Life, Bill Clinton gave an extensive interview to Dan Rather. Rather asked Clinton why he had conducted an inappropriate relationship with me. (Discussions of this topic seldom acknowledge that I was not the first person with whom he stepped outside his marriage.)
His reason: “Because I could.” (And, yes, that’s a direct quote.)
Why did I choose to participate in this docuseries? One main reason: because I could. Throughout history, women have been traduced and silenced. Now, it’s our time to tell our own stories in our own words. Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Blair Foster, the Emmy-winning director of the series, is testing that idea in myriad ways. She pointed out to me during one of the tapings that almost all the books written about the Clinton impeachment were written by men. History literally being written by men. In contrast, the docuseries not only includes more women’s voices, but embodies a woman’s gaze: two of the three main editors and four of the five executive producers are women. (The one man is Academy Award winner Alex Gibney.) I may not like everything that has been put in the series or left out, but I like that the perspective is being shaped by women. Yes, the process of filming has been exceedingly painful. But I hope that by participating, by telling the truth about a time in my life—a time in our history—I can help ensure that what happened to me never happens to another young person in our country again.
So, Victim or Vixen? Maybe, in 2018, it’s a question we should no longer be asking.
The Clinton Affair premieres on Sunday, November 18, on A&E.
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