Shamed in the spotlight
Monica Lewinsky glad to see apologies over mistreatment of pop star Spears
Monica Lewinsky is pleased to see people apologizing for mistreating Britney Spears and other women.
Lewinsky, 48, has said she relates to Spears because the public treated them both negatively for their time in the spotlight.
Lewinsky has said her own situation — which saw her affair with former U.S. president Bill Clinton as a White House intern ultimately leading to Clinton's impeachment — is very different from that of Spears because Lewinsky “made a mistake,” whereas Spears didn't.
Lewinsky — a producer on the new FX show Impeachment: American Crime Story, which dramatizes the affair — is pleased to see a shift in public attitude.
“I think it's long overdue and wonderful to see it happening for different women in different arenas and scenarios,” she told Instyle magazine. “I made a mistake. Britney didn't. There were other young women this happened to, and there's an enormous amount of collateral damage.
“So I think it's not just an apology to a person, it's an apology to how you've affected a culture. What is sexual agency? What does it mean? It's not surprising that this de-objectifying of women is happening alongside the #Metoo movement. They braid together in a way that makes sense.”
Lewinsky met Spears, 39, in passing in the early 2000s.
“But at that time I wasn't able to have the perspective to recognize, `Oh, this is happening to other women.' When the fat-shaming happened to Jessica Simpson (in 2009), I thought, `Oh, OK. This didn't just happen to me. This is happening now to other people too.' Not that that's a good thing.”
Lewinsky said there is something beautiful about resilience.
“When you have made a colossal mistake like I did so early in your life, and lost so much because of it, the idea of making a mistake is catastrophic,” she said. “And yet in order to move forward, I have to take risks. I have to try things. I have to continue to define who I am.”