Woody: I like #MeToo, and I’m innocent
BILL CLINTON hasn’t spoken to Monica Lewinsky since their sex scandal more than 20 years ago — and doesn’t think he owes her a personal apology.
“I have never talked to her,” Clinton said in a testy interview with NBC News that aired Monday. “But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.”
Clinton’s comments came amid questions about the #MeToo movement, which has exposed sexual misconduct against women by scores of powerful men.
Lewinsky penned an Op-Ed for Vanity Fair in March, in which the former White House staffer described how her own tryst with the President may have been influenced by his being the most powerful man on the globe.
Lewinsky contended that their relationship “was not sexual assault” but “constituted a gross abuse of power.”
While she didn’t directly respond to Clinton’s comments, reposted the piece to Twitter on Monday, saying she was “grateful to the myriad people who have helped me evolve + gain perspective in the past 20 years.”
But Clinton, who was plugging his new book alongside co-author James Patterson, defended his response to the Lewinsky scandal when asked during the interview if he would have done anything differently.
“Because people would be using the facts instead of the imagined facts,” the 71-yearold ex-President said. “If the facts were the same today, I wouldn’t.”
Clinton initially claimed the affair with his former intern didn’t happen when the scandal surfaced in 1998. He later came clean during a televised address.
When asked by NBC News if he thought Lewinsky deserved a direct apology, Clinton said, “No, I do not.”
A subsequent investigation into the Oval Office tryst and his response led to Clinton’s impeachment — making him just the second President to go through the process. The Senate acquitted him in early 1999.
The fiery Clinton, who offered some support to the #MeToo movement, boasted he made the right decision to fight the messy impeachment process, rather than resign.
“I think I did the right thing,” Clinton told NBC News. “I defended the Constitution."
He also complained that President Trump, WOODY ALLEN says he’s a big supporter of the #MeToo movement – and believes he’s been unfairly lumped in with the slew of Hollywood figures accused of sexual misconduct.
The director, who was accused by adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7, said he should be the “poster boy” of #MeToo because he’s worked with hundreds of actresses in Hollywood but has never been accused of “any kind of impropriety at all” by them.
“If there is something like the #MeToo movement now, you root for them, you want them to bring to justice these terrible harassers, these people that do all these terrible things. And I think that’s a good thing,” Allen says in a new TV interview with the Argentinean show “Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism for All).”
“What bothers me is that I get linked in with them,” Allen continued. “People who have been accused by 20 women, 50 women, 100 women of abuse and abuse and abuse — and I, who was only accused by one woman in a child custody case which was looked at and proven to be untrue, I get lumped in with these people.”
The molestation allegation against Allen, 82, initially surfaced in 1992 and led to an investigation by Connecticut officials. Charges were never filed.