Monica's # MeToo awakening
Finaly sleaze Bill what he is
IN 2014, Monica Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”
Nearly four years later, the promise of permanent firmness has softened. Lewinsky’s finger of blame has shifted — away from the media, from special prosecutor Ken Starr, and even from Hillary Clinton (who once famously labeled her a “narcissistic loony toon’’ in a letter to a friend). She’s taking aim at the man who did her wrong, who’s personally responsible for turning her name into the punch line of an X-rated joke: Former President Bill Clinton. Finally. “He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet. He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better,’’ Lewinsky, now 44, writes in the same magazine’s March issue. “He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college.’’
It seems to have just dawned on her that taking advantage of this vast power imbalance to satisfy his sexual urges fits the very definition of sexual harassment. Two decades after L’affair du Monica led a president to impeachment and acquittal, nearly destroyed a former White House intern and changed forever the way those in this country think about oral sex, #MeToo is catching up to Bill Clinton. He left office incredibly popular. He almost got away with it.
But now, with politicians, columnists and Lewinsky herself, perhaps his most ardent and loyal fan, turning on him belatedly, Clinton is toxic.
I must note that we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election and today wandered the White House, rather than the woods around Chappaqua. The Democratic machine has been fiercely protective of all things Clinton, and more than willing to throw any number of women under the bus.
That changed in a big way in November. Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, long a Bill Clinton pal, now a reborn women’s champion be- lieved to have designs on a 2020 presidential run, said that in hindsight she believes Clinton should have resigned from office over his affair with Lewinsky.
Twenty years is a long time to protect a sexual villain. But the dominoes began falling one by one, with angry, anti-Clinton opinion pieces cropping up all over, including in the reliably Dem-friendly New York Times.
In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan details allegations of rape and sexual assault leveled against Bill Clinton by Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey. She writes, “the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations . . . But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation, and it was willing — eager — to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.’ ”
That includes Lewinsky, who let Bill off the hook for years. Her transformation into a woman who’s mad as hell is as striking as it is welcome. She writes, “I’ve lived for such a long time in the House of Gaslight, clinging to my experiences as they unfolded in my 20s and railing against the untruths that painted me as an unstable stalker and Servicer in Chief.’’ She describes herself as a victim of “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
“I — we — owe a huge debt of gratitude to the #MeToo and Time’s Up heroines. They are speaking volumes against the pernicious conspiracies of silence that have long protected powerful men when it comes to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and abuse of power.”
I can hear the feminists who once revered Bill Clinton while ridiculing Lewinsky shouting in unison. “You said it, sister.’’
It’s highly unlikely that Clinton, now 71, will ever face charges for sex crimes. Yet he will, and should be, shunned. His speeches, once a huge draw, should bring crickets, not cheers. Showtime, which has been adapting a novel he wrote with James Patterson into a TV series, should drop the project, or risk the ire of a femi-mob.
I’ve always thought Lewinsky was treated badly, by the Clinton machine, by Starr, by the press — but mostly by Bill himself. I’m happy to see that she finally agrees.