Lewinsky: I was no devil in a blue dress
Clinton intern opens up about ’90s stain on the nation
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. sat quiet and practically deserted on Nov. 15, 1995, the second day of a federal government shutdown. Most of the West Wing’s full-time staffers had been told to stay home, leaving only a skeleton crew of essential personnel and interns to keep the White House running. During a birthday party for a staffer late in the day, Monica Lewinsky, a 22year-old intern in Chief of Staff Leon Panetta’s office, realized that the straps of her thong underwear were peeking above the waist of her pants. “Instead of pulling my trousers up, like I would in any other instance, I didn’t,” Lewinsky said. “It was noticeable to everybody else in the room. “But [Bill Clinton] noticed.”
In an in-depth interview for “The Clinton Affair,” a six-part documentary series premiering Sunday night on A&E, Lewinsky delved into the rise, fall and, 20 years on, reappraisal of her torrid fling with a sitting president that sparked a political tinderbox still smoldering today.
Later on that November night, Lewinsky passed by the office of White House Senior Advisor George Stephanopoulos and saw President Clinton alone inside.
“He motioned me in,” said Lewinsky. “I don’t think my heart had ever beat that fast.
“Unbeknownst to me, I was on the precipice of the rabbit hole.”
THAT night marked the beginning of a two-year relationship between the leader of the free world — a married father to a young daughter — and his intern, but it started, Lewinsky felt at the time, as an innocent “crush.”
A recent graduate of Lewis & Clark College, Lewinsky found herself smitten with the smooth-talking, sax-playing man more than twice her age shortly after beginning her unpaid internship — her first job — at the White House.
The day after she finally spoke with President Clinton during a White House event, Lewinsky bolted home during her lunch break to change into the same green suit she’d had on during their meeting.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’ll notice me again,’ ” Lewinsky recalled. “And notice me, he did.”
The relationship began with a simmer — a locking of the eyes, a shared smile — before rising to a boil during the shutdown.
But it was never about the sex, at least not in whole, Lewinsky insists.
“It just felt like connecting,” she said, detailing how they would talk about everything from their days to global affairs. “I think it meant more to me that someone who other people desired, desired me. However wrong it was . . . at 22 years old, that was how it felt.”
Clinton would sing Otis Redding to her — “Try a Little Tenderness” — and showered her with gifts, including, one day, a hat pin and a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
On that February 1997 day, “We moved to the bathroom and were more intimate. There was some attention paid on me and then I was reciprocat-
ing, where up until that point he had always stopped before completion on his part,” Lewinsky said, trying to delicately explain the encounter. “So that finished and then I hugged him after.
“And off I went,” wearing a navy blue Gap dress.
‘IWENT to dinner that night,” Lewinsky recalled. “None of these people said to me, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go to the bathroom, you’ve got stuff all over your dress.”
In fact, Lewinsky didn’t spot the telltale semen stains, physical proof of her and Clinton’s dalliance, until months after the encounter, when she pulled out the infamous blue button-down for Thanksgiving.
She went on to testify that she thought the discoloration “could be spinach dip or something.”
Lewinsky and Clinton’s last physical encounter came in December 1997, before the relationship buckled under the strain of independent counsel Ken Starr’s probe into Clinton, initially on unrelated scandals.
Clinton denied in a sworn deposition having sexual relations with Lewinsky — a claim undermined by the blue dress, which Lewinsky was encouraged to keep by confi- dante-turned-Starr-informant Linda Tripp (inset, far left).
“There were always narratives of secrecy in this relationship,” said Lewinsky. “We were both cautious, but not cautious enough.”
Two decades removed from the end of her affair with the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere, Lewinsky, now 45, looks back with understanding of her naivete as a 22-year-old, and a reappraisal of the relationship through the lens of the #MeToo movement.
“It’s not as if it didn’t register with me that he was the president,” she said. “I was completely at his mercy.”