Monica Lewinsky: Bill Clinton Should 'Want To Apologize'

Monica Lewinsky: Bill Clinton Should 'Want To Apologize'

With the TV series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” of which she is a co-producer, premiering Tuesday night, Monica Lewinsky joins TODAY for an exclusive live interview. “As a producer, I’m very proud of the project,” she says. “It is a dramatization, but there is an enormous amount of emotional truth.”

FX’s latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story looks at the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, suggesting that perjury and obstruction, which were the charges the House—though not the Senate—found Clinton guilty of, is the equivalent of the murders previous seasons explored. While the media firestorm at the time focused on the political dynamics, reverting to the default framing of a gladiatorial (courtroom) combat between two men, this post-#MeToo production foregrounds the women who were subject to Clinton’s advances instead of relegating them to the sidelines of their own story.

However, time has done nothing to make the ethical issues less murky. Unlike, say, the Weinstein saga, this was never a simple case of a powerful man pressuring women into doing what he wanted but that they didn’t. Some of the women Clinton put the moves on were definitely consenting while others found his attentions decidedly unwelcome. Whatever their reaction, all ended up being used as pawns by partisan interests, losing agency over their own experience.

The Clinton impeachment was also the first major excursion into the post-truth world, where conspiracy theories and outright lies amplified by compliant media outlets and social media in its infancy were deployed as political weapons to muddy the waters, mobilize the base, and discredit the very notion of objective truth. However, after 20-plus years, it should be possible to separate fact from fiction. We take a look at whether American Crime Story has managed it.



The episode starts with a fulcrum moment in 1998. Fresh-faced Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein) is packing up her apartment before meeting her friend Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson) for lunch. Arriving at a food court, the unsuspecting Lewinsky is trailed by Men in Black until they ask her to accompany them to a room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where prosecutors from independent counsel Ken Starr’s office are waiting to question her, telling her, “It’s about the Paula Jones case.” Tripp urges Lewinsky to cooperate.

This is true. Within hours of getting approval to extend his inquiry to include the Lewinsky affair, Starr arranged for Tripp to lure Lewinsky to the Pentagon mall. Lewinsky ended up being questioned for 11 hours in the hotel room. “It was just like you see in the movies,” she told a Forbes 30 Under 30 conference in 2014. “Imagine, one minute I was waiting to meet a friend in the food court and the next I realized she had set me up, as two FBI agents flashed their badges at me. Immediately following, in a nearby hotel room, I was threatened with up to 27 years in jail for denying the affair in an affidavit and other alleged crimes. Twenty-seven years. When you’re only 24 yourself, that’s a long time.”



However, Lewinsky was up for a fight. Not only did she genuinely say Tripp should remain in the room because she wanted “that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me,” as depicted in the show, but when urged by the FBI agents to accompany them, her response, at least according to the New York Post, was “go fuck yourself.”

Vince Foster

In a flashback to 1993, Tripp considerately brings lunch to Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel for whom she works as an assistant. He leaves the office without touching it, drives to a park, and removes a revolver from the glove compartment. The next thing we see is his belongings being removed from his office, including a large box marked “Whitewater.”

Foster was an Arkansas friend of the Clintons who found the partisan pressures of Washington, and the resulting attacks on his integrity, too much to bear. The U.S. Park Police, the D.C. coroner, and the FBI all concluded his death was a suicide, but in some quarters the show’s accurate representation of his death will be considered invention. Multimillionaire conservative activist Richard Mellon Scaife funded a group of journalists to come up with Clinton “gotcha” pieces. One of these was Christopher Ruddy (now CEO of Newsmax), whose book about Foster’s death alleged that he was in fact murdered by the Clintons because he knew too much about their financial malfeasance/his own affair with Hillary Clinton.

Although Foster’s death had already been the subject of two investigations, in 1995 a young attorney named Brett Kavanaugh convinced his boss, Kenneth Starr, that these unsubstantiated allegations provided legal grounds for including Foster’s death in the Starr inquiry. Although this investigation too concluded Foster had committed suicide, the “mysterious” death of Vincent Foster has remained a right-wing conspiracy talking point, leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to refer in 2016 to Foster’s “very fishy” death, asserting Foster “knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”