Sunday Pick: How to reclaim your narrative (w/ Monica Lewinsky) | from How to Be a Better Human

Monica Lewinsky says her relationship with then-President Bill Clinton, when she was 22, became a worldwide public humiliation after the story broke online in January 1998. She describes it as the first major news story in which the Internet displaced traditional news: online comments and emails accelerated judgment and fueled virtual mobs. Misogynistic insults reduced her to a public caricature, leaving her “widely seen but known by few.” The exposure also affected her family; her younger brother entered adult life with their surname associated with a sexual act he had no part in.

After trying to retreat into private life and studying in London, Lewinsky hoped to find work and live normally, but says she was rejected after 50 job interviews. In 2014, after what she calls her “dark decade,” she published a first-person essay in Vanity Fair, her first public words in ten years. She rejects “reinvention” as a description of that change because it implies her earlier self had to be replaced. For her, reclaiming her narrative meant becoming more visible as herself and making room for the person she had been, the person she became, and the person she hoped to become.

Lewinsky describes healing as a spiral rather than a straight line: what feels like a return to the beginning can still be part of moving forward. She cautions against expecting trauma to follow a universal timetable or yield to a three-step fix. Friends and family who reflected her true self helped anchor her, and she says that in her 50s she feels she has found more of herself and become more comfortable with who she is. Resilience, in her account, means recovering more quickly and catastrophizing less; reaching a better place does not erase what happened.

She says she knew Clinton was married and that her actions could hurt people who had no choice in the situation, while placing greater responsibility on the married person. With age, she sees the age gap differently and says she could not now imagine a relationship with a 24-year-old. She distinguishes her experience from cases in which women were forced into sexual relationships with bosses, while maintaining that power differences still matter. She also separates accountability from reflexive pile-ons: harmful conduct should have consequences, but people need room for dialogue, grace, and possible redemption.

For Lewinsky, forgiveness does not excuse behavior and may benefit the person forgiving more than the person forgiven. She believes those responsible should make amends and take responsibility, though that does not always happen; she says no key player in 1998 personally made amends to her. Some people later apologized for laughing at jokes about her. During the investigation, she says being lied about and thrown under the bus intensified her need to defend herself and hold on to her account of events; she also understood that insistence as a way of asserting agency.

Humor helped Lewinsky survive, and she says laughter and gratitude can shift how people feel. She trusted her instinct to include a joke in her TED Talk despite advice that it might reinforce a sexualized framing of her story. Positive responses to that talk and her Vanity Fair essay helped her and her family shift the private and public narrative and brought a sense of healing. She also brought the scripted series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox to 20th Television and executive produced it because she understood what it meant to be globally misunderstood as a young woman; the series follows Knox’s adjustment after prison and the effects on her family, rather than ending at her release. Lewinsky says sharing painful experiences can help others and build understanding, but she would change the trauma rather than choose it for that benefit.