Santa Monica College Crazy Restraining Order Professor Art Faculty Harrasment
The Great Read
Monica Lewinsky Is (Reluctantly) Revisiting 'That Woman'
As a producer on the new FX series "Impeachment," she hopes to reframe her story and heave her burgeoning Hollywood career. But that doesn't hateful the experience has been piece of cake.
Credit... Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
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"This is surreal," Monica Lewinsky kept saying.
She was trying to make her way to her seat in a crowded room where everyone wanted her attention. Information technology was a hot summer night in New York, in a blip of a pandemic reprieve before the Delta variant hit, and the city's vaccinated elite were practically vibrating with free energy. Nobody had been to a political party like this in a long time.
The occasion was a July screening and reception to promote FX's "Impeachment," the latest installment of Ryan Murphy's "American Law-breaking Story" anthology series, which revisits the events leading up to the impeachment of President Beak Clinton through the perspectives of the women involved. Lewinsky is a big part of that story, of course. So are Linda Tripp, the friend who exposed her affair with the president; Paula Jones, who had accused him of sexual harassment; and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton. Simply Lewinsky is the only one who is a producer on the show.
Lewinsky, 48, had skipped the screening portion of the evening — no need to rewatch the most humiliating period of her life with a roomful of strangers, she joked — and had a video session with her therapist. Only she agreed to attend the reception afterward. It took identify in the one-time Four Seasons eating house — once a nexus of Manhattan'due south famous and powerful, some of whom had returned to their old haunt for the outcome.
Prototype
In that location was Tina Brown, the celebrated editor who in 1999 published the first interview with Hillary Clinton near the affair, in Talk magazine, and would after remark how gracious Lewinsky had been when they spoke that evening. Gay Talese, picking at a filet mignon, noted out loud to his tablemates how much thinner she looked. Calvin Trillin, another stalwart of New York'southward media elite, rose as the room offered Lewinsky a roaring continuing ovation.
The new faces included Beanie Feldstein, seated next to Lewinsky, who plays her in the ten-part series, and who for months had carried around a copy of Lewinsky's biography in her haversack. Nearby was Sarah Paulson, who and then assuredly embodies Tripp in the show — her hulking posture, the cadence of her voice — that certain scenes gave Lewinsky flashbacks.
Lewinsky was 22 when her human relationship with the president began — an affair that played out over 18 months, mostly within the Oval Office, even every bit she moved into a full-time chore in the Pentagon.
"Impeachment" begins on the day information technology all came aging down: Jan. xvi, 1998, when the FBI ambushed her in the Pentagon City mall. "That was the most terrifying day of my life, which competes for worst day with the release of the Starr Report," Lewinsky said.
In the evidence'south opening scene, nosotros see a immature Lewinsky in conditioning gear and tube socks, naïvely waiting for Tripp, who had past so turned over some 20 hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations between them. The next xi hours, in which Lewinsky was interrogated in a nearby hotel room and threatened with 27 years in jail, would change the course of her life — and, of course, go one of the enduring political scandals of our time.
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We all know what came next. A steamy 160-folio study to Congress. Oral sex jokes on late-nighttime television, and an uptick in cigar sales. The impeachment hearings. A tarnished political legacy. And a young intern who in one case dreamed of becoming a forensic psychologist whose identity was now seemingly carved in stone: That woman.
Since then, Lewinsky tried reinventing herself repeatedly, for a long fourth dimension without much success. There was a failed handbag line. A brief stint in reality TV. Moving overseas. Well-nigh a decade of self-imposed silence.
Merely that began to change in 2014, with an essay in Vanity Fair — in which she declared it was time to "burn the beret and coffin the blueish dress" and "bring a purpose to my past"— and then a TED Talk the post-obit year, about the public humiliation she endured. Together they told a new version of her story at a fourth dimension when the culture seemed set up to hear it — amidst greater awareness about bullying and trauma and a more than sophisticated understanding of sexual power dynamics. "The world was now understanding her side of things," said David Friend, her editor at Vanity Fair, where she is a contributor.
She has since plant paid work campaigning against bullying and speaking on the field of study. She has slowly made her way into producing, including an upcoming documentary near public shame and a newly-formed production company, aptly titled "Alt Catastrophe."
But "Impeachment," which premieres on Sept. 7, is the well-nigh personal — and arguably the most prominent — chapter in her rehabilitation.
The good news for Lewinsky is that this time she'southward shaping the story herself. The bad, perhaps, is that information technology means reliving the darkest period of her life — and introducing it to at least 1 generation that wasn't around to see it. She still isn't exactly certain how she feels about the whole thing.
And yet at that place she was at the reception, in the company of so many of those who one time made a living mocking her, preparing to revisit the same drama from which she has spent half a lifetime trying to move on. She looked happy, smiling as she greeted dozens of well-wishers, but also slightly wary.
"When you have made a jumbo mistake like I did so early in your life, and lost and so much because of it, the thought of making a error is catastrophic," she told me later. "And yet in order to move forward, I have to take risks. I have to attempt things. I have to keep to ascertain who I am."
'I Wanted to Be Treated Normally'
I first met Monica Lewinsky 7 years ago, as she was preparing to re-emerge after virtually a decade out of the spotlight. I had come of age in the Clinton era. As a teen, I vividly think poring over the Starr report with friends, likewise young to sympathise the complexities or power dynamics of the president's matter with a immature intern, but old enough to know there was something we weren't supposed to like about "that woman" — the one the president, in a news conference, angrily denied having had "sexual relations with."
When I got to know Monica, more than a decade later, she was 41, but without many of the things a person her historic period might want: a permanent residence, a source of income, a career path, a family of her own. While the residuum of the world — the Clintons, the news media, fifty-fifty the other women involved — had moved on, she was seemingly frozen in time.
Not for lack of trying. In 2005, she once again tried to start over, moving to London for a master'south degree in social psychology. She hoped she might be able to resume what her therapist at the time called "a normal developmental runway."
"I wanted a job, I wanted a husband, I wanted kids," she said. "I wanted to be treated normally."
But she could never quite escape the shadow that hung over her name. After graduate school, she moved briefly to Portland, Ore., where she tried, and failed, to become a job in marketing. "I must have practical for 50 jobs," she said.
And so she retreated. She moved dorsum to Los Angeles, where she had grown up, still dependent on her parents for fiscal back up. She volunteered and spent fourth dimension with friends, and worked with a diverseness of mental health specialists (she had been diagnosed with PTSD after the events of '98). All the while, she continued to turn down offers to capitalize on her story: television, books, plays, a graphic novel, and hundreds of interviews. (The last fourth dimension somebody counted, there were 128 rap songs that cite her name.)
Recently, she found herself on a road about Pasadena that jolted her back to that aimless time in L.A., when she'd bulldoze long distances to pass the fourth dimension. "It was a nighttime, dark time," she said. "I just had no purpose."
Paradigm
And so, in 2010, Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University, killed himself later on his roommate used a webcam to film him in an intimate encounter with another man. Lewinsky had no connectedness to Clementi, but her female parent was beside herself with grief. She later realized her mother was "reliving a time when she sat by my bed at night, and made me shower with the bathroom door open," out of fear she might have her own life.
Lewinsky had spent time thinking about the touch on of shame on the psyche; in graduate school, she had studied the effects of trauma on identity. Simply her female parent'south response triggered something more urgent in her. She thought back to a conversation she'd had with a professor in graduate schoolhouse — nigh how there was no "competing narrative" to her story. Could she be the 1 to write her fashion out?
There is no perfect formula to reclaiming a narrative. And yet something about her Vanity Fair essay clicked. David Letterman expressed remorse over how he had mocked her. She was invited to speak at TED, and and so at the Cannes Lions Festival and others, and non to talk nigh what happened then merely most what was happening at present. She became a catalyst for broader reconsideration of some of the other women who were bandage aside in that era — Tonya Harding, Lorena Bobbitt, even Britney Spears, each now the subject of more thoughtful movie or Television receiver treatments.
It was simply a matter of time earlier Hollywood rediscovered Lewinsky.
In 2017, Tater had optioned the rights to "A Vast Conspiracy," a all-time-selling volume on the Clinton scandal by Jeffrey Toobin, who last year faced his own public scandal. (He is not involved in the bear witness.)
Then #MeToo happened. Lewinsky, who has always maintained that her relationship with Clinton was consensual, wrote virtually the complication of those power dynamics in another essay. ("Power imbalances — and the ability to abuse them — practise exist even when the sex activity has been consensual," she wrote.) Everywhere, it seemed, the legacies of powerful men were being re-examined, as were those of vilified women.
Potato ran into Lewinsky at a political party, and told her: "Nobody should tell your story but you, and it'south kind of gross if they do." He asked her to come on equally a producer.
She would take preferred in that location be no idiot box series at all, she said. Only if it was going to happen — and if it wasn't Irish potato, it eventually would be somebody else — she wanted to be in the room.
"Information technology'southward much better to be going through this as part of something," she said, "than to exist desperately trying to find out what'south on the testify."
Teetering Betwixt Past and Nowadays
These days, Lewinsky spends much of her time on other projects besides: She is putting the finishing touches on the documentary she is executive producing with the director Max Joseph, "xv Minutes of Shame," which will air on HBO Max next calendar month. She is working with the producer Stacey Sher on a series reimagining a literary archetype likewise about sex and shame. In June, she signed a producing deal with 20th Tv set.
But two weeks before the premiere of "Impeachment," she was getting anxious.
We were at her apartment in Los Angeles, which overlooks the flats of Beverly Hills where she grew upwards. She was in a T-shirt and jeans, her hair in a messy bun, with candles and incense burning. An Ed Ruscha print with the word "Miracle," a souvenir from a friend, was backside her.
That morning, her PTSD had flared up. She wasn't sure what caused it, exactly, merely it had been edifice. Earlier in the calendar week, she'd had to sit for a photo shoot for this story. At present there was a reporter in her home, asking to record their conversations (you can imagine how she feels about being recorded).
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It would be impossible to extricate the Monica Lewinsky of today from what happened 23 years ago. Her mother, Marcia Lewis Straus, said Lewinsky'southward experiences back and then hadn't changed who she is at her core — the "strong willed piddling girl" who could talk her into or out of anything. But information technology has changed how she approaches life: Cautiously. Guardedly. Fiercely protective of what she has rebuilt.
The actor Alan Cumming has been a friend since they were introduced by a mutual friend in 2000, dorsum when "she nigh wasn't really human to people," he said. (He described how, when they would go out to eat, on more than than i occasion a diner had reached over the booth divider only to touch her.) "When you realize what she'south been through, the fact that she is who she is — this warm, kind, hilarious, witty person — it'south just remarkable."
Information technology'south true: Spend more than than a few minutes with Lewinsky and you apace realize she is far smarter, and funnier — often at her ain expense — than she often got credit for. She is still careful, and at times circumspect, simply she is a fleck looser, a bit more than self-bodacious, than she was even a few years ago.
These days, she uses her proper name (well, by and large) in public. She is comfortable cutting off an interview — or walking off a stage — if information technology goes to a identify she isn't comfy. She is financially independent for the offset fourth dimension — making a living from producing, speaking and consulting fees.
And she can express joy about things she couldn't always. Like, say, the Clintons.
When I was writing about her in 2015, Lewinsky abruptly pulled out subsequently an artist who'd painted Pecker Clinton's portrait said in an interview that a "shadow" in his painting, owned by the National Portrait Gallery, was meant to stand for the matter. She was actually sorry, she said, but she simply felt as well exposed to go forward with the article. She eventually changed her mind.
But on a recent afternoon, when we walked into a production studio for a coming together and were confronted with iii giant posters bearing Hillary Clinton's face up — ads for the Hulu documentary, "Hillary" — she merely chuckled. "Well, that's funny," she said.
"It just doesn't impact me the same way, you know?" she said after, when I asked how it affects her to see the Clintons in the news. "They don't loom nearly as big as they did for two decades in my life."
And for the tape: She did support Hillary Clinton in the 2016 ballot.
'A Commonage Conversation'
While Lewinsky was glad to exist involved in the telling of her story in "Impeachment," that doesn't mean the procedure was especially pleasant.
She often had her trauma therapist with her via video equally she read through scripts. She was shaken when, during production last twelvemonth, she learned from her publicist that Tripp was near expiry. (The betrayal of that friendship, she said, was a "fissure in my life that would never close up.")
But in some means, working on the show was also an exercise in blending the fragments of her identities — of figuring out, as she puts it, how to "integrate" the past with the nowadays.
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At that place is the fictional Lewinsky, who buys Sassy magazine that twenty-four hours in the mall and helps Tripp make a spreadsheet of her sexual encounters with Clinton. Then there is the existent Lewinsky, who was too terrified to buy anything that 24-hour interval and never made a spreadsheet (though Tripp did take notes, she said).
There was the younger, more tempestuous Lewinsky, whose terminal words to Tripp, every bit depicted in the get-go episode, are to call her a "treacherous bitch." And so there is the Lewinsky of today, who wanted to make certain her former friend was portrayed with nuance, and who opted in the writers' room to avoid weighing in on the dynamic between the Clintons. ("It felt inappropriate, yous know?")
At that place is Lewinsky the producer, who advised on everything from dialogue to wardrobe, said Brad Simpson, an executive producer, and who — despite the creators' best efforts to not heart the show on sexual practice — encouraged them to include that infamous moment when she flashed her thong at the president (even though it makes her cringe). "I simply felt I shouldn't go a pass," she said.
Then at that place is Lewinsky the person, who has to keep reminding herself that this is "a dramatization," and that it is possible to brand a evidence most the by while yet moving forward.
Though she does wonder: Will she ever be able to be done talking near it? Will nosotros?
"The reality is that this story has been part of a collective conversation for xx years, and equally I evolve, as the world evolves, information technology comes to take different meanings," she said every bit she zipped through traffic in Santa Monica, making her style to the pier for a walk along the beach.
"And so I don't know," she said. "It might be the final time. I hope it's the last time. Just I have no idea."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/arts/television/monica-lewinsky-impeachment-american-crime-story.html
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