Monica Lewinsky Says Former President Bill Clinton Should’ve Resigned From Office After Affair - E! Online

Monica Lewinsky opened up about the fallout of her affair with Bill Clinton on Call Her Daddy, reflecting on the ways she could have been better protected.

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Watch : Monica Lewinsky Shares How She Commemorates Anniversary of Bill Clinton Scandal Going Public Every Year

Monica Lewinksy knows there is no easy answer when it comes to the White House.

However, regarding how the now-51-year-old was treated amid the 1997 revelation of her affair with then-President Bill Clinton, which began when she was 22—the fallout of which saw her publicly ridiculed and shamed—Lewinsky thinks there were ways in which the situation could have been handled more delicately.

“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to say it was nobody's business,” she reflected while in conversation with Alex Cooper on the Feb. 25 episode of Call Her Daddy. “And to resign. Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus.”

Lewinsky continued, “And at the same time, I'm hearing myself say that, and it's like, we're also talking about the most powerful office in the world. So I don't want to be naïve, either.”

As Alex pointed out, in reference to the White House, “Because at what cost are you just kind of thrown to the wolves to protect something larger?”

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Monica Lewinsky Shares How She Commemorates Anniversary of Bill Clinton Affair Scandal Going Public 

While Lewinsky agreed the circumstances were especially complicated due to amount of people who could have been affected, she also reflected on the impact the scandal had—not just on herself, but on all the women bearing witness at the time.

“I don’t know where the right balance is, because there was damage, no matter what,” she noted. “There was so much collateral damage for women of my generation, to watch a young woman to be pilloried on the world stage. To be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for my everything.”

E! News has reached out to representatives for Clinton but has not yet heard back. 

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Lewinsky also addressed whether she herself has ever received an apology from parties involved in the scandal.

“I have had a handful of people who were involved at the time that I've run into who have acknowledged that they wish they had made different choices,” she explained. “None of the people who were sort of the above-the-fold names involved in the investigation.”

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But as she noted, now so many years removed from the scandal, “I'm really grateful that I'm at a place where I don't need it anymore.”

For his part, Clinton—who has been married to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since 1975—addressed the scandal in the 2020 documentary Hillary.

“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly I think,” he said in the doc, per CNN. “Over the years, I’ve watched her trying to get a normal life back again, but you’ve got to decide how to define ‘normal.’”

And indeed, Lewinsky—whose new podcast Reclaiming recently debuted—has been candid about the ways in which she herself has reclaimed the narrative around the scandal, pointing to the last 10 years of her life as having turned a corner.

For one, she and her family refer to Jan. 16—the day she was seized by FBI agents at the age of 24—as “Survivor’s Day.”

“That was the worst day of my life thus far,” Lewinsky told Rolling Stone in an interview published Feb. 14. “It’s connecting to that, but in a way that brings it back to myself.”

She made sure to note that the annual commemoration is not one of pain.

“We celebrate,” she continued. “Sometimes my mom buys me a gift or I buy myself a gift, and just make a moment of really acknowledging. That’s when I connect to my past the most.”

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