Monica Lewinsky - ‘I would have liked a more normal life’

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0:43Welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that I started because I wanted to know how other people survived failure and what, if anything, they learned along the way. This was not something that happened to me. And so it was foreign and it was terrifying. I never could have imagined the consequences being so far reaching. Okay, what am I, how am I going to do my CV? Do I put that I worked at the White House? Do I not? My guest today is an activist, producer and podcaster. She is also, in her own words, the patient zero of online harassment. Her 2015 TED Talk, The Price of Shame, has to date been viewed over 20 million times.

1:28She has repeatedly spoken out about cyberbullying and the need to find one's own voice. She has a master's degree in psychology from the London School of Economics, where her thesis dealt with the effects of pretrial publicity on juror impartiality. Her podcast, which launched earlier this year, is called Reclaiming, and features interviews with guests in the process of reclaiming their own narratives, just as she was forced to do. Because her name is Monica Lewinsky. and in 1995, at the age of 22, she fell in love with her boss, a man almost 30 years older than she was. Her boss was the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton, and by the age of 24, Lewinsky, a White House intern, had found herself in the eye of a global scandal.

2:21She was subjected to a mass public shaming, losing her livelihood, her anonymity, and the future she had once imagined for herself. It is testament, perhaps, to her courage and to her determination that she returned to the public eye at all. Now 51, Lewinsky has garnered a new generation of admirers who, with the advent of social media and shifting cultural tides, have rightly reinterpreted the shocking way she was treated. She's also launched her own production company, Alt Ending, aiming to platform others whose voices have been silenced. It is an expansive and impressive trajectory. As Lewinsky said in a recent interview, my life is full of things other than just my past.

3:14Monica Lewinsky, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you. Thank you so much. I told you before we started recording that you have been on my dream guest list for this podcast ever since I started. So it's a real pinch me moment to have this happen and to meet you and discover that you're so wonderful in person as you are on your podcast. But tell me why that idea of reclaiming and calling your podcast Reclaiming was so important to you. Interestingly, the idea actually started out as a book that I thought I might write. And then it just started to kind of tickle me in a weird way as a thought around that it would be more interesting to explore this landscape with other people.

4:03And really, when I started to look at it and think about where does this fall into our culture, I realized there's a very elastic definition of reclaiming that I was attracted to, right? So it wasn't necessarily just someone who had a big reclaiming like mine was over the last 10 years of their narrative and their history. But I think the smaller ways that we might, the different aspects of our identity. I also joke around that when I, you know, call someone a fuck face, but I don't flip them off in the car in L.A. with my road rage, like I have reclaimed my calm. So there are little moments of reclaiming too.

4:43And I think it's kind of an ethos that when you start to look at the world through that lens, you start to see reclaiming everywhere. So that was really where it felt interesting to me. I also get road rage. But I appear a very calm and reasonable person in other respects. So it all comes out behind the wheel of a car. Yeah. I don't understand why people get so mad when you want to go faster. I just don't. I don't. I don't, it's not like I've said you're bad in bed. I mean, it's just, it's sort of one of those things where you think, I'd like to go faster than you. That's also just either let me move so I can go in front of you or move so I can just go on and be out of your hair.

5:22I mean, I don't want to, yeah, I totally agree with you. And I don't want to make this profound metaphorical shift, but I'm going to try anyway. Okay. Do you think that part of it is you lost a decade of your life, at least to what I refer to in the introduction. And do you feel now that you're kind of making up for that time, that you don't have time to waste, that you need to go fast? What's interesting to me is there was a long period of my life where I felt exactly that. And I think in the last decade, as things started to change, both in my personal work, spiritual, energetic, psychological, psychiatric, all the work, all the things, I started to see, and as my life was shifting, I think in the public arena and people were seeing me more from my true self and understanding what happened to me through a different lens.

6:12I started accepting slowing down. So I began somatic therapy during the pandemic. It's the first time in my life I found myself saying to a practitioner, okay, we have to slow down. Or we're at 40 minutes of the hour session, I'm done. Because I think that there was very much, exactly as you're saying, this feeling of I have to catch up. I've lost so much time. I have to catch up to my peers. I have to catch up to my dreams. And fortunately for me, turning 50 was really just so much about acceptance, a really nice way. I wanted to ask you about turning 50 because when you turned 40, you wrote this extraordinary piece for Vanity Fair, which I remember reading at the time, which really reset the framework for public perception of you.

7:05and turning 50 you've launched this podcast and I wonder how you how you feel about your your 50s I'm excited I never thought I especially not having been married and not having had kids that um were things that I really wanted in my life and I think very much things that I saw um constructs in a way that I looked at the world ways that I I evaluated people or situations and myself to just kind of find myself in a place where that all feels okay to me is is pretty pretty magical so it's also really amazing for me to meet a fulfilled brilliant creative woman who doesn't have children so I don't have children either in the biological sense I know we're both aunts.

8:01Yes. And I want to thank you for that, really, because I think that even though it was sort of forced on you, I imagine, by what happened, you're such a role model. I mean, it's aspirational what you present to the rest of us. Thanks. I, you know, I, it was not by choice. Um, I, so I think I just, I had Chelsea Handler on the podcast and we had a discussion. I don't know if you've had her on yet. Not yet. Okay. Well, I will plug you to her. She's an amazing woman. And we came at this same kind of conversation from these two different places of Chelsea really knowing she didn't want to have children.

8:42And for me, I did really want it. And I froze my eggs. And my therapist said something so helpful to me. I repeat this all the time. You know, I think there was a small period where I was toying with the idea of, do I have a child on my own? And we had this discussion about regret. And she said, it's a mistake to think that making the right decision means you won't have regret. That's so wise. I don't know if this will make sense, but it's like regret seems to make our decisions binary in some way. And that's how we define it, right? Like, well, the wrong choice is regret and the right choice I won't have regret.

9:24And that's not accurate at all. I know we're going to get more into this later, but your sense of acceptance more generally, I read absolutely zero bitterness in you. Not today. Well, you're not driving. Right, exactly. You know, I mean, it's there sometimes, but overall, all. It's one of the ways I consider myself so lucky. I mean, I've had a fuck ton of unlucky things happen, but I consider myself really lucky to not, to not be bitter, to still be able to open my heart, to still be trusting, sometimes too trusting. And, um, but yeah. Yeah. So, because when you're talking about having frozen your eggs and not having got married or had the children that you yearned for and thought you'd always have, that can be laid squarely at the foot of what happened to you when you were in your early 20s?

10:17Well, my best friend from college will often say, well, it was always going to be hard for you. Really? Really? Why? I think I'm a pretty, many of us are complex. I think my complexities are pretty unique. So without getting into it a lot more, But I just always thought that was funny. And I love that she says it to me. Yes. Because it makes you more than what happened to you as well. I think so. I think so. And I think when you have any kind of a big identity shifting loss or failure or any of those things, that it is always good to be reminded of all of who you are. Yes. Right? Even if it's negative, right?

11:12So, I mean, she says it to me lovingly, but it's a good reminder that I can't blame everything on, like, I was kind of fucked up before, too. So, I mean, and also, you know, without getting into too many details of things, I also think that there was a brokenness there that led to what happened. Right. So. Well, now that's all I want to know about. That's for off record. Okay, fine. That's for drinks. Fine. Sometimes. At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear, like high-quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40 ,000 steps, baby. Who's on top now, Karen? You've taken the office step challenge a step too far.

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12:36Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Well, let's get on to your first failure. Yes. And who you were as a child. And I love this failure because it's your first memory of failure and they're so potent. And I also have my own first memory of failure. And yours dates from first grade. So how old are you for English listeners? So six or seven. How's that? Great. Okay. Perfect. So you're six or seven and it's a Friday afternoon at school and it's show and tell. And what happens? Well, in order to go to the show and tell that's happening on one half of the classroom, you know, where there's the rug that you take the naps on and the other half has the desks, is the girl whose show and tell it is that day and she's brought in a bunny.

13:24But the rest of us are still sitting at our desks and we've been given a new math assignment and you can't go to the show and tell on the other side of the room and play with the bunny until you finish the math assignment. In a very weird twist for me, like math and school things just came quite easily to me then. I couldn't figure out the math problems. And so I would answer them. And every time the teacher would come around to kind of check it, she'd be like, nope, that's not it. I couldn't figure it out. And so then I started to panic more and more because it was this spiral of, this hasn't happened to me before.

14:02You know, I've lost at games, but losing and failure are two different things, right? And so it really was the first time that I remember this concrete failure because everybody else finished before me. And I think that my anxiety and panic started to grow too because I had always been able to rely on my intellect. I think to understand the landscape of this story, that it was just this, this was not something that happened to me. And so it was foreign and it was terrifying. Tell me quickly whether you ever got to cuddle the bunny. I did. But what I couldn't remember as was, I remember starting to cry eventually.

14:45And what I couldn't remember was if I got the math problem finally, or they just finally said to let me go, which is sort of interesting to me. Um, my guess is it's the latter because I feel like I might have had a memory of accomplishing something or I just blocked the whole thing out because it was so, it was really traumatic for me. Yeah. Funnily enough, I actually ran into the girl who was there with the bunny, um, randomly at a spa. She looks exactly the same as she did in first grade. And so we had a nice reconnect. I mean, I hadn't seen her since third grade. So, but I think what you're saying is so interesting.

15:29And I relate in a certain aspect in that as a child and probably still now, I didn't have a great deal of self-esteem, but I was good at school and being good at school became part of my identity. Yeah. It's what I relied on to give me the data that I was lovable in a way. And obviously it's a conflation of different things. Being academically successful doesn't make you lovable. Right. Spoiler alert, sadly. But I wonder if that resonates with you. Oh, absolutely. You know, I think as I've, you know, one of the interesting things, I guess if you're an introspective person about getting older, is you also have these opportunities to relends early experiences all the way up, right?

16:20You learn more things about yourself and you start to see things differently. And so I had had a period in second grade where I was very competitive with who my best friend at the time was. And I remember she kept sort of getting better scores. We were like doing some dinosaur thing and you'd get a Jolly Rancher or Smelly Sticker, whatever the thing was. And I actually, I stole the answer book from the classroom and took it home so that I could, oh, it's like making me emotional. I feel it. So that I could get, and it wasn't so much that I wanted to beat her. I just wanted to be, it was like perfect.

17:03It was some version of perfect. And of course, I look back now and I wonder, you know, there are a bunch of things for me from my earlier years that I know problematic things happen and I don't know what they were. And so I look at that time period or even back to first grade and I think, well, maybe something was happening around that. And so that it was really more of a telltale sign that there was a problem. But we just kind of, we didn't live in a world that looked at things that way at the time. I mean, I very, I had and have very loving parents who, you know, very, I think very, my dad spent a lot of time with me doing the projects for school, the dioramas and all those things.

17:54And my mom was very attentive. But parents just didn't have a kind of a way of looking at things back then. You mentioned your parents and I know that they got divorced when you were a teenager. So I wanted to know whether that, what kind of effect that had on you, if any. It was all very complicated. And kind of once, actually, when I was in my 40s, it also became clear in a therapy session. I was saying, I've talked about this before, but I was saying something to my therapist and about having lost my virginity. And I was like, well, I was 19. I was like, well, technically, I was 14, but it didn't count.

18:34And so I realized later that some of what I had labeled upset from the divorce was actually this thing that happened to me at camp the summer before my – I'm so sorry. Yeah, thank you. It was complex because we didn't have language for things back then. And it was – and I had liked the person, but I had clearly – I was 14. I didn't want to have sex. I didn't know that's what was about to happen. And I tried to dismiss it away with my therapist of like, well, he stopped when I said to stop. And, you know, she's like, no, that's an unwanted sexual experience. It was very hard for me to accept that.

19:18And so, yeah, the divorce was not an easy thing. I don't think it's easy for anybody. but it also was necessary. Thank you so much for sharing that, which I mean, I know so many people will feel seen by what you have been courageous enough to talk about just there. And I just want to reach out to 14-year-old Monica and give her a hug because that was so much for you to go through. Yeah. Your intellect got you to achieve academically and you ended up as a White House intern, which brings us on to your second failure. But before we get onto it, I just want to say that I am really aware that you have had to talk about this so much.

20:14And I wanted to check in with you about how that felt for you. Even the fact that I write an introduction and it's mentioned in it. And you're so much more than that. And I just want to see how you are about it. Yeah, it's, you know, it's such an interesting thing because it's been, I think, 27 years now. And it feels different. It means different things. It has less energy around it for me now.

20:48would I like there to be a point where that's not the first thing that's part of the story? Sure. You know, and there's also an acceptance of, that's so much of the work I had to do in, I think in the deeper healing work I did of recognizing I couldn't run away from what happened. I had to integrate it. Yeah. So it's fine. Like, do I cringe a little inside? Yes, I do, you know, but it's, um, it's one of those accepting what is right. Yes. So your second failure is about a time when you had done your master's degree in social psychology at LSE and you were trying to get a job and you weren't able to tell us that story.

21:34In, in the few years, first few years after 98, I felt like I didn't have a choice but to lean into being a public person. It just became really clear around, started around 2003, really clear 2004, this wasn't going well. I think going to graduate school really felt like I was going to be turning the page on this public life. I was going to have this degree. It was going to be a scaffolding upon which I could kind of hang a new identity. And when I got out of graduate school and started to job hunt, it just became clearer and clearer how hard that was going to be. You know, I remember somebody asking me of like, well, if you were a brand, what brand would you be?

22:20And at the time, It just felt like it was not intended to be a complicated question or anything that would sort of incite panic in me. But it did because it just felt really loaded. And it was a totally appropriate question to have asked me. I was looking to go into marketing and advertising and branding. So that makes sense. but I found you know so it was from that I found there were particularly some of the non-profit places that I interviewed asked me one place asked me if I could get a letter of indemnification from the Clintons because they were worried that if Hillary had won in 2000 because she was running to be the candidate this was in 2006 and 2007 before Barack Obama became our candidate and then our president, there was concern that if she won, that they would lose their funding.

23:28And so that there would be like some sort of backlash that way. So it, it just became more and more complicated and more and more obvious that a traditional job was not going to be an option for me. And that was terrifying. And it was kind of an epic failure that in a weird way felt not of my own making in some sense. Like most of the time, I think the failures that I think about are kind of were direct result of something I did. And while yes, obviously I made bad choices, you know and I just think I never could have imagined the consequences being so far reaching we were now 10 years out from what had happened yeah and that was um so I I think I had and also just the complications of things of um okay what am I how am I going to do my CV do I put that I worked at the White House do I not do I put my name do I use a different name well if I use a different name what happens when I walk in for the interview and the person sitting there going, I don't know, you know, Cheryl Smith sure looks a lot like Monica Lewinsky.

24:49Like, how do you even do that? You know, so, and then you've also started out a professional relationship with a lie. So, you know, there was complication there. Then there was, okay, in which states could I, you know, interview for jobs? Because I can't not have a support system somewhere. That wouldn't work to be, to do kind of what I did when I went to college. I moved to Portland, Oregon. I didn't have a support system there, but that was fine. I wouldn't be able to do that post 98. So. I'm sorry, you wouldn't be able to do it because you felt so fragile. Um, I think it, there, the, the fragility was certainly a part of it, but it was also, there were times where something would happen in the news and this would rear its ugly head and paparazzi would show up somewhere.

25:45So if I didn't have a support system in the city, who was going to come help me? You know, it was, and I just think that for me, the way I became a public person and was a public person, I was just more vulnerable. You know, I didn't have the resources. Most people who end up with a level of name recognition that I had at that time have an enormous amount of resources, an enormous amount of people around them to help with the complications of not being anonymous. Yes. And choose it. They choose the fame and you did not. I grew up knowing what happened to you. And it was impossible not to because the media landscape was such that there was such an obsession with you, Monica, not with President Clinton, 27 years older than you.

26:42It was with you. And I heard an interview where you said the Washington Post printed 127 articles back in the first 10 days after this came out. Yeah. About the scandal and yeah. Yeah. Google had just launched the web traffic doubled overnight. Right. That was when the Star Report came out. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, it's all part of the same thing, right? It was, it's so hard to remember a time when a story could have legs for almost a year or over a year, practically. I mean, now there were new things that kept happening, right? There was an ongoing trial. And then the Star Report came out eight months later, nine months later, whatever it was.

27:21But it was this ongoing onslaught and the media was not kind. No, I do not know how you got through it. I don't either. I think that I come from a long line of very strong women who have faced adversity in myriad ways. And I think, you know, my therapist will say sometimes that, you know, the very things that helped me that I learned how to do as a child that then helped me survive 98 are also some of the things that wreak havoc for me in present time. But I think that, I think being able to dissociate, being able to sort of check out helped at times. And I had an extraordinary family, you know, so, and have, who was supportive.

28:25And I think that had my family not stood by me, and it would have been, I wouldn't have been able to survive on many levels. You described it then as falling in love with someone who just so happened to be the most powerful free leader of the Western world. Do you still categorize it as love? I, it was 22 to 24 year old young woman's love. Yes. So, I mean, but I think probably everybody can relate to this, that the way we see love evolves with every relationship we have. You know, it's sort of, I don't think I know one person who has said, oh, this relationship I'm in now, this love that I'm in now, this is so much lesser than this one from 10 years ago.

29:24Because we change as people and we evolve. And every time we fall in love, it changes us anyway. And the person, so those things. So I see what happened. I see it as something different. But yes, that's what I felt was like, I think there was some limerence there and all sorts of other things. But that's how I saw it then. And I think, you know, it was also an abuse of power. It wasn't a relationship of equals. No, but I think that's sort of the power aspect, but it wasn't sexual assault. So particularly when we have conversations around Me Too, I think that that's, you know, something we're looking at.

30:10But it was, you know, considering that even though it was a family friend who was a big donor who, you know, had recommended me for the White House internship program, I had written an essay that had me writing, not Xeroxing for the internship. And that I then got a job on my own before the relationship started. So my very first job out of college was working in the White House. so I don't think that that's the kind of trajectory that someone thinks then you know 10 12 years later that person's not going to be able to get hired no so um and you know and then I worked in the pentagon as well and traveled the world with my boss who is the pentagon spokesman and we traveled with the secretary of defense and um you know it was I think there there was I'm by no means a genius, by no means going to be the, you know, the cream of the crop, but I wasn't a bimbo.

31:12I wasn't a dumb bimbo. So like I was portrayed to be, and that was a big struggle for me to deal with that. And you were often portrayed as that by other women? Often by other women, but, you know, I think that that was a narrative that was crafted and put out by the White House. So I think it was picked up, that mantle was picked up by a lot of women. But, you know, so. What do you think this whole period of your life taught you about love and trust? Because there were so many ways in which you were betrayed. Um, I think that I, I, I think they were very deep wounds. And they're both really, were really intertwined from that whole period.

32:15And it's something that I still work on, you know, I mean, and, and the, I think we've been having these kinds of conversations publicly more, but with the somatic therapy, It's bringing in, you know, my nervous system and my body and listening to my body and trying to reconnect in different ways because of betrayal and because of love and those things. So I think it's ongoing work for me. I think it's ongoing work for probably everybody in different ways. What is somatic therapy for anyone who's not familiar? Okay, I'm probably not going to give the best definition, but how I think of it is, you know, when you go into therapy, you're talking about your thoughts and your emotions.