“You were 22 years old. He was 49. You were an intern. He was the president of the United States.”
Those were the words of Alex Cooper, host of the Call Her Daddy podcast, as she contextualized her recent interview with Monica Lewinsky. She was referencing the infamous sexual relationship between Lewinsky and Bill Clinton in 1998.
Her shock at how Lewinsky was treated is palpable. When the scandal broke, Cooper would have been four years old. Though Lewinsky never alleged assault, in our contemporary understanding of consent, the age and power difference between the President and his employee would not have allowed for a shred of acceptability.
Yet, for me, my peers, and many young women in the late nineties, as we saw Lewinsky skewered in the national media, we were without language to cogently express how bewildering it was.
The FBI came for her. The full force of the media was thrown at her. Someone who was not so unlike us: smart, ambitious, and prone to a bad decision involving sex on occasion.
The Lewinsky/Clinton scandal brought to mind the moment when we witnessed Joe Biden, then a senator, handle, or fail to handle, the sexual harassment hearings involving Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas and his former employee Anita Hill. Hill had a Yale law degree and over a decade of experience in her field. If a woman with those credentials could be dismissed as “a scorned woman,” what about the rest of us?
In 1998, we found out.
The changed nature of how we view power dynamics nearly thirty years later is a crucial lens for conceptualizing who Monica Lewinsky is today. In her newly launched Wondery podcast, Reclaiming, she interviews critical thinkers and cultural icons.
During these conversations, we learn Lewinsky is really into crystals. We learn how deep her family connections are. We learn that she swears, a lot. We learn she had Bell’s Palsy. We learn that despite how much she both needed and wanted to avoid media post-1998, she also went to after-parties with the actor Alan Cumming. She did have the support of other famous and powerful people, but often out of the spotlight.
World leaders in government and business have a long history of capitulating to American presidents. Still, a young and politically inexperienced Lewinsky was pilloried for doing the same. She was made the butt of jokes, slut- and body-shamed, all for not knowing how to reject the dangerous attentions of a charismatic leader. Hill, even though she categorically rejected Thomas’s advances, was pilloried too.
In 1998, the revelation of instances of oral sex between Lewinsky and Clinton sparked more collective moral outrage than the U.S. declining to adopt a ban on child soldiers in the International Criminal Court.
There is an important parallel between Lewinsky hosting a podcast and what ultimately exposed the Clinton affair: a series of recorded phone calls between her and an older female colleague she was confiding in. The podcast mirrors, in some ways, the tapes Linda Tripp surreptitiously made and subsequently turned over to the FBI in terms of frank, often vulnerable audio. While certainly a podcast is meant for public consumption in a way private communication is not, it’s also a powerful structural element. The podcast re-frames Lewinsky’s actual voice. We first heard her on gossipy news clips as an unsure young person. Now she is an assured woman intentionally broadcasting and in control of her own narrative.
Reclaiming is slickly produced and the guests highly curated. This is not a surprise. Lewinsky, rather than a salacious headline, is a media figure in her own right. She’s made news for starting a handbag company, for anti-cyberbullying activism, and has written for Vanity Fair since 2014.
Where the podcast succeeds is moving beyond a rehashing of what made Lewinsky a household name—and came with the threat of a possible twenty-seven-year sentence in federal prison—and toward shaping a dialogue that is often thoughtful and inquisitive.
While some episodes do verge away from pure interview into chummy chats, the format works. It’s compelling to hear Lewinsky be corrective when #MeToo comes up, reminding her guests that this movement did not start on Twitter in 2017 in a response to Harvey Weinstein but was rather founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006. It’s heartening when she navigates complicated conversations with influential people, like a discussion about the emotional motivations of AI tech bros with Kara Swisher, arguably one of the most significant journalists working today.
“I never should have fucking been in that situation,” Lewinsky laments to Cooper.
She’s right, but instead of being permanently derailed, Lewinsky evolved from a punchline pariah to a woman with a platform. Reclaiming is, yes, another entrant in the celebrity podcast genre, but Lewinsky has a reason to be on the mic. She deserves to be heard.
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Wendy J. Fox is the author of five books of fiction, including What If We Were Somewhere Else, which won the Colorado Book Award and the forthcoming The Last Supper. She has written for many national publications including Self, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Ms. and authors a quarterly column in Electric Literature focusing on independent books. She is a former SVP of marketing for a green tech firm and lives outside of Phoenix.