""If you can't laugh at yourself, you are so fucked": During a conversation yesterday at The Atlantic Festival with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, Monica Lewinsky said this was one of the most important things she's learned. In 1998, as a 24-year-old White House intern, she was entangled in a sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton and quickly became a subject of international scorn."
"Instead, she began to imagine herself as "a poster child for having survived shame." Today, Lewinsky is an anti-bullying activist, a TV producer, and the host of the podcast Reclaimed -whose title, for her, holds multiple significant meanings. She and Gilbert discussed how much has changed, both in her own life and in American culture, since the 1990s, an era when the lives-and mistakes-of young women were a reliable punch line."
Monica Lewinsky became internationally scorned after a 1998 sex scandal that involved a sitting president while she was a 24-year-old White House intern. She attempted to rebuild a normal life by going to graduate school and moving abroad, but she recognized that anonymity was no longer possible. She reframed her experience as survival from shame and embraced public roles: anti-bullying activist, TV producer, and podcast host of Reclaimed. Her story reflects cultural shifts in how women’s mistakes and lives are treated by media, and it connects to broader reconsiderations of shame, accountability, and public humiliation.
Read at The Atlantic
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