Lewinsky shares how she spends Clinton scandal anniversary

Monica Lewinsky has revealed how she remembers the day news of her affair with Bill Clinton broke. On January 16, 1998, the 51-year-old former White House Intern was detained by the FBI and questioned for 11 hours by the Office of the Independent Counsel amid an investigation into her relationship with the 42nd President of the United States.

Lewinsky, who was only 24 years old then, was shoved into the spotlight next to Clinton, who was 51 and married at the time, spawning one of the biggest global scandals of the 20th century. Speaking with Rolling Stone in a new interview, Lewinsky said she’ll always remember that fateful time as “Survivor’s Day” — and so will her family.  “There’s still things that I do on Jan. 16 every year — that was the day the sting operation happened,” she said in the article published Friday. “We celebrate.”

“Sometimes my mom buys me a gift or I buy myself a gift, and just make a moment of really acknowledging” it, Lewinsky continued. “That’s when I connect to my past the most. That was the worst day of my life thus far. It’s connecting to that, but in a way that brings it back to myself.”

“So much of the personal work I’ve done (has been) working directly on forgiving and letting go of things from the past,” she said. “Sure, I have moments where I definitely get triggered or angry or feel sad.”

The greatest “gift” Lewinsky’s received in the last decade has been space and privacy, she noted. “I think the gift the world gave me in these last 10 years (is to) finally being able to have movement forward and being taken seriously as a human being; it allowed me to just shed a lot of that,” she explained.

Lewinsky kept out of the public eye for some time after her storied interrogation and Clinton’s impeachment trial, but the American activist spoke out in a tell-all essay for Vanity Fair in 2014. “It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” she noted in piece. “I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”

Reflecting on her past relationship with Clinton, who has been married to former First Lady Hillary Clinton for close to 50 years now, Lewinsky believes it was “textbook abuse of power.”

“It’s interesting because it feels as I get older I look at it differently. I’m now 51. The idea of being in a relationship (at this age) with a 24-year-old is insane to me, on so many levels,” she told Rolling Stone. Clinton was 49 when he began his 18-month affair with Lewinsky, who was 22 when it started. “There’s just so many different ways of unwrapping what you thought something was, what it meant to you at the time, how you see it now,” she continued.

Lewinsky has plans to launch her first-ever podcast with Wondery called Reclaiming on February 18. “With the podcast, (it) feels like a new chapter for me. It’s a different way to use my voice, reclaim my voice, and in that sense, to connect with people, and I hope it does,” Lewinsky said.

Earlier, Monica Lewinsky has revealed who she is endorsing in the US presidential race. “PLEASE VOTE!” Lewinsky said in a tweet viewed over 10 million times. “(preferably like I did for harris/walz).”

Lewinsky has been vocal about her support for Harris and is just one of numerous celebrities. Lewinsky’s support came some 26 years after her scandalous affair with then-president Bill Clinton while she was working as a White House intern between 1995 and 1997. Clinton’s behaviour again came under scrutiny last month, when he called Arizona senate candidate Kari Lake “attractive” in a speech on the Harris campaign trail.

The Independent