The Lewinsky affair, the sex scandal that hit Clinton and plunged Monica into an ocean of loneliness

February 12, 1999 Bill clinton he caught his breath. The then US president came out of 13 months of investigation, prosecution and trial for playing in one of the most high-profile scandals in US politics, having a two-year parallel relationship with the intern. Monica lewinsky.

It was in 1995 that the young woman entered to work at the White House without probably imagining that, some time later, his name would become the most pronounced in the press and in conversations across the country about what was happening in Washington DC

That a president was sexually involved with a woman while married to another was not going to go unnoticed by either society or the courts. Clinton, 49 and Lewinsky, 22, had been in a relationship for two years and the first lady, Hillary, knew nothing until the evidence was released.

It was Linda Tripp, a former Pentagon employee, who shed light on the relationship between Bill Yes Monica. For this, she recorded 20 hours of conversations with her friend, in which she told the sexual details of what was happening in an office adjoining the Oval Room. This battery of evidence was handed over to the FBI in January 1998.

In an interview in 2003, Tripp He said he had no regrets. “I didn’t know what to do, it terrified me, it scared me, I felt totally guilty for having to handle her, but I was convinced in my soul that it would benefit her in the end.” That he couldn’t do that to hurt someone else anymore, ”he admitted years later. His intention was to expose what, in his vision, was an overt abuse of power on Clinton’s part..

At 24 and in love with the President of the United States, Lewinsky had a lot to lose. Is it when your case transcended the walls of the Oval room, her name began to appear in all media headlines and even began to be distinguished for what happened. The Washington Post, for example, she devoted 125 articles to the subject in ten days, as she complained. To all this must be added the morbid with which allusion has been made to the details of the relationship between the two, such as the famous stained dress.

Monica had to put up with being described as the “Predatory intern at the White House” or as a “Young vagabond in search of emotions”. “There was a time for me where I would cry hysterically and then pass out. And in the times when it was off, I remember looking out the window thinking the only way to fix this was to kill myself, jump out the window, ”he said in a broadcast interview. by the chain. ABC.

The harassment that led her to consider ending her own life inspired her years later to become an Internet Anti-Harassment Military Officer and Doctorate in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics. With the rise of the movement Me too In 2017, the 47-year-old reflected again on the episode that put her center stage and remembered how helpless she had felt. In an article he wrote for Vanity FairShe thanked the words that one of the promoters of the feminist movement addressed to her then. “Sorry to leave you alone”, said the message that moved Monica.

“Usually I was alone. Publicly alone; abandoned above all by the key figure in the crisis, who knew me very well and intimately [Clinton]. That I had my mistakes, we can agree on that. But swim in the sea of ​​loneliness it was terrifying“, He stated Lewinsky in the same column.

Faced with the scandal of his relationship with Lewinsky, the Democratic president carried another strong accusation on his shoulders. Paula jones, a former secretary from Arkansas, had denounced him in 1994 for sexual harassment. The woman alleged that during Clinton He was governor of the State, on May 8, 1991, he had made her go up to his room to force her to give him a blowjob.

The problem worsened when, during his declaration to the Jones case -the count for which he was exonerated on April 1, 1998-, the former president denied having had sexual relations with Lewinsky. All this earned him to be charged with 11 crimes and led him to “AccusedFor perjury, abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

“I had a relationship with the lady Lewinsky that it was not appropriate and that it was in fact wrong. It was an error of judgment and a personal fault on my part; I am solely responsible, but at no time did I ask anyone to lie or to hide or destroy evidence, ”admitted the president at the time, but his efforts to be honest were not enough to avoid a political trial.

The process began on December 19, 1998 in the House of Representatives and, after 13 months of investigation, ended in the Senate on February 12 of the following year. The background and the number of Democrats in the upper house were big factors Clinton emerged politically unscathed from such a scandal. To remove a president in the United States, two-thirds of the membership is required, i.e. 12 senators from his party had to be put against him. Neither.

In the documentary Hillary, where the intimate circle of the former first lady participates, said her husband, about the scandal in which he starred: “Everyone’s life has pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of everything (.. .). Things I have done to control my anxieties for years. I am a different person, totally different from what I was ”. He also reflected on perhaps the biggest victim of his case: “I feel bad that the life of Monica lewinsky he was defined by that, unfairly I think ”.