Meeting Monica Lewinsky Healed My Teenage Self

And what she means to a generation of women.

Me and Lewinsky now; Me in the ‘90s.

I was 14 in 1998 when the relationship between President Bill Clinton and his intern Monica Lewinsky came to light. Those early teen years are extremely formative. The things we see and hear in the media get stamped into our minds, and much of it never leaves. The kids on TikTok like to say things “change their brain chemistry,” and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I do think the entire Lewinsky/Clinton scandal changed who I was and formed what kind of adult I became. And I know I’m not alone.

When I told my friends I was maybe going to meet Lewinsky at facialist Shani Darden’s dinner for her new skincare launch (I covered it for The Hollywood Reporter), the response from women my age was generally the same: shock and awe. They didn’t ask me if I could get a photo. (I did.) They asked if I could hug her. There’s a collective emotion between us all that’s hard to explain, it’s like we have this connection with a woman we’ve never met. Because we are her. We’ve been her. We relate to her in ways that don’t even fully make sense and wouldn’t to a younger generation who only read about the scandal long after it happened. I don’t even know if it hit our parents the way it hit us.

We don’t need to go over the details of the then-White House intern’s affair with the president. Because that’s not what affected me. I didn’t care what the president did in his free time with a consenting adult. My parents, longtime Democrats and Clinton supporters, didn’t either. When my parents talked about the scandal, it was inoffensive and mostly with empathy for all the women involved. I was lucky in that way, that I didn’t have to hear the sex-shaming, body-shaming, and overall disgusting rhetoric that was in the media, in my own house.

TIME's Feb. 2, 1998, issue, a special report.

I heard enough of it, and read enough of it, in the news. Fortunately, there was no social media because I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been. Here I was, dating for the first time, and growing into my body with bigger boobs than my friends’, navigating the pressures of being a teenager. At the same time, I watched a pretty, intelligent, 22-year-old get vilified for having a relationship with an attractive, charismatic, powerful older man who should have known better. And should have protected her.

It made me think, if I made a bad decision with the wrong guy, would anyone protect me? Would they believe me when I told them? I wouldn’t want to be defined by the last guy I dated. I felt young and dumb, just like the girl I saw on T.V. I could see how easily something like this could happen.

I’m sure I expressed some sort of criticism of her for being with a married man. I was a big Hillary Clinton fan and often asked my parents why she couldn’t be president. (I’d go on to be heartbroken in 2016.) I didn’t understand the power dynamics at the time and couldn’t see that Clinton wasn’t just as much at fault, he was much, much more so.

While there was no TikTok, there was The Wall Street Journal, which called Lewinsky “a little tart.” The New York Times said she was a “ditzy, predatory White House intern.” Poll after poll asked readers to rate her attractiveness. New York magazine reported that as a child, Lewinsky spent two summers at a “fat camp,” where she “paid particular attention to the boys.” So, they were calling her fat and a slut. Great.

There was no feminist media. There was no Jezebel for me to read to get another perspective. And Lewinsky had very few supporters. She wasn’t rich. She didn’t have a PR machine or perfect makeup and clothes. She had no chance.

I thought about her all the time and read everything I could. I learned about Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations of sexual harassment she made against Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas. I was disgusted by her treatment and the questions she faced. Christine Blasey Ford would go on to face very similar treatment in 2018 when she went up against the same panel with allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. We’re shown over and over that no one believes women.

Lewinsky’s 2014 Vanity Fair essay made me realize how bad it really was. She was suicidal, broke, couldn’t get a job, and didn’t want to write a tell-all. Her mother was worried she would be “literally humiliated to death.”

Vanity Fair.

Now at 40 years old, with my own experience with bad decisions, body shaming, and the works, it’s even harder to imagine what she went through. For the past 10 years, I’ve loved following her on social media, especially Twitter before Elon Musk ruined it. Seeing her take back her power has been incredibly inspiring. She’s become an activist, speaking out against online harassment and its devastating effects.

There seems to be a new podcast every day, which makes me think podcast equipment is too readily available (especially for men). But if anyone should have one, it’s Lewinsky. She’s put out seven episodes of Reclaiming so far, in which she talks to guests about traumatic moments in their lives and how they got through them. It’s helped heal the part of me that’s worried about her since middle school. I can’t wait for the next episode with Beanie Feldstein, who played Lewinsky so well in Impeachment: American Crime Story.

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When I met Lewinsky at dinner, I didn’t say everything I wanted to say. We talked about beauty and skincare, which was my work assignment. I didn’t tell her how much she means to an entire generation of women and how proud of her we are. I like to think she already knows.