None other than Monica Lewinsky, who obviously figures that if Hillary! can resurrect the nineties, so can she, via the pages of the increasingly anti-Hillary New York Times:
Monica Lewinsky was sitting in a Manhattan auditorium last month, watching teenage girls perform a play called “Slut.” Ms. Lewinsky was in blue jeans and a blazer, her hair pulled out of her face with a small clip. She was wiping away tears.
In the scene, a young woman was seated in an interrogation room. She had been asked to describe, repeatedly, what had happened on the night in question — when, she said, on their way to a party, a group of guy friends had pinned her down in a taxi and sexually assaulted her. She had reported them. Now everyone at school knew, everyone had chosen a side.
“My life has just completely fallen apart,” the girl said, her voice shaking. Her parents were in the next room. “Now I’m that girl.” The play concluded, and Ms. Lewinsky fumbled through her purse for a tissue. A woman came and whisked her to the stage. “Hi, I’m Monica Lewinsky,” she said, visibly nervous.
The Girl in the Blue Dress gets the full, sympathetic, gauzy-photo treatment from the Paper of Record of the Democrat National Committee; instead of the hot intern who seduced an easily persuaded our horn dog of a president, she’s now the Wronged Woman, standing up for Womyn Everywhere.
A lot is different for Monica Lewinsky these days, starting with the fact that, until last year, she had hardly appeared publicly for a decade. Now 41, the former White House intern once famously dismissed by the president as “that woman” holds a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics. She splits time between New York and Los Angeles, where she grew up, and London, and said it’s been hard to find work. Mostly she has embraced a quiet existence: doing meditation and therapy, volunteering, spending time with friends.
But the quiet ended last May, when she wrote an essay for Vanity Fair about the aftermath of her affair with Bill Clinton — the story a result of a years-long relationship with the magazine and its editor, Graydon Carter. (She was first photographed in its pages by Herb Ritts in 1998.) In the essay, which was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award, she declared that the time had come to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and “give a purpose to my past…”
She is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control.
Read the whole thing, especially if you’re nostalgic for pre-9/11 America. And then remember why there’s no way in hell we want a choice between Hillary! and Jeb Bush.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member