English Version | Crime and Punishment

01 Sep 2022
By Ana Murcho

Once upon a time there was a young woman who fell in love with her boss. The (adulterous) relationship between them becomes public. Only the boss is the most powerful man in the world, and the world is not prepared to “forgive” the woman who fell into temptation. The affair ends, he is acquitted and lives happily ever after, she does not. She has to endure the scrutiny of the invisible voices that, behind a screen, turned her into the first villain of the digital age.

Once upon a time there was a young woman who fell in love with her boss. The (adulterous) relationship between them becomes public. Only the boss is the most powerful man in the world, and the world is not prepared to “forgive” the woman who fell into temptation. The affair ends, he is acquitted and lives happily ever after, she does not. She has to endure the scrutiny of the invisible voices that, behind a screen, turned her into the first villain of the digital age. 

It is hard to find anyone who does not know who Monica Samille Lewinsky is. Author and activist, she is known worldwide as “the intern” who had an affair with Bill Clinton — a relationship that almost cost the former American president his second term in office. Few people will know, however, the truth about Lewinsky. How she survived the annus horribilis of 1998, how she overcame the stigma of being “the most hated woman in the world”, how she coped with the humiliation of seeing intimate details of her private life dissected in newspapers, magazines, websites (the Internet was in its infancy, and this is particularly relevant in this story), coffee chats and TV programs, how she recovered her self-esteem after being labeled a whore, fat, libertine, narcissist, crazy, ambitious. The story exploded in early 1998, more precisely on January 19, when The Drudge Report — an eminently conservative news and gossip website read by all Washington players — published a post alluding to the purposeful delay in the publication of an article in Newsweek magazine about the alleged affair between Clinton and Lewinsky. Until that day, Monica was just a former White House intern, a piece so small that she could be considered invisible in the cog of American politics. But when it became public that she was “one more” in the already long list of women with ties to the president, the media decided, for no apparent reason, that she would be “the face” of the scandal — even if it was he, and not she, who lied about the relationship. Under oath. Lewinsky was the perfect target: young, naive, educated, wealthy, overweight beyond what heroin chic perceived to be right... woman. In October 2021 Vox wrote an article entitled Every version of the Monica Lewinsky story reveals America's failure of empathy, which read: “Her name became synonymous with a sex act. Her humiliation became a national spectacle.” Lewinsky's mistake was to fall in love with a married man, substantially older, and to believe that their relationship (adulterous, to be sure, but private) was theirs alone. From this distance, it is possible to see that the price she paid for this slip was too high — Clinton survived an impeachment and ended her second term with her popularity intact.

In 2014, after more than a decade of self-imposed social withdrawal, Monica Lewinsky returned: first with a TED talk that received very positive reviews, then with an essay published in Vanity Fair (whose title, Shame and Survival, perfectly sums up her story) where, for the first time, she shared her version of events. “I became a social representation, a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.” The piece starts with a disarming confession. In early 2001, Lewinsky was giving a Q&A about Monica in Black and White, an HBO documentary in which she starred, when someone asked her the following question: “How does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?” Both she and the audience were petrified. The reason she had agreed to participate in that program was simple — she believed she would be able to shift the focus of the scandal to relevant issues that had been heavily ignored in the past. “People seemed indifferent to the deeper matters at hand, such as the erosion of private life in the public sphere, the balance of power and gender inequality in politics and media, and the erosion of legal protections to ensure that neither a parent nor a child should ever have to testify against each other [Lewinsky's mother was forced to testify against her daughter, something unprecedented even considering the unconventional parameters of the Clinton affair]. She soon realized that this was not (yet) possible. “How naïve I was.” Dozens of voices shouted “don't answer”, but she did not take the advice. “It’s hurtful and it’s insulting. And as insulting as it is to me, it’s even more insulting to my family. I don’t actually know why this whole story became about oral sex. I don’t. It was a mutual relationship.... The fact that it did is maybe a result of a male-dominated society.”

As she herself assumed, that meeting with the public was insignificant, especially when compared to the infamous Starr Report, a 445-page portent that summarized independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s four-year investigation into the Clinton White House, and which included chapters devoted to Lewinsky’s (intimate? personal?) sexual activities, as well as dozens of transcripts recounting private conversations she had with her “friend” Linda Tripp. However, that question (“How does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?”) symbolized not only a frontal, direct attack, but revived the stigma that had always dogged her — that she was a sex-addicted whore and a home-wrecker. And yet… “Had that awkward moment at Cooper Union aired only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating. That clip would have gone viral on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TMZ, Gawker. It would have become a meme of its own on Tumblr. The viralness itself would have merited mention on the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.” In other words, once someone is labeled an adulterer (the expression “the scarlet letter”, which alludes to an identifying mark placed on someone who has committed adultery, fits Lewinsky like a glove) it will be difficult to portray him or her any other way. No one is safe from being publicly humiliated. Monica Samille Lewinsky, about whom both the reader and myself know little or nothing — because her entire persona was constructed according to an idea approved by the media and and validated by millions of onlookers who followed her descent into hell — was only “patient zero” of this phenomenon that took on frightening proportions with the advent of the Internet. “In 1998, when news of my affair with Bill Clinton broke, I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world”, Monica said. “Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.”

In the 20th century, this is where the rumors, the gossip, the half-truths that can destroy a person's life are born. This “culture of humiliation”, as historian Nicolaus Mills calls it, not only encourages hearsay but also rewards the perpetrators. The victims are, almost always, forgotten. As Lewinsky reminds us: “Yes, we’re all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle achievements large and small. But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims.” The difficulty in turning the page, made difficult by the impossibility of erasing the past, conditions all those who are judged in the court of public opinion — where millions of “lawyers” expose their arguments, whether true or not, in front of a jury that seems to rejoice at every slip. Until her death on August 31, 1997, Princess Diana was one of the main targets of this catalogue of infamy, with almost daily accusations from the British tabloids, which profited from “news” that had little or no foundation. The world moved on and the technological explosion of the 2000s was marked by the proliferation of websites, first, and blogs, later, which functioned as the beginnings of social networks. Perez Hilton, one of the first to use this type of tool, started publishing gossip about celebrities in 2001. His modus operandi — aggressive, unscrupulous, ruthless — turned him into one of the most hated figures in Hollywood. On and off the internet, names like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton or Miley Cyrus were denigrated to exhaustion. Spears' meltdown in 2007 was broadcast worldwide like a sitcom. Richie's weight problems were ridiculed in the public square. Lohan's career was destroyed by her addictions and personal problems, which were scrutinized on a daily basis. In all these cases, the public went from being a passive spectator to an active player in the “killing.”

Today, anonymity is an almost impossible status. Even the most incognito citizen is subject — just for being alive — to having his name dragged through the mud. The very moment that someone, behind a screen, imagines something about another person, however far-fetched, is the starting point for a headache that can, in the extreme, be fatal. The number of suicides motivated by gossip and rumors increases every year, especially among teenagers, who have no defense mechanisms to fight the accusations they are subjected to. The problem is so serious that there are already studies that try to understand how the proliferation of rumors can end up in self-induced death. The hit 13 Reasons Why (2017) is an example of how bad language can be destructive. The premise of the show is the aftermath of the suicide of Hannah Baker, a teenager who before killing herself leaves behind a box of tapes in which she details the reasons why she chose to end her life, as well as the people she believes are responsible for her death. In literature, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) is one of the most recent examples of this theme. Jon Ronson, a British journalist, discusses the many aspects of online shaming and analyzes its historical background. The book explores the resurgence of “public shaming” as an Internet phenomenon, particularly on Twitter, and contains the testimony of victims of this type of aggression — namely Justine Sacco, PR executive, who was fired after sharing a racist tweet, or Lindsey Stone, healthcare worker, who lost her job when one of her private jokes became public. In both cases, the level of internet shaming was such that they were forced to (drastically) change all the plans they had made up to that point. As the book reminds us, the legitimacy of their actions is not in question, but rather the high price they were forced to pay for being judged in the public square. Is all this a reflection of our lack of empathy, the one that in 1998 also spoke to the Americans?

We have always been curious, to be sure. But that curiosity should, perhaps, have less than seven lives — have limits. Nowadays it's not enough for us to know everything firsthand, we need to have an opinion about everything (and everyone). With unlimited access, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to any kind of information, we see ourselves as news agents, specialized commentators, shameless critics. In Portugal, take the case of personalities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Margarida Corceiro, Judite de Sousa, or Cristina Ferreira, whose footsteps occupy pages and pages of both “specialized” publications and personal feeds, where the right to comment is taken for granted. In the essay published in Vanity Fair, Monica Lewinsky recalls how tragic bad gossip can be: “Tyler [Clementi], you will recall, was an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man. Days later, after being derided and humiliated on social media, he committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Lewinsky, whose involvement in the production of Impeachment: American Crime (2021), helped clarify several dimensions of the Clinton affair, is finally beginning to be seen with new eyes. She is no longer just “that woman” (an expression used by the President to refer to her), but a fighter, a woman who has survived the worst kind of humiliation imaginable — public humiliation, the kind of humiliation that can often lead to death. “I wished I could have had a chance to have spoken to Tyler about how my love life, my sex life, my most private moments, my most sensitive secrets, had been broadcast around the globe. I wished I had been able to say to him that I knew a little of how it might have felt for him to be exposed before the world. And, as hard as it is to imagine surviving it, it is possible.”  Several people reacted to Lewinsky's article. Almost all showed remorse — even those who attacked her. “I started to feel bad, David Letterman said on air after he confirmed that he had read the article. “Because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman. And she was a kid, she was 21, 22. … I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation.” The mention of the name “Monica Lewinsky” will always provoke unexpected reactions but, so many years after being connoted as “that woman”, she can finally be seen as a symbol of the feminism that failed us in 1998. Perhaps this is the best plot twist of this battle for the truth: it is quite possible that Lewinsky is not the villain after all. This is where her happy ending begins.

Translated from the original on The Gossip Issue of Vogue Portugal.Full credits and stories on the print issue.

Ana Murcho By Ana Murcho

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