Other women whose testimonies could have changed Thomas’s fate have since come forward. His former employee Angela Wright was prepared to testify during Hill’s hearing that she had experienced similar treatment by Thomas, but was never called as a witness. Neither was Rose Jourdain, an EEOC speechwriter willing to verify Wright’s story. “I knew that Clarence Thomas was capable because he had made similar remarks to me and in my presence about my body and other women’s bodies, and he did—he was very egotistical, and he did pressure me to date him, and he did drop by the house when unannounced,” Wright later said. She believes that the committee purposely avoided her testimony. A special assistant to Thomas, Sukari Hardnett, said she left the EEOC because she had also witnessed Thomas’s inappropriately sexual behavior toward women in the office. “If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female,” Hardnett told the Washington Post.
THE INTERN
In July 1995, Monica Lewinsky started her internship in the White House. It was the same month that she turned twenty-two years old. In November, she passed the president in the hall and mouthed “Hi,” according to Lewinsky’s biography, Monica’s Story, by Andrew Morton. The president smiled back. Lewinsky worked in the same office as Clinton’s chief of staff. That same day, the president swung by four or five times Lewinsky later recalled. He dropped by a staffer’s birthday party and smiled at her again. “She was, in White House parlance, getting a lot of presidential ‘face time,’” Morton wrote. To up the flirtation ante, Lewinsky flashed the president her thong.
Their affair wasn’t a fling. It spanned more than two years, ending in May 1997, and consisted of roughly twenty meetings and “countless” lengthy, late-night phone calls, “all of them made by the President.” Clinton promised to protect Lewinsky and told her that she reminded him of his mother. Morton observes: “Far from using her as a mere sexual plaything to be discarded at whim, the fifty-year-old president seemed to have a much deeper need for this girl in her early twenties.” And yet America has immortalized the relationship as fellatio in the Oval Office and foreplay with a cigar. In the history books, it isn’t the Clinton scandal—it’s the Lewinsky scandal. One person is at fault.
In April of 1996, staffers suspicious of Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton transferred her to the Pentagon. Evelyn Lieberman, the deputy White House chief of staff, later told the New York Times that Lewinsky was moved because of “immature and inappropriate behavior,” and that she was too distracted to get her work done. Lewinsky was devastated by the demotion and what it would mean for her relationship with Clinton. Once at the Pentagon, she befriended a longtime employee, Linda Tripp, and confided in her about the affair. Tripp surreptitiously recorded these confidential talks and then gave the tapes to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who was investigating the president in January of 1998. The former Bible salesman seemed to have a bloodthirst for the president and his infidelities.
In love and compelled to protect “Handsome,” Lewinsky submitted a false affidavit, professing no sexual relationship with Clinton. But her recorded conversations with Tripp told otherwise. On January 12, Tripp called the Office of the Independent Counsel and said that the president was having an affair with a government employee who was subpoenaed in the Jones case, and that he had told her to lie about it. The next day, Tripp recorded three hours of conversations with Lewinsky.
While many retellings imagine Lewinsky as too dumb to realize her friend was entrapping her, by the end of their relationship, Lewinsky distrusted Tripp and suspected her espionage. She dug in Tripp’s purse looking for a recorder after her colleague decamped to the bathroom. She didn’t find it because the wire was affixed to Tripp herself. On January 16, armed FBI agents hauled Lewinsky—now twenty-four—to a room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and threatened her with charges like perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, plus twenty-seven years in prison. Agents grilled her for hours. Lewinsky said the encounter felt “as if my stomach had been cut open and someone poured acid onto my wound.” She thought about suicide then and there at the hotel, since there were sliding windows she could conceivably jump through.
A CLINTON BIMBO
The scandal, which has been called “the most riveting chapter of recent American history,” broke on January 17, 1998, when a blogger named Matt Drudge published a skeleton report that began:
**WORLD EXCLUSIVE**
**MUST CREDIT THE DRUDGE REPORT**
At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!
The Drudge Report, which was made by this story, wouldn’t out Lewinsky until the following day. She was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Paula Jones. It took two days for other news outlets to report the story. Drudge’s sentence construction cemented the narrative: the intern as subject and actor, the president as object. Early descriptions of Lewinsky noted she was “saucy” and “tearful,” and wore “low-cut blouses” and “thigh-high skirts.”
After the scandal broke, Lewinsky sequestered herself in her mother’s Washington apartment at the Watergate. After she was tailed on her way to get her hair cut, she changed stylists. When she visited her father in Los Angeles, a car full of paparazzi chased her down and crashed into her vehicle. And when the press weren’t stalking or endangering her, they insulted everything about her, including her appearance, ambition, and background. Coverage of her focused on tired stereotypes. Lewinsky was slutty, dumb, entitled, and fat. “It’s doubtful that Lewinsky played hard to get,” Newsweek editorialized. Former boyfriends emerged to bash Lewinsky publicly. A married former lover in Oregon called a press conference on his lawn to disparage her.
News anchors wondered if she was “ditzy.” Democrats and Republicans alike called her a “Clinton bimbo,” a term used to defame the women with whom the president had allegedly cheated on his wife. ABC News promoted their segment featuring Tripp’s tapes as the “world’s most exclusive girl talk.” Of course, Lewinsky and Tripp weren’t girls. They were professional women, and assistants to high-level government officials in the Pentagon office of public affairs. But because the topic of conversation was sex with men, the media reduced them to schoolgirls.
FAT AND UNATTRACTIVE
Many blamed Lewinsky for the affair, claiming she wasn’t attractive enough to bag the president. “I think what people are outraged about is the way that she looks. . . . I mean, the thing I kept hearing over and over again was Monica Lewinsky’s not that pretty,” said writer Katie Roiphe at a convening of feminists in February of 1998. Later, when the Starr Report described Clinton complimenting Lewinsky’s beauty, sniggers abounded. But more offensive than Lewinsky’s looks was her weight. When she was growing up in Beverly Hills, classmates had bullied her and called her “Big Mac.”
Lewinsky was self-conscious about her body from an early age. The repeated fat-shaming stung and contributed to “neurotic” behavior regarding her body into adulthood. Tabloids like the Enquirer hurled every synonym for “fat” they could find at Lewinsky. They reported on what they thought she ate, from potato chips to crab cakes. Headlines like “Tubby Temptress Checks into Gym to Lose 55 Pounds” were common. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” Later, when a famous photographer shot Lewinsky for Marie Claire UK, the paper reported that he “overlit her face to make it appear thinner.”
It wasn’t only the tabloids that taunted Lewinsky for being fat. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd called her “the girl who was too tubby to be in the high school ‘in’ crowd.” Lewinsky had sent care packages to the president containing letters and a tie, but Dowd joked that instead the parcels contained Ho Hos and Ding Dongs (double entendres lost on no one), since both Lewinsky and Clinton were “junk food addicts” likely “swept away on a Slurpee sugar
high, comforting each other for their body image disorders.” Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin described Clinton’s young paramour as a budding body-conscious narcissist: “Before she became obsessed with the president of the United States, her only other serious interest in life was dieting,” he wrote. Former suitors piled on. Journalist Jake Tapper called her “chubby” and “cute, if a little zaftig” in a Washington City Paper article he wrote about dating her. “I have two words for people who think that sex burns calories,” cracked Jay Leno. “Monica Lewinsky.”
When Lewinsky became a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig diet brand in 2000, some read it as her attempt to trade pounds for love, just as Anna Nicole Smith had hoped to do. Lewinsky had been characterized as “an oversized, oversexed power grubber and home wrecker,” wrote Jennifer-Scott Mobley in the book Fat: Culture and Materiality. Lewinsky was “performing her weight loss to escape the ghosting of her previous body—and the contempt and disgust associated with it—and thereby reshaping her public identity,” Mobley observed.
But even the “change your body, change your life” fight, which had worked wonders for personalities like Oprah and Kirstie Alley, backfired for Monica Lewinsky. Detractors mocked her for trying to slim down. Jenny Craig reportedly dropped her because she didn’t lose enough weight. Her fleshiness rivaled her adultery in its offensiveness.
Not only was she stigmatized for being fat, but Lewinsky’s body type contributed to the story line that she was lazy and unkempt—“one of the untidiest people I have ever met,” according to Morton. The emergence of the now infamous blue dress stained with semen underscored her supposed slovenliness. A prurient public had to know: Why didn’t she wash it? In her biography, she explained that she didn’t want to pay to clean the garment until just before she was going to wear it again, in case she gained weight and couldn’t fit into it. She maintains that she told prosecutors about the dress because they threatened her with jail time if she didn’t reveal everything, and she had already told Tripp about it on the tapes. But this explanation didn’t suffice. Instead, it substantiated the many negative traits attributed to her by an unforgiving press and public—gluttony, stupidity, and perversion foremost among them.
HAVING SEX AND LIKING IT
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer Prize “for her fresh and insightful columns on the impact of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky,” judges noted, but the coveted award was won at the expense of a recent college grad who had a consenting relationship with the most powerful man on earth. Dowd’s columns about the “ditsy, predatory White House intern” consecrated the notion that she was a dumb slut. She insisted Lewinsky “might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon” and was “immune” from having a brain. Dowd accused her of taking down a powerful man by dispensing her cleavage. A test-balloon defense for Lewinsky could be “the Troubled Slut Defense,” Dowd offered. “White House aides note that her friends say Monica arrived in Washington like a heat-seeking missile to seduce the President,” she wrote. Lewinsky took to calling her “Moremean Dowdy” among friends.
In the August 1998 column “Monica Gets Her Man,” Dowd shames Lewinsky for embracing her sexuality in public. The romance was “pathetically adolescent,” and Lewinsky was silly for believing anything to the contrary. “Monica made it clear she was not simply servicing the President. The pleasuring, she insisted, contradicting his account, was mutual. Their relationship was not cheap. It was way unique,” Dowd observed.
While slut-shaming Lewinsky was a bandwagon everyone rode, it is striking that this behavior was rampant even within her own camp. Her lawyer and family friend William H. Ginsburg publicly made sexual jokes about Lewinsky. He remarked to her father that Bill Clinton would “cream his pants” if he saw her at a photo shoot. He said that Clinton preferred women with “dark pubic hair,” an off-color reference to Lewinsky. Time magazine quoted him bitchifying Lewinsky as a “caged dog with her twenty-four-year-old libido.”
Fewer things are more threatening to puritanical, morally hysterical America than a young woman having sex and liking it. This is precisely what Lewinsky was guilty of, and the punishment was—and remains—slut-shaming. Newsweek reported that Lewinsky’s childhood neighbors said she “wore adult makeup” as early as age twelve as evidence that she had long sought male attention. Tapper confirmed this. Though he claimed he was writing about her valiantly, to correct those who called her a “tart,” he admitted that he talked to her at a party because she seemed “easy.” “I figured that behind her initial aggressiveness lurked an easy, perhaps winning, bit of no-frills hookup,” he wrote. On the requisite Saturday Night Live sketch, Molly Shannon’s Lewinsky insists, “I like BJs,” and uses the film Titanic as sexual innuendo. “That thing was so long” and “took two hours to go down,” she trills.
Like Anita Hill before her, Monica Lewinsky was accused of suffering from erotomania—deluding herself that Clinton wanted her, as Hill had allegedly done with Thomas. The implication was that the affair was her fault and only occurred because her craziness wore the poor man down. Barbara Walters does not hide her disdain for Lewinsky’s sexuality, rebuking her throughout the course of their exclusive interview. “The whole country felt you were a stalker and a seductress,” said Walters. Critics didn’t see Lewinsky expressing her agency by truthfully describing what she knew to be her sexual relationship with the president; they saw her to be threatening him with her lustful story. “Like the Glenn Close character in ‘Fatal Attraction,’ Monica Lewinsky issued a chilling ultimatum to the man who jilted her: I will not be ignored,” Dowd wrote. The stalker sobriquet proved handy. Only a crazy obsessive who didn’t wash her clothes after sex could begin and maintain an affair with the leader of the free world, a man whose bedroom door is guarded with guns. The story that women stalked men in large numbers was proved to be a gross exaggeration by a 1998 Justice Department report. It found that women were four times more likely to be victims of stalking than men, and that more than a million women were stalked each year. “Given these findings, stalking should be treated as a legitimate criminal justice and public health concern,” the authors wrote.
Lewinsky’s self-proclaimed comfort with her own sexuality was discomfiting to many, but women older than her seemed particularly offended. She claimed to come “from a generation where women are sexually supportive of each other,” but this concept was lost on older, influential women and feminists, many of whom bad-mouthed her. Betty Friedan publicly called her “some little twerp.” Erica Jong cracked that Lewinsky had “third stage gum disease.” In her primetime interview, Barbara Walters calls Lewinsky a “big mouth” for telling people about her affair with Clinton. “You’re a sensuous, passionate young woman. Is Bill Clinton a sensuous, passionate man?” Walters asks.
“Gosh, I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Lewinsky replies.
“Not in any more trouble than you’re already in, Monica,” Walters scolds.
“Where was your self-respect?” she asks, her voice climbing an octave. “Where was your self-esteem?”
“I don’t have the feelings of self-worth that a woman should have, and that’s hard for me, and I think that’s been at the center of a lot of my mistakes and a lot of my pain,” Lewinsky answers, making Walters look like a circling vulture, refusing to stand down even though the prey is still very much alive.
Walters asks what Lewinsky will tell her children about the affair. When Lewinsky says she’ll tell her children that “Mommy made a big mistake,” Walters sums up the interview in a recorded voice-over: “And that is the understatement of the year.” Cue the credits.
The Walters sit-down with Lewinsky was the essence of 90s bitchification. Seventy-four million people viewed it, putting it on par with that year’s Super Bowl and making it “the most-watched news interview ever televised on a single network.”
Sadly, the interview didn’t evoke any ire at the older woman’s reproachful, finger-wagging trea
tment of the younger one, or much sympathy for Lewinsky’s touching honesty, for that matter. Rather, most calls to ABC after the interview, according to Walters, demanded to know Lewinsky’s lipstick shade and where to buy it. Glaze by Club Monaco quickly sold out across the country.
A SHUNNING
Though Anita Hill had charged sexual harassment, after the hearings she was punished for being associated with sex. She was overwhelmed by threats of death, sexual violence, and bombs, and would return home to vile packages and voice mails. “People felt free to leave the most cruel and revolting messages imaginable,” she said.
Hill was to appear in a promotional video for her job, at the University of Oklahoma, but after the hearings, the advertisement was pulled and Hill was edited out. “We felt that people would focus on her and not stay with the institutional message,” said a spokeswoman. Hill called it “a shunning.” Her hometown paper, the Daily Oklahoman, ran editorials favoring Thomas’s appointment, and called her testimony a ploy conjured by Democratic shills. Hill’s advisers discouraged her from responding to the attacks, and few came to her defense.
Meanwhile, Thomas and his wife, Virginia, made the cover of People magazine. A photo of the couple hugging opened to a multipage spread featuring them relaxing and reading the Bible in their home. These humanizing images of a married couple seemed to underscore Thomas’s innocence. The magazine also ran an essay by Virginia Thomas, in which she accuses Hill of lying and furthers the erotomaniac theory. “What’s scary about her allegations is that they remind me of the movie Fatal Attraction or, in her case, what I call the fatal assistant. In my heart, I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted,” Virginia Thomas wrote.
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