Steve Keyes

Monica Lewinsky was 22 when she started having sex with the President of the United States. Bill Clinton was 49 and her boss. She was an unpaid White House intern. They hooked up nine times in the Oval Office. Then her friend from work secretly recorded 20 hours of their phone calls and handed them to the prosecutor. And it was Monica, not the president, whose life was destroyed. Monica started her internship in July 1995. Four months later she was alone with Clinton for the first time. Their last encounter was in spring 1997. By then she had been moved to a job at the Pentagon. That's where she met Linda Tripp. Monica told her everything. On the advice of literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, Tripp started recording their calls in secret, which was illegal in Maryland where she lived. And Tripp told Monica not to dry-clean the blue dress with the president's semen on it. On January 16, 1998, Tripp invited Monica to lunch at the Pentagon City mall food court. She came down the escalator with two FBI agents. They took Monica to room 1012 of the Ritz-Carlton next door. For about 12 hours prosecutors told her she could go to prison for 27 years. She was 24. Ten days later Clinton went on national TV: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Monica got immunity and handed the blue dress to Ken Starr. In August the FBI took Clinton's blood for a DNA test. It matched. Clinton admitted the relationship. In December 1998 he was impeached. He stayed in office. Monica says sympathy lasted "five seconds." After that she was called "a stalker, a whore, mentally unstable, a bimbo." In 1999, 70 million Americans watched her interview with Barbara Walters. She made $1 million from the international rights and about $500,000 from a book. Jenny Craig signed her for $1 million if she lost 40 pounds. They paid her $300,000. In 2018 NBC asked Clinton if he owed her an apology. "No, I do not." In 2020 he said he felt "terrible" that the affair had defined her life. In 2021 Monica produced the TV series about her own scandal, Impeachment: American Crime Story. In 2025 she said Clinton should have resigned instead of throwing a young woman "under the bus." "I lost my future." "I bet nobody has asked Bill if he ever thought about changing his name." He got impeached and kept his job. She got a blue dress, 27 years on the table and a name she can't change. Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.