Monica Lewinsky Says Bill Clinton Walked Away “Untouched” While She Nearly Lost Her Life

A former White House intern says America still hasn’t reckoned with the power imbalance that defined one of the most infamous political scandals in modern history.

Monica Lewinsky is speaking out again. And this time, she’s taking sharper aim at Bill Clinton than ever before.

In a new interview conducted in late 2025 and published this week, Lewinsky said the former Democratic president “escaped far more than I ever did,” even though she was the youngest and least powerful person involved.

“I haven’t spoken to him in almost thirty years,” she said. “But I think he escaped a lot more than I did.”

The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal exploded in January 1998, shaking a White House already weathering questions about honesty, character, and national security decisions. Clinton was 49. Lewinsky was 22, fresh out of college, and working as an unpaid intern.

Clinton denied the affair outright. His now-famous line, delivered from the White House podium, became a national punchline and a cultural marker.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Lewinsky says the response wasn’t just a lie. It was psychological warfare.

“It was gaslighting,” she said. “I experienced it on a very large scale. It was devastating.”

Lewinsky admitted that the media mob that followed her everywhere left her considering suicide.

“The public humiliation was excruciating. Life was almost unbearable,” she said.

Friends of Lewinsky, speaking anonymously, told The Times that she “rarely left her apartment” and lived in “constant panic” as the scandal consumed every inch of public life in the late 1990s.

“She became the national punching bag,” one longtime confidant recalled. “Clinton got book deals. She got death threats.”

Lewinsky maintains their relationship was consensual but says that doesn’t change the truth.

“This was a gross abuse of power. Full stop,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes. But at the heart of it was a gross abuse of power.”

Critics on the political right have argued for decades that Clinton received special treatment because of his party affiliation and his cultural celebrity. Under President Trump’s current administration, the Clinton legacy has once again become a talking point as Republicans seek to contrast Trump’s policies and conduct with past Democratic scandals.

Although Clinton was impeached in 1998, he was acquitted by the Senate and went on to build a lucrative post-presidential career. In 2018, he bristled at questions about whether he should have resigned.

“I dealt with it 20 years ago,” he told NBC. “The American people stayed with me.”

That comment still angers women’s-rights advocates, especially those on the right who argue the #MeToo movement bent over backwards to avoid holding Clinton fully accountable.

Lewinsky retreated from public life in the mid-2000s. She later returned as a producer for FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story and has more recently attempted to reclaim her own narrative. In January 2025, she launched a podcast called Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky.

“I draw from my own unique experiences, like surviving a global scandal at 24,” she says in the show’s description.

On a February 2025 episode of Call Her Daddy, she argued that Clinton should have stepped down.

“The right way to handle a situation like that would have been to resign,” she told host Alex Cooper. “Or find a way to stay in office without lying and without throwing a young person under the bus.”

She paused before adding something she has never said so bluntly.

“But we’re talking about the most powerful office in the world. I can’t be naive about what that means.”

Nearly thirty years later, Lewinsky believes the country still misunderstands what happened.

“Let’s recognize that Bill’s behavior was more reprehensible than mine,” she said. “But yes, I also made mistakes.”

As the Trump White House continues emphasizing accountability, political observers note that Lewinsky’s story now resonates differently with an America reevaluating how Democrats handled their own scandals long before the #MeToo era.

One Republican strategist put it simply:

“Monica lost her reputation. Clinton kept his power. That tells you everything about Washington before President Trump came back.”