When Bill Clinton turned 50 he was in a relationship with a 22-yearold White House intern called Monica Lewinsky. After two sexual encounters in the private study of the Oval Office – where she serviced his needs while he took phone calls from congressmen – he invited her for a third, calling her “kiddo”. She assumed he had forgotten her name. After the scandal broke in 1998, no one in the western world has since.
Now Monica Lewinsky is 50, the age of the then president of the United States, she is also in a relationship with that 22-year-old intern. There are two Monica Lewinskys in 2024: The most shamed girl who ever lived, the “patient zero” as she put it, of the internet’s power to hold public hangings by humiliation. And also the woman who endured long enough, argued thoughtfully enough, to make us collectively ashamed.
Monica is finally in her presidential age, and it’s apparent not just in her new photoshoot – styled as if for the executive suite if not the West Wing – but in the
