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November 10, 2019 5 mins
We all owe Monica Lewinsky an apology.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Jonesy and Amanda in the morning. Well, Saturday night, I
went to see Lee Sayles interview Monica Lewinsky and she
is now an advocate for OR. She's a campaigner to
stop cyber bullying. She says she was patient zero in
public humiliation and how your life can just end overnight,

(00:23):
and it particularly in a modern era. Public shaming in
the modern era is something that she talks about and
it's interesting looking. She wonders how different it would have
been if her public shaming had happened now. On one hand,
she thinks it'd be more there. Of course, it'd be
more of a pylon maybe, but she'd have had her
own voice through it. She could have answered back. And

(00:45):
the new cycle is so much faster.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's quicker. It definitely wouldn't have lasted as long as it.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Has, that's right. But for her, twenty years after this incident,
she is still a public name that everybody knows for
all the wrong reasons. Infamous, infamous, and her message is
if I can survive this, so can you.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
How does she survive it?

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Well, because a lot of she does a lot of
good works for there's some public service announcements. Here's how
we can help cyber bullying. Here's how you can break
the circuit the cycle. Here's how you can be kinder.
She talks about clicking with compassion, for all of us
in social media to click with compassion, and it made
me think, you know, I make jokes about the people

(01:28):
who go on Love Island and those sorts of shows.
Really I'm going to try and be kinder because that
is nineteen year olds who don't know what they're doing.
They're manipulated in this TV show. Why should they be
publicly damned for one event? And listening to her talk
about what happened to her is extraordinary, she said, and

(01:48):
how she's unpicking what happened to her, she's still unpacking
it and unpicking it twenty years later. She's always held
onto the notion, she said, I was not a victim.
It was a consensual relationship she had with Build Clinton,
and she's really held stronger onto the fact it was consensual.
But she said, in more recent years, in light of
the Meet Too discussion, she's come to see that there

(02:08):
was a disparity in power, there was a disparity in age.
So she's still not sure what it all means, but
she said yes, she wasn't taken advantage of it was consensual,
but it was also an abuse of power.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
So ironically, there's.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
A lot of those young ladies that you'll see and
they'll say, well, I can handle myself, But years later
I said, well, no, actually I probably could.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
She was completely abandoned. She was a single, twenty four
year old girl, abandoned by everyone except a family and friends, feminists, deserted, media, public.
Does everyone abandoned her? She was the villain, not the
fifty year old married man. And to the point where,
and I was talking about this with other women on
the night and my friends that how bad we feel

(02:58):
at every joke we've ever laughed at about the cigar,
and every time she's ever been reduced to just being
a footnote in history, and the image we had of her,
which was, as she says herself, this dumb fat bit
on the side. Because what no one, what we saw
on Saturday night was the true Monica, funny, feisty, sexy, smart, interesting.

(03:21):
She was reduced to a joke and a humiliated joke.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Did you say, if she had her time again, would
she like the no notoriety? So imagine the world where
there's no no one would know the name Monica Lewinsky.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
She would love that. She spoke about. Lee asked her,
what were there certain moments where you thought your life
has changed now? And she talked about the day that
the ken Star report came out, this report because she'd
been she'd been set up by a so called friend
who's not a friend, Linda Tripp, who recorded all her conversations,
because she didn't approve that of Clinton having this relationship.

(03:57):
So Monica's life because Kelewinsky didn't go to she didn't
set out to entrap the president. She actually signed over.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
The dress.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Well she didn't talk about that, but my feeling is
and that's what she said. She had to hold onto
the notion that it had been a relationship. I think
she was in love with this man, and that was
almost like a token of their love in a way.
It was never to entrap him. It was never to
make money out of him. It was almost like a

(04:28):
you know, you'd keep a hanky with his name on
it or something, Well, you know, I do. There was
nothing malicious in it, but she made the mistake of
telling Linda Tripp.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
So she told Linda. She said I've got the blue dress,
as she said, you.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
Know she's she said, I've had this relationship and she
told him about the dress, and Linda said, you need
to keep that as future insurance. And here's this young
twenty four years going. I don't know, why would I
want all that?

Speaker 2 (04:53):
And Linda, for surely she would have kept it for
that reason.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Look, I can't answer for her. I don't know, but
Linda there when recorded all their conversations, Linda and trapped
her so the FBI could then come down and they
said to her, you we want you to wear a
wire and record conversations with the president, or you could
face twenty seven years in jail because you've lied under
oath that you weren't having a relationship. And she refused

(05:17):
to do it, and years of twenty four she refused
to do it. So this was a girl who was
abandoned by everyone, including the man she thought she was
in love with, just absolutely abandoned. And here we are
twenty years later, and a lot of people I know
want to say, I'm so sorry about you, how you've
been treated all these years. But she's a strong, powerful,

(05:38):
interesting woman and doing her thing to make everyone be
kinder to have a kinder Internet click with compassion. I
got an enormous amount out of watching her talk. It
was extraordinary. Jones, The and Amanda, good morning,
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