Shame that sticks like tar
Monica Lewinsky speaks of stigma, trauma and the need
to promote anti-bullying:
by Jon Ronson
One night in London in 2005, a woman said a surprisingly eerie thing
to Monica Lewinsky.
Lewinsky had moved from New York a few days earlier to take a
master’s in social psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE).
On her first weekend, she went drinking with a woman she thought might
become a friend. “But she suddenly said she knew really high-powered
people,” Lewinsky says, “and I shouldn’t have come to London because I
wasn’t wanted there.”
Lewinsky is telling me this story at a table in a quiet corner of a
West Hollywood hotel. We had to pay extra for the table to be curtained
off. If we hadn’t done it, passersby would probably have stared.
Lewinsky would have noticed the stares and would have clammed up a
little. “I’m hyper-aware of how other people may be perceiving me,” she
says.
“Why did that woman in London say that to you?” I ask her.
“Oh, she’d had too much to drink,” Lewinsky replies. “It’s such a
shame, because 99.9% of my experiences in England were positive, and she
was an anomaly. I loved being in London. I was welcomed and accepted at
LSE, by my professors and classmates. But when something hits a core
trauma – I actually got really re-triggered. After that, I couldn’t go
more than three days without thinking about the FBI sting that happened
in 1998.”
Core trauma
On 16 January 1998, Lewinsky’s friend – an older work colleague
called Linda Tripp – invited her for lunch at a mall in Washington DC.
Lewinsky was 25. They’d been working together at the Pentagon for nearly
two years, during which time Lewinsky had confided in her that she’d had
an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Unbeknown to Lewinsky, Tripp had been secretly recording their
telephone conversations – more than 20 hours of them. The lunch was a
trap. When Tripp arrived, she motioned behind her and two federal agents
suddenly appeared. “You’re in trouble,” they told Lewinsky.
She was bustled upstairs to a hotel room filled with prosecutors and
federal agents. She started to cry. They told her they were
investigating claims that President Clinton had sexually harassed a
former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, and that if Lewinsky didn’t
cooperate with them, she’d be charged with perjury and jailed for 27
years.
How long were you re-triggered for after that night in London?” I ask
her.“The impact reverberated throughout my year there,” she says.
“What does retriggered actually mean?What are the physical symptoms?”
I ask.
“That varies for me, depending on what trauma is being retriggered –
lucky me,” she replies. “It’s as if I’m seeing and feeling on
fast-forward – a quicker pace.”
Lewinsky doesn’t like thinking about her past. It was hard to get her
to agree to this interview. She rarely gives them and she nearly
cancelled this one. I approached her on several previous occasions, when
I was writing a book on public shaming, and she kept saying no.
It’s not because she’s difficult. She isn’t. She’s very likeable and
smart. But it feels as if I’m sitting with two Lewinskys. There’s the
open, friendly one. This is, I suspect, the actual Lewinsky. In a
parallel world where nothing cataclysmic happened in the 1990s, I
imagine this would be the entire Lewinsky. But then there’s the nervy
one who sometimes suddenly stops mid-sentence and says, “I’m hesitating
because I have to think through the consequences of saying this. I still
have to manage a lot of trauma to do what I’m doing, even to come here.
Any time I put myself in the hands of other people…”
“What’s your nightmare scenario?” I ask her.
“The truth is, I’m exhausted,” she says. “So I’m worried I may misspeak,
and that thing will become the headline and the cycle will start all
over again.”
The reason why she finally met me, despite her anxieties, is that the
Guardian is highlighting the issue of online harassment through its
seriesThe web we want – an endeavour she approves of. “De-stigmatising
the shame around online harassment is the first step,” she says. “The
first step is recognising there’s a problem.”
Lewinsky was once among the 20th Century’s most humiliated people,
ridiculed across the world. Now she’s a respected and perceptive
anti-bullying advocate. She gives talks at Facebook, and at business
conferences, on how to make the internet more compassionate. She helps
out at anti-bullying organisations likeBystander Revolution, a site that
offers video advice on what to do if you’re afraid to go to school or if
you’re a victim of cyberbullying.
She recently gave a talk about being the object of the first great
internet shaming: “Overnight, I went from being a completely private
figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. Granted, it was before
social media, but people could still comment online, email stories and
cruel jokes. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of
course, ‘that woman.’It was easy to forget that ‘that woman’ was
dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.”
Lewinsky’s talk was dazzling and now gets taught in schools
alongsideNathaniel Hawthorn’s‘The Scarlet Letter.’
Monica Lewinsky grew up in Beverly Hills. Her father was an
oncologist, her mother an author, who wrote the biography, ‘The Private
Lives Of The Three Tenors.’
She had weight issues as a teenager. “I was very sensitive, so I
couldn’t take a joke,” she says. “I remember sitting on my parents’ bed
and them practicing with me how to take a joke, how to not cry. I
remember one very specific day in the playground when a group of girls
had concocted some game. They’d say a number and it would mean something
– run up and push me, or make a face at me or say something stupid.” She
pauses. “Those memories inform a lot of who we become. They contributed
to me not having a strong sense of self. Look. I could sit and cry all
day about kids being afraid to go to school.”
“Do you remember what the girls said to you?” I ask.
“No, I just remember the feeling,” Lewinsky says. “And I just stood
there. Why didn’t I walk away?”
White House intern
Lewinsky was 22 when she began interning at the White House. She and
Bill Clinton started flirting soon afterwards. One day she blurted out
to him, “I have a crush on you,” and he replied, “Well, do you want to
come into the back office?” Eventually, Clinton staffers noticed how
much time she was spending in the West Wing, including at weekends, and
so a deputy chief of staff had her transferred to the Pentagon, which
was where she met Linda Tripp.
Five days after the FBI sting, Lewinsky was outed by the online
gossip site the Drudge Report, under the headline: “A White House intern
carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!”
Bill Clinton called her a liar, denying he had had “sexual relations”
with “that woman.” Lewinsky, who has often said she’d “do anything to
have my anonymity back,” was forced to testify before a grand jury. The
3,000-page Starr report, which included mortifying details of their nine
sexual encounters, was released to the world.
“That people could read the transcripts was horrific enough,”
Lewinsky said in her TED talk, “but a few weeks later the audio tapes
[the telephone calls Tripp secretly recorded] were aired on TV and
significant portions made available online. The public humiliation was
excruciating. Life was almost unbearable.”
“I felt like every layer of my skin and my identity were ripped off
of me in ’98 and ’99. It’s a skinning of sorts. You feel incredibly raw
and frightened. But I also feel like the shame sticks to you like tar.”
She never attempted suicide, she says, “but I came very close.”
“You worked out how you’d do it?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I think some young people don’t see suicide as an
ending, but as a reset.”
Back then, the world basically saw Lewinsky as the predator.
Late-night talk show hosts routinely made misogynistic jokes and here is
one: “Monica Lewinsky has gained back all the weight she lost last year.
[She’s] considering having her jaw wired shut but then, nah, she didn’t
want to give up her sex life.” In February 1998, the feminist writer
Nancy Friday was asked by the New York Observer to speculate on
Lewinsky’s future. “She can rent out her mouth,” she replied.I hope
those mainstream voices wouldn’t treat Lewinsky quite this badly if the
scandal broke today. Nowadays, most people understand those jokes to be
slut-shaming, punching down, don’t they?
“I hope so,” Lewinsky says. “I don’t know.”
Either way, misogyny is still thriving. When the Guardian began
researching the online harassment of its own writers, they discovered
something bleak: Of the 10 contributors who receive the most abuse in
the comment threads, eight are women – five white, three non-white – and
the other two are black men.Overall, women Guardian writers get more
abuse than men, regardless of what they write about, but especially when
they write about rape and feminism.
“A lot of vicious things that happen online to women and minorities
do happen at the hands of men,” she says, “but they also happen at the
hands of women. Women are not immune to misogyny.”
She says:“I think it’s fair to say that whatever mistakes I made, I
was hung out to dry by a lot of people – by a lot of the feminists who
had loud voices. I wish it had been handled differently. It was very
scary and very confusing to be a young woman thrust on to the world
stage and not belonging to any group. I didn’t belong to anybody.”
Misogynistic bullying
I tell Lewinsky that I think the problem with focusing all the
attention on misogynists and racists is that it’s bound to legitimise
certain types of bullying. I’ve seen men try to speak up about their
online abuse only to be met with a barrage of “stop whining” and “check
your privilege.”
The sentimental view is that men tend to recover from online bullying
just fine, whereas women are crushed; but psychologists will tell you
there are bigger differences between individuals than gender when it
comes to overcoming abuse.
Non-ideological
Lewinsky’s outlook on her scandal has been doggedly non-ideological.
“I’m endlessly fascinated by how people derive meaning in life,” she
says, “the chasm between how idealised people pretend life is and how
complex we really are.” She’s written that she thought it was stupid and
wrong in the 1990s when most people blamed her for the affair with
President Clinton, but also stupid and wrong in the 2010s when people
got more enlightened and started retrospectively blaming him.
There’s an extraordinary moment in the 2002 documentary, ‘Monica In
Black And White.’ It’s a kind of ‘Ask MeAnything’ session, with Lewinsky
taking questions from an audience of graduate students and staff.
Towards the end, a man stands up and asks, “How does it feel to be
America’s premier blowjob queen?” There are gasps from the audience.
“I don’t actually know why this whole story became about oral sex,”
Lewinsky replies. “It was a mutual relationship.”
When I mention the documentary, she tells me of a recent press
conference, at the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles: “A
reporter told me he was surprised I’d agreed to take part in it. He
said: “We expected you to crawl under a rock and die.” Then he said: “I
misspoke. I meant hide. Not die.’” Lewinsky smiles. “But he did say
die.”
In 2005, Lewinsky retreated. She moved to London to take the course
in social psychology at the LSE. “It looked at identity, and what
happens when your identity is threatened. A threatened identity can be
something like getting divorced: you’re someone’s wife and now you’re
not someone’s wife. Or losing a child: you’re a parent and now you’re
not a parent.”
Private life
Her plan after graduating was to get a job and lead “a much more
private life, and move towards a more normal developmental path.” But
she found that nobody would employ her. The stigma outweighed her
qualifications and aptitude. She couldn’t even get volunteer work with a
charity.
“I was going through such a hard time,” she says, “I felt so
shattered, it took me six months to even get up the courage to approach
this particular organisation. And when I did, they told me my working
there ‘wasn’t a good idea.’ It was a very desolate 10 years for me. I
was really floundering. I could not find my way.”
She drifted back to London and had coffee with her old LSE Professor,
Sandra Jovchelovitch. “She said to me, ‘Whenever power is involved,
there always has to be a competing narrative. And you have no
narrative.” It was true.
I had mistakenly thought that if I retreated from public life the
narrative would dissipate. But instead, it ran away from me even more.”
That’s when Lewinsky realised she had to do something to de-objectify
herself.
Being shamed feels like being a victim of identity theft.
One minute you’re a private individual, working out who you are, your
likes and dislikes. The next minute, you’re America’s premier blowjob
queen.
“The fear of ostracisation strikes at the core of who we are,”
Lewinsky says. “We cannot survive alone.”
These days, she is often approached by victims of online bullying,
“when I’m on the subway, in line for coffee, at dinner parties.” Shamed
people tend to seek each other out, the cure for shame being empathy.
“Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I went through this, but it’s nothing like what
you went through.’ But I tell them that, if I drown in 60 feet of water
and you drown in 30feet, we both still drowned.”
So she has spent much of the past few years trying to formulate
practical advice for them. “To be able to give a purpose to my past,
feels meaningful to me,” she says. Her number one piece of advice:
“Integrate what has happened to you. Integrate the experience, the
faster the better.” She knows this can be hard. “There’s shame about the
shame. So there’s a tendency to not want to tell someone what’s going
on.”
Decade of silence
In 2014, after a decade of silence, Lewinsky wrote an essay for
Vanity Fair, headlined Shame and Survival. “The night before it was
published, a friend gave me a card with an Anaïs Nin quote: ‘And the day
came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the
risk it took to blossom.’”
As a result she was asked to speak at Forbes and TED conferences. She
knew what a big deal TED was and employed “a team in London to help me
find my authentic voice in public speaking.”
Nowadays, charities like the Diana Award are queueing up to work with
her. (The Diana Award is an enterprise, endorsed by Princes William and
Harry that hopes to “inspire and recognise social action in young
people.”) Most bullying victims don’t have such a highfalutin stage as
TED upon which to reclaim their identity, but most bullying victims
weren’t bullied relentlessly all over the world for years, often by
highfalutin people.
Lewinsky has advice for bystanders, too: “Don’t bully the bully. It
doesn’t move the conversation forward. I see bullying as similar to
cutting. People who cut are trying to localise their pain. I think with
bullying, people are suffering for myriad reasons and are projecting it.
Instead of cutting themselves, they’re cutting someone else.”She knows
her advice can sometimes seem hard to stick to, such as when she
suggests boycotting unfolding public shaming stories: “Because of the
way the algorithm of the internet works, we do have some control.
Editors aren’t going to assign stories that aren’t going to get clicks.”
She came up with her most recent endeavour after some teenagers told
her how hard it can be to find the right words. “I realised,” she says,
“that our brains process images faster than text, which means the
fastest way you can help – the least amount of time between someone
feeling alone and upset, and feeling just a tiny bit better – is with an
image.”
And so she pitched an idea to Vodafone. Could she design a keyboard
of anti-bullying gifs and emojis for them?
Emojis
“Look. Let me show you…”
She pulls out her phone and starts to search for them. I remember
something we talked about at the start of the interview – her fear of
misspeaking and bringing the maelstrom back down upon her.
It’s not an irrational anxiety. Formerly shamed people frequently
find themselves suddenly reshamed for the original transgression when
they least expect it – when social media hears they’ve got a new job,
for instance.
We tend to relentlessly define people by the worst mistake they ever
made.“Somewhat unique about my situation,” Lewinsky says, “is that my
narrative is tied to other people’s narratives, people on the public
stage. And so my narrative gets pulled into things, based on what other
people are doing, even if I do nothing.”
Super Tuesday
As it happens, we are speaking the day after Super Tuesday. Donald
Trump released a campaign video on Instagram that included a photograph
of a young Lewinsky in a beret, smiling at Bill Clinton.
It felt like a harbinger – a warning shot. He’d already told NBC’s
Today Show, back in December 2015, that he considered Lewinsky “fair
game” in his battle against the Clintons.
“Are you worried Trump is going to make hay with you?” I ask her.
“I’m not going to answer that,” she replies. Then passes me her
phone.There’s a gif on the screen. It’s a big heart with two arms inside
it, embracing. The heart shakes.It’s the unmistakable yellow blob of
Donald Trump, looming down, yelling from a podium.
“It feels like a hug!” she says. “Right?”
“I think it looks great,” I say. “It does feel like a hug.”
“Well, thanks!” she says. Suddenly all her nerviness is gone. She
smiles a huge smile and points at the gif on the screen and says, “I
worked my little heart out on it.”
- Guardian
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