Robyn Urback writes that the Clintons are long-overdue for a #MeToo reckoning. It has always struck me as fundamentally unjust that Monica Lewinski's life has been permanently scarred while the Clintons have prospered.
To this day, Clinton maintains a rather unrepentant air. When he was pushed about his affair with Monica Lewinsky during a television interview back in June, Clinton lashed out at the interviewer and accused him of ignoring supposed "gaping facts" about the saga. Clinton also noted that he was a victim, too, in that he left the White House $16 million in debt. Let's pause here a moment to appreciate the trauma of the Clintons' fleeting financial insecurity.Lewinsky, during that time, was made the nation's punchline, villain and slut. Decades before the term "gaslighting" would enter the mainstream lexicon, the president of the United States went on national television and told the world that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman." Clinton's allies painted Lewinsky as a stalker and a manipulator, and even feminist icon Gloria Steinem suggested in a column for the New York Times that Lewinsky was equally at fault for the illicit affair.
It would take Lewinsky nearly 20 years to realize that the power imbalance between an unpaid intern and her boss -- a man 27 years her senior and also the president of the United States -- complicates notions of consent and culpability. She would grapple with post-traumatic stress disorder for decades and struggle to find a clear career path. These are not ordinary consequences for a poor decision; most of us do dumb things we regret in early adulthood, but few of us are defined by them for the rest of our lives.
