Monica, Bill, and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

NOTE: I wrote this piece in May, 2014, after Monica Lewinsky was featured in a cover story in Vanity Fair. There is a new documentary out now called “The Clinton Affair”, and a new piece in Vanity Fair, so the attention is on her again — and again it’s of her own making.

I agree it was a big story at the time and we’ll probably revisit it many more times, but I’ll always see her as an unwitting victim. A victim of a very real Right Wing conspiracy designed to bring Bill Clinton down — which wasn’t hard, considering his own role in this sordid story — a young girl caught up in a whirlwind she couldn’t begin to understand. I want her to heal. I hope this is it, now.

_________________________________

May 9, 2014 — Monica Lewinsky is now 40 years old. In the late 1990s, when she was barely into her twenties, she met Bill Clinton, flirted a bit and caught his attention. Before long she was having an affair with the President of the United States. Heady stuff for a bedazzled young girl and of course she had to tell somebody.

As we all now know, she confided in her friend Linda Tripp. Tripp, a Republican who hated Bill Clinton even before she knew about the affair, took Monica’s story to Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent specializing in conservative authors. Goldberg had once tried to sell Tripp’s book proposal on the differences between Bush 41’s keeping dignity in the White House compared to Clinton’s appalling misuse. It never went anywhere, but this…