Monica Lewinsky said then-President Bill Clinton should have resigned after his affair with her came to light in 1998.
“I think the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” Lewinsky said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who is just starting out in the world under the bus.”
Lewinsky told “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper that she had never been asked how she thinks the situation should have been handled, so she had to think about her answer for a minute. Cooper praised her answer, saying, “It’s the least they could have done for you.”
Lewinsky was a 22-year-old White House intern when she began a sexual relationship with Clinton in 1995. After Lewinsky told her co-worker Linda Tripp about the affair, Tripp began recording her phone calls with Lewinsky and urged Lewinsky not to clean a dress stained by Clinton’s semen as an “insurance policy.” Tripp gave the recorded phone calls to Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel working on an investigation to impeach Clinton.
Under oath, Clinton denied a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and when news of the affair broke in the media in 1998, Clinton again publicly denied the relationship but then months later admitted to it. Clinton was accused of perjury for lying under oath after the semen on Lewinsky’s dress was found to match Clinton’s DNA. He was impeached but then acquitted.
On “Call Her Daddy,” Lewinsky said she had lost her future and was “lucky” to have held onto a strand of her “true self.”
Lewinsky was on the podcast to promote her own podcast, “Reclaiming,” which has featured guests like Olivia Munn and Alan Cumming.
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In Clinton’s memoir, which came out in November, he wrote that he lives with regret over the affair “all the time” and that he wishes the best for Lewinsky.
Earlier this month, Lewinsky called the affair “an abuse of power.”
“The idea of being in a relationship with a 24-year-old is insane to me on so many levels,” she said.