Monica Lewinsky said bad things about social media during her April 8, 2024, talk at the Illini Union in Urbana. But she also revealed at the University of Illinois event some good aspects about platforms such as X and Facebook during the question-and-answer portion of the evening – namely, that she’s able to convey her sense of humor to the masses.
“My younger brother had to acknowledge that I’m funny,” Lewinsky told the audience in the packed room. “For years he was like, ‘You’re really not as funny as you think you are.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m funny!’”
As someone who attended Lewinsky’s talk, which occurred on the same day as the heralded solar eclipse as well as the men’s and women’s NCAA championship basketball games, I can vouch that Lewinsky is funny. The social activist is also lighthearted and authentic, though it took a lot of time and self-work on Lewinsky’s part to reach a point where she could stand in front of cheering students to share harrowing parts of her life.
I’ll stop here to quickly rehash one of the biggest stories that happened toward the end of the 20th century, right on the cusp of the explosion of the Internet but pre-social media. Lewinsky, a White House intern at the time, had an affair with President Bill Clinton and was caught, though some might say “ensnared” would be a better word.
During her talk, Lewinsky referred to Clinton as a person she was in love with and her “married boss.” Linda Tripp, meanwhile, who recorded conversations with Lewinsky that led to the White House scandal, was mentioned as someone the then-intern thought of as a friend. It was an ugly time in U.S. politics and a foreboding event that paved the way for the less than collegial current-day politics in the Capitol.
The loud cheering for Lewinsky at the start of the Illini Union talk, from the mostly student-filled seats, felt to me like a weird time gap I’d completely missed. One minute, 26 years ago, Lewinsky is a punching bag, a butt of jokes on Jay Leno and David Letterman’s late-night shows and everywhere in media and entertainment. And the next minute, on the day of a historic solar eclipse, she’s standing behind a podium in the Illini Union, receiving applause from hundreds of people much younger than me.
Back in 1998, I remember feeling struck that Lewinsky and I were the same age – we’re both 50 now – because I couldn’t imagine being in the worldwide spotlight at age 22 for incidents that were so incredibly personal.
As Lewinsky waited for the clapping at the Illini Union to subside at the start of her talk, I realized I’d missed most everything about her life since the time when the movie Titanic was king of the world – things about her that a younger generation greatly appreciated.
Emerging from her self-imposed silence in 2014, when she wrote a first-person essay for Vanity Fair, Lewinsky has become a prominent spokesperson in the anti-bullying world and has served as an ambassador and strategic adviser to Bystander Revolution. She is also a producer of the show American Crime Story and produced the “Impeachment” episode in 2021.
During the decade prior to 2014, Lewinsky earned a master’s degree in social psychology but, unbelievingly, couldn’t land a job. So, she forged her own path and began telling her story, starting with the piece in Vanity Fair, where she is a contributing editor. Who better to hear from about cyberbullying than someone who calls herself “person zero” from an increasingly digitized world in the late 1990s, a woman whose reputation was harmed immediately worldwide thanks to “a rush to judgment that was enabled by technology,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky related to the students how she inadvertently ate three marijuana-infused brownies on her college graduation night and talked a little about her studies as an undergraduate.
“I was a psychology major, so writing papers on antisocial personality disorder, and taking a personality theory class, really prepared me well for Washington, D.C.,” Lewinsky said.
She joked about the number of times – 125 and counting – her name has appeared in lyrics by rap artists such as Eminem, Nicki Manaj, Kid Cudi, Lil Wayne, and Jeezy.
When she was 41 years old, Lewinsky was hit on by a 27-year-old guy who told her he could make her feel 22 again. The line by this individual, who Lewinsky admitted was rather charming, turned out to be a deal breaker on any sort of relationship between the two, unsurprisingly. But his words are drawing laughs from crowds nearly 10 years later.
What wasn’t so funny was hearing about Lewinsky’s detachment from herself and her thoughts of suicide on September 11, 1998, in a New York City hotel room, where she was holed up with her Sony Vaio laptop computer. On that computer Lewinsky read the online version of the Starr Report, the document by Independent Counsel Ken Starr that spelled out the groundwork for the impeachment of the president due to their relationship. Even a few years earlier this information would have traveled much slower. Now, it was fodder for the world to read instantaneously within a 24-hour news cycle that had become the norm.
As Lewinsky read the words in the Starr Report that she felt were without consent, without context, and without compassion, a “relentless mantra” kept cycling through her head: “I want to die.”
But Lewinsky thankfully didn’t end her life, and the vivaciousness and compassion she displayed during her talk made it seem as if such an act could not be possible. Kasey Umland, one of the question-and-answer moderators at the event and director of the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Illinois, aptly summed up what Lewinsky has given the world since 2014: hope that a person can reclaim her life following intense hardships and thrive in the aftermath.
“One of the things that I really appreciate about your story is that you not only reclaimed your narrative, but that you’ve also reclaimed the tools that were used to put you down to make your voice heard,” Umland said, referring to digital media platforms that are at once so loved and despised.
Lewinsky then related how joining X (then known as Twitter) was an important first step toward communicating honestly and transparently about what she went through, and what so many others have gone through since, in a shaming-prone digital world.
Perhaps the most touching moment of the evening happened at the end, when Lewinsky was asked how she wanted to be remembered. Her answer centered on what she might be able to leave behind through her efforts to curb bullying, not anything personal. She dreams of people not having to rush back to work following hourlong therapy sessions in the middle of the day. Attempts to pull oneself back together in the office after sharing miseries with a therapist can be tough, she said. Lewinsky also envisions easy-access “urgent care” centers that people can visit on their way home from work to help themselves emotionally and physically.
Lewinsky’s main therapist is a trauma psychiatrist who describes trauma as a longtime echo that gets softer as time moves on. That resonates with the woman whose life was turned upside down for all the world to see. We all go through traumas; Lewinsky wants to normalize them.
“My experience has been the sooner we get to addressing a trauma, like, the fresher the wound is, the faster it heals, the less time it … infects our future,” she said.