Monica Lewinsky - ‘I would have liked a more normal life’

Monica Lewinsky is an activist, podcaster and producer. At the age of 24, Lewinsky, a White House intern, found herself in the eye of a global scandal. She was subjected to a mass public shaming - losing her livelihood, her anonymity and the future she had once imagined for herself. Now, 51 Lewinsky has garnered a new generation of admirers, who with the advent of social media and shifting cultural tides, have rightly reinterpreted the shocking way she was treated. Her podcast, which launched earlier this year, is called ‘Reclaiming’ and features interviews with guests who are in the process of reclaiming their own narratives, just as she was forced to do. She joins us to talk about her experiences with shame, her perfectionism and why the pain she went through has given her purpose. Elizabeth and Monica answer YOUR questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content ✨ IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 01:32 Early Life and Career 03:12 Reclaiming Her Narrative 06:17 Reflections on Turning 50 11:19 First Memory of Failure 18:40 Struggles After the Scandal 23:12 Navigating Post-Scandal Job Search 23:58 The Fragility and Vulnerability of Public Scrutiny 25:03 Media Obsession and Public Perception 25:59 Surviving the Media Onslaught 27:16 Reflections on Love and Power Dynamics 30:22 The Impact of Betrayal and Somatic Therapy 35:50 The Handbag Business Venture 40:12 Lessons Learned and Final Thoughts Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com All episodes in June are brought to you by @arlalactoFREE - all the taste, easier to digest. Listen to our bonus episode brought to by ArlaLactoFREE with Vicky Pattison here: https://link.chtbl.com/VickyPattison 🌎 Get an exclusive 15% discount on your first Saily data plans! Use code [howtofail] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to to https://saily.com/howtofail ⛵ I have an upcoming one-off show at Cadogan Hall on 21 Sep for my new novel One of Us. Full show details here: https://www.fane.co.uk/elizabeth-day Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Mix Engineer: Matias Torres Studio Engineer: Gulliver Tickell Assistant Producer: Suhaar Ali Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Carly Maile How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

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• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

  to start your free trial. That's Shopify.co.uk/fail. Go to Shopify.co.uk/fail today to hear your first...

• 0:57Elizabeth Day?

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• 1:14Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that I started because I wanted to know how other people survived failure and what, if anything, they learnt along the way.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  This was not something that happened to me. And so it was foreign and it was terrifying. I never could have imagined the consequences, being so far-reaching. Okay, what am I, how am I going to do my CV? Do I put that I worked at the White House? Do I not?

• 1:42Elizabeth Day?

  My guest today is an activist, producer and podcaster. She is also, in her own words, the patient zero of online harassment. Her 2015 TED Talk, The Price of Shame, has to date been viewed over 20 million times. She has repeatedly spoken out about cyberbullying and the need to find one's own voice. She has a master's degree in psychology from the London School of Economics, where her thesis dealt with the effects of pre-trial publicity on Dura impartiality. Her podcast, which launched earlier this year, is called Reclaiming and features interviews

• 2:22Elizabeth Day?

  with guests in the process of reclaiming their own narratives, just as she was forced to do. Because her name is Monica Lewinsky and in 1995, at the age of 22, she fell in love with her boss, a man almost 30 years older than she was. Her boss was the then president of the United States, Bill Clinton, and by the age of 24, Lewinsky, a White House intern, had found herself in the eye of a global scandal. She was subjected to a mass public shaming, losing her livelihood, her anonymity, and the future she had once

• 3:01Elizabeth Day?

  imagined for herself. It is testament, perhaps, to her courage and to her determination that she returned to the public eye at all. Now 51, Lewinsky has garnered a new generation of admirers who, with the advent of social media and shifting cultural tides, have rightly reinterpreted the shocking way she was treated. She's also launched her own production company, Alt-Ending, aiming to platform others whose voices have been silenced. It is an expansive and impressive trajectory. As Lewinsky said in a recent interview, "My life is full of things other than just my past."

• 3:45Elizabeth Day?

  Monica Lewinsky, welcome to How to Fail.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 3:50Elizabeth Day?

  I told you before we started recording that you have been on my dream guest list for this podcast ever since I started, so it's a real pinch me moment to have this happen and to meet you and discover that you're so wonderful in person as you are on your podcast. But tell me why that idea of reclaiming and calling your podcast reclaiming was so important to you?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Interestingly, the idea actually started out as a book that I thought I might write, and then it just started to... Kind of tickle me in a weird way as a thought around that it would be more interesting to explore this landscape with other people. And really, when I started to look at it and think about where does this fall into our culture, I realized there's a very elastic definition of reclaiming that I was attracted to, right? So it wasn't necessarily just someone who had a big reclaiming like mine was over the last 10 years of their narrative and their

• 4:55Speaker 01

  history, but I think the smaller ways that we might, the different aspects of our identity. I also joke around that when I, you know, call someone a fuckface, but I don't flip them off in the car in LA with my road rage, like, I have reclaimed my calm. So there are little moments of reclaiming too. And I think it's kind of an ethos that, that when you start to look at the world through that lens, you start to see reclaiming everywhere. So that was really where it felt interesting to me.

• 5:25Elizabeth Day?

  I also get road rage.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:27Elizabeth Day?

  But I, I appear a very calm and reasonable person in other respects. So it all comes out behind the wheel of a car.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't understand why people get so mad when you want to go faster. I, I just don't, I don't, I don't, I, it's not like I've said you're bad in bed. I mean, it's just, it's sort of one of those things where you think, I'd like to go faster than you. That's also just, either let me move so I can go in front of you, or move so I can just go on and be out of your hair.

• 5:53Elizabeth Day?

  I mean, I don't want to, yeah, I totally agree with you. And I don't want to make this profound metaphorical shift, but I'm going to try anyway.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:00Elizabeth Day?

  Do you think that part of it is, is you lost a decade of your life, at least, to what I referred to in the introduction? And do you feel now that you're kind of making up for that time, that you don't have time to waste, that you need to go fast?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  What's interesting to me is there was a long period of my life where I felt exactly that. And I think in the last decade, as things started to change, I, both in my personal work, spiritual, energetic, psychological, psychiatric, all the work, all the things, I started to see, and, and as my life was shifting, I think in the public arena, and people were seeing me more for my true self and understanding what happened to me through a different lens. I started accepting slowing down. So I began somatic therapy during the pandemic. It's the first time in my life I found myself saying to a practitioner, okay, we have to slow down.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Or we're at forty minutes of the hour session. I'm done. Because I think that there was very much, exactly as you're saying, this feeling of I have to catch up. I've lost so much time. I have to catch up to my peers. I have to catch up to my dreams. And fortunately for me, turning fifty was really just so much about acceptance. A really nice way.

• 7:22Elizabeth Day?

  Well, I wanted to ask you about turning fifty because when you turned forty, you wrote this extraordinary piece for Vanity Fair, which I remember reading at the time, which really reset the framework for public perception of you. And turning fifty, you've launched this podcast. And I wonder how you feel about your fifties.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I'm excited. I never thought, especially not having been married and not having had kids, that were things that I really wanted in my life. And I think very much things that I saw, constructs, in a way that I looked at the world, ways that I evaluated people or situations and myself, to just kind of find myself in a place where that all feels okay to me is pretty magical.

• 8:17Elizabeth Day?

  So. It's also really amazing for me to meet a fulfilled, brilliant, creative woman who doesn't have children. So I don't have children either, in the biological sense. I know we're both aunts.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:33Elizabeth Day?

  And I want to thank you for that, really, because I think that even though it was sort of forced on you, I imagine, by what happened, you're such a Role model. I mean, it's aspirational what you present to the rest of us.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Thanks. I, you know, I, it was not by choice. Um, so I think I just, I had Chelsea Handler on the podcast and we had a discussion. I don't know if you've had her on yet.

• 8:58Elizabeth Day?

  Not yet.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I will, I will plug you to her.

• 9:01Elizabeth Day?

  Please do.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Um, she's an amazing woman and we came at this same kind of conversation from these two different places of Chelsea really knowing she didn't want to have children. And for me, I did really want it and I froze my eggs. And my therapist said something so helpful to me. I repeat this all the time. You know, I think there was a, a small period where I was toying with the idea of do I have a child on my own? And, um, and, and we had this discussion about regret. And she said, it's a mistake to think that making the right decision means you won't have regret.

• 9:40Elizabeth Day?

  Oh, that's so wise.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I don't know if this will make sense, but it's like, regret seems to make our decisions binary in some way that, and, and that's how we define it, right? Like, well, the wrong choice is regret and the right choice, I won't have regret. And that's not accurate at all.

• 9:56Elizabeth Day?

  I know we're going to get more into this later, but your sense of acceptance more generally, I read absolutely zero bitterness in you.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Not today.

• 10:10Elizabeth Day?

  So. Well, you're not driving.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. You know, I mean, it's there sometimes, but, but overall, it's one of the ways I consider myself so lucky. I mean, I've had a fuck ton of unlucky things happen, but I consider myself really lucky to not, to not be bitter, to still be able to open my heart, to still be trusting, sometimes too trusting. And, um, but yeah.

• 10:33Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:34Elizabeth Day?

  Because when you're talking about having frozen your eggs and not having got married or had the children that you yearned for and thought you'd always have, that can be laid squarely at the foot of what happened to you when you were in your early twenties.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Well, my best friend from college.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, often say, well, it was always going to be hard for you.

• 10:57Elizabeth Day?

  Really, really, why?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Um, I think I'm a pretty, um, many of us are complex. I think my complexities are pretty unique, so, um, without getting into it a lot more. But I, I just always thought that was funny and I love that she says it to me.

• 11:18Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 11:19Elizabeth Day?

  Because it makes you more than what happened to you as well.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 11:22Elizabeth Day?

  It's also you.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  I think so, and I, I think those, I think when you have, um, any kind of a big identity shifting loss or failure or any of those things that it, it is always good to be reminded of all of who you are.

• 11:41Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Right, even, even if it's negative, right? So, I mean, she says it to me lovingly, um, but it's a good reminder that I can't blame everything on, like, I was kind of fucked up before too. So, I mean, it's, but, and also, you know, without getting into too many details of things, I also think that there was a brokenness there that led to what happened.

• 12:04Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 12:06Elizabeth Day?

  Well, now that's all I want to know about. I'm being respectful.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  That's for our record.

• 12:10Elizabeth Day?

  Okay, fine.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  That's for drinks, um, sometimes.

• 12:15Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialized treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 13:00Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Well, let's get on to your first failure.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:15Elizabeth Day?

  Who you were as a child. And I love this failure because it's your first memory of failure and they're so potent. And I also have my own first memory of failure. And yours dates from first grade. So how old are you for English listeners?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  So six or seven, how's that?

• 13:32Elizabeth Day?

  Great.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:33Elizabeth Day?

  Perfect. So you're six or seven and it's a Friday afternoon at school and it's show and tell. And what happens?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Well, in order to go to the show and tell that's happening on one half of the classroom, you know, where there's the rug that you take the naps on and the other half has the desks. Is the girl who's show and tell it is that day and she's brought in a bunny. But the rest of us are still sitting at our desks and we've been given a new math assignment. And you can't go to the show and tell on the other side of the room and play with the bunny until you finish the math assignment. In a very weird twist for me, like math and school things just came quite easily to me then. I couldn't figure out the math problems. And so I would answer them and every time the teacher would come around to kind of check it. She'd be like, nope, that's not it.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I couldn't figure it out. And so then I started to panic more and more because it was this spiral of this hasn't happened to me before. You know, I've lost at games, but losing and failure are two different things, right? And so it was, it really was the first time that I remember this concrete failure because everybody else finished before me. And, and I think that my anxiety and panic started to grow too, because I had always been able to rely on my intellect. I think to understand, understand the landscape of this story, that it was just this, this was not something that happened to me. And so it was foreign and it was terrifying.

• 15:08Elizabeth Day?

  Tell me quickly whether you ever got to cuddle the bunny?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  I did, but what I couldn't remember as was, I remember starting to cry eventually. And what I couldn't remember was if I got the math problem finally, or they just finally said it to let me go, which is sort of interesting to me. My guess is it's the latter because I feel like I might've had a memory of accomplishing something, or I just blocked the whole thing out because it was so, it was really traumatic for me. Yeah. Funnily enough, I actually ran into the girl who was there with the bunny randomly at a spa. She looks exactly the same as she did in first grade. And so we had a nice reconnect.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I hadn't seen her since third grade. So, but.

• 15:59Elizabeth Day?

  I think what you're saying is so interesting, and I relate in a certain aspect in that as a child, and probably still now, I didn't have a great deal of self-esteem. But I was good at school. And being good at school became part of my identity.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:17Elizabeth Day?

  It's what I relied on to give me the data that I was lovable, in a way. And obviously, it's a conflation of different things. Being academically successful doesn't make you lovable.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:28Elizabeth Day?

  Spoiler alert, sadly. But I wonder if that resonates with you?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. You know, I think, as I've, you know, one of the interesting things, I guess if you're an introspective person about getting older, is you also have these opportunities to to relens early experiences all the way up, right? You learn more things about yourself, and you start to see things differently. And so I had had a period in second grade where I was very competitive with who my best friend at the time was. And I remember she kept sort of getting better scores. We were like doing some dinosaur thing, and you'd get a Jolly Rancher, smelly sticker, whatever the thing was. And I actually,

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I stole the answer book from the classroom and took it home so that I could, it's like making me emotional.

• 17:26Elizabeth Day?

  I feel it.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  So that, so that I could get, and it wasn't so much that I wanted to beat her, I just wanted to be, it was like, perfect. It was some version of perfect. And of course, I look back now, and I wonder, you know, there are a bunch of things for me from my earlier years that I know problematic things happen, and I don't know what they were. And so I look at that time period, or even back to first grade, and I think, well, maybe something was happening around that. And so that it was really more of a. Telltale sign that there was a problem.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  But we just kind of, we didn't live in a world that looked at things that way.

• 18:12Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I very, I had and have very loving parents who, you know, very, I think, very, my dad spent a lot of time with me doing the projects for school, the dioramas and all those things. And my mom was very attentive. But parents just didn't have a kind of a way of looking at things back then.

• 18:34Elizabeth Day?

  You mentioned your parents, and I know that they got divorced when you were a teenager. So I wanted to know whether that, what kind of effect that had on you, if any?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  It was all very complicated. And kind of once, actually, when I was in my 40s, it also became clear in a therapy session, I was saying, I've talked about this before, but I was saying something to my therapist and about having lost my virginity. And I was like, well, I was 19. I was like, well, technically, I was 14, but it didn't count. And so I realized later that some of what I had labeled upset from the divorce was actually this thing that happened to me at camp.

• 19:20Elizabeth Day?

  I'm so sorry.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. It was complex because we didn't have language for things back then. And it was, and I had liked the person, but I had clearly, I was 14. I didn't want to have sex. I didn't know that's what was about to happen. And I tried to dismiss it away with my therapist of like, well, he stopped when I said to stop. And, you know, she's like, no, that's just an unwanted sexual experience. It was very hard for me to accept that. And so, so yeah, the divorce was, was not an easy thing. I don't think it's easy for anybody. But it also was necessary, you know?

• 20:07Elizabeth Day?

  Thank you so much for sharing that, which, I mean, I know so many people will feel seen by what you have been courageous enough to talk about just there.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  No, thanks.

• 20:16Elizabeth Day?

  And I just want to reach out to 14 year old Monica and give her a hug because that was so much for you to go through.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:26Elizabeth Day?

  Your intellect got you to achieve academically and you ended up as a White House intern, which brings us on to your second failure. But before we get on to it, I just want to say that I am really aware that you have had to talk about this so much. And I wanted to check in with you about how that felt for you, even the fact that I write an introduction and it's mentioned in it. And you're so much more than that. And I just want to see how you are about it.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's such an interesting thing because it's been, I think, 27 years now. And it feels different. It means different things. It has less energy around it for me now. Would I like there to be a point where that's not the first thing that's part of the story? Sure. You know, and there's also an acceptance of, that's so much of the work I had to do in, I think, in the deeper healing work I did of recognizing I couldn't run away from what happened. I had to integrate it. Yeah, so it's fine.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Like, do I cringe a little inside? Yes, I do, you know, but it's, it's one of those accepting what is, right?

• 21:49Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  So.

• 21:51Elizabeth Day?

  Your second failure is about a time when you had done your master's degree in social psychology at LSE and you were trying to get a job and you weren't able to.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:04Elizabeth Day?

  Tell us that story.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  In the few years, first few years after 98, I felt like I didn't have a choice but to lean into being a public person. It just became really clear around, it started around 2003, really clear 2004, this wasn't going well. I think going to graduate school really felt like I was going to be turning the page on this public life. I was going to have this degree. It was going to be a scaffolding upon which I could kind of hang a new identity. And

• 22:40Speaker 01

  When I got out of graduate school and started to job hunt, it it just became clearer and clearer how hard that was going to be. You know, I remember somebody asking me of like, well, if you were a brand, what brand would you be? And at the time, it just felt like it was not intended to be

• 23:01Speaker 01

  a complicated question or anything that would sort of incite panic in me. But it did because it just felt really loaded. And it was a totally appropriate question to have asked me. I was looking to go into marketing and advertising and branding. So that makes sense.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  But I found, you know, so it was from that. I found there were particularly some of the nonprofit places that I interviewed asked me, one place asked me if I could get a letter of indemnification from the Clintons because they were worried that if Hillary had won in 2000, because she was running to be the candidate. This was in 2006 and '07, before Barack Obama became our candidate and then our president. There was concern that if she won, that they would lose their funding. And so that there would be like some sort of backlash that way. So it it just became more and more complicated

• 24:09Speaker 01

  and more and more obvious that a traditional job was not going to be an option for me. And that was terrifying. And it was kind of an epic failure that, in a weird way, felt not of my own making in some sense. If that may, like, most of the time, I think the failures that I think about are kind of were were a direct result of something I did. And while, yes, obviously, I made bad choices, you know, and I just think I never could have imagined the consequences.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Being so far reaching, we were now 10 years out from what had happened.

• 24:56Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  And that was, um, so I, I think I had, and also just the complications of things of, um, okay, what am I, how am I going to do my CV? Do I put that I worked at the White House? Do I not? Do I put my name? Do I use a different name? Well, if I use a different name, what happens when I walk in for the interview and the person's sitting there going, I don't know, you know, Cheryl Smith sure looks a lot like Monica Lewinsky. Like, how do you even do that?

• 25:23Elizabeth Day?

  Neutrum.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  You know, so, and then you've also started out a professional relationship with a lie. So, you know, there was complication there. Then there was, okay, in which states could I, you know, interview for jobs? Because I can't not have a support system somewhere. That wouldn't work to be, to do kind of what I did when I went to college. I moved to Portland, Oregon. I didn't have a support system there, but that was fine. I wouldn't be able to do that post 98. So.

• 25:54Elizabeth Day?

  And so you wouldn't be able to do it because you felt so fragile?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Um, I think it, there, the, the fragility was certainly a part of it, but it was also, there were times where, um, something would happen in the news and this would, um, rear its ugly head and paparazzi would show up somewhere. So if I didn't have a support system in the city, who was going to come help me? You know, it was, uh, and I just think that for me, the way I was a pup, became a public person and was a public person, I was just more vulnerable. You know, I didn't have the resources. Most people who end up with a level of name recognition that I had at that time, have

• 26:40Speaker 01

  an enormous amount of resources, an enormous amount of people around them to help. To help with the complications of being, of not being anonymous.

• 26:50Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  You know.

• 26:51Elizabeth Day?

  And choose it. They choose the fame and you did not.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:57Elizabeth Day?

  I grew up knowing what happened to you.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:02Elizabeth Day?

  And it was impossible not to because the media landscape was such.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:07Elizabeth Day?

  That there was such an obsession with you, Monica. Not with President Clinton, 27 years older than you.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:15Elizabeth Day?

  It was with you. And I heard an interview where you said The Washington Post printed 127 articles about you in the first 10 days.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:23Elizabeth Day?

  After this came out.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. About the scandal and.

• 27:26Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:27Elizabeth Day?

  Google had just launched, the web traffic doubled overnight.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Right. That was when the Starr Report came out.

• 27:32Elizabeth Day?

  Right.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's all part of the same thing, right? It was, it's so hard to remember a time when a story could have legs for almost a year or over a year practically. I mean, now there were new things that kept happening, right? There was an ongoing trial and then the Starr Report came out eight months later, nine months later, whatever it was. But it, it was this ongoing onslaught and um

• 28:01Speaker 01

  the media was not kind.

• 28:04Elizabeth Day?

  No. I do not know how you got through it.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I don't either. You know, I, I, I think that, um, you know, I come from a long line of very strong women who have faced adversity in myriad ways. And I think, you know, my therapist will say sometimes that, you know, the very things that helped me, that I, I learned how to do as a child, that then helped me survive 98, or also some of the things that. wreak havoc for me in present time. But I think that, um, I think being able to dissociate, being able to sort of check out helped at times.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  And I had an extraordinary family, you know, so, and have, who was supportive. And I think that, um, had my family not stood by me and it would have been, I, I, I wouldn't have been able to survive on many levels.

• 29:11Elizabeth Day?

  You described it then as falling in love with someone who just so happened to be the most powerful free leader of the Western world. Do you still categorize it as love?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  I, I, it was 22 to 24 year old young woman's love.

• 29:28Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it, but I think probably everybody can relate to this, that are, the way we see love evolves with every relationship we have. You know, it's sort of, um, I don't think I know one person who has said, oh, this relationship I'm in now, this love that I'm in now, this is so much lesser than this one from 10 years ago, because we change as people and we evolve. And every time we fall in love, it changes us anyway. And the person said those things. So, um, I see what happened. I see it as something different.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  But yes, that's what I felt was like, I think there was some limerence there and all sorts of other things, but that's how I saw it then. And I think, um, you know, it was, it was also an abuse of power.

• 30:25Elizabeth Day?

  It wasn't a relationship of equals?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  No, but I think that's in, I think that's sort of the, the power aspect. But it was not, it wasn't sexual assault. So, particularly when we have conversations around me too. I think that that's, you know, something we're looking at. But it was, you know, Considering that, even though it was a family friend who was a big donor, who, you know, had recommended me for the White House internship program, I had written an essay that had me writing, not Xeroxing, for the internship. And that I then got a job on my own before the relationship started. So my very first job out of college was working in the White House.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  So I don't think that that's the kind of trajectory that someone thinks then, you know, 10, 12 years later, that person's not going to be able to get hired.

• 31:19Elizabeth Day?

  No.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  So, um, and, you know, and then I worked in the Pentagon as well and traveled the world with my boss, who was the Pentagon spokesman, and we traveled with the Secretary of Defense. And, um, you know, it was, I think there, there was, I'm by no means a genius, by no means going to be the, you know, the, the cream of the, of the crop, but I wasn't a bimbo. I wasn't a dumb bimbo.

• 31:46Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So like I, I was portrayed to be, and that was a big struggle for me to, to deal with that.

• 31:52Elizabeth Day?

  And you were often portrayed as that by other women?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Often by other women, but, you know, I think that that was, um, that was a narrative that was crafted and put out by the White House. So I think it was picked up, that mantle was picked up by a lot of women, but, you know, so.

• 32:18Elizabeth Day?

  What do you think this whole period of your life taught you about love and trust? Because there were so many ways in which you were betrayed.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Um, I think that I, I, I think they were.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Very deep wounds and they're both really were really intertwined from that whole period. And it's something that I still work on, you know, I mean, and the, I think we've been having these kinds of conversations publicly more, but with the somatic therapy, it's bringing in, you know, my nervous system and my body and listening to my body and trying to reconnect in different ways. Because of betrayal and because of love and those things. So I think it's, it's ongoing work for me. I think it's ongoing work for probably everybody in different ways.

• 33:19Elizabeth Day?

  What is somatic therapy?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Oh, so it's, okay, I'm probably not going to give the best definition, but how I think of it is, you know, when you go into therapy, you're talking about your, your thoughts and your emotions and you're sort of using your emotions as the landscape to have those discussions. And somatic therapy is really about the body. It's, it's checking in with the body. It's being aware of what the body is doing, what the body is reacting to. And yes, you, you know, use words and their images and all sorts of things to communicate that to someone. So it's not necessarily non, nonverbal, but it's, it's really reconnecting.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It's sort of remembering that these are all the parts of me. So that's, that's what you work on, you know, calming the nervous system, toning your vagus nerve, so.

• 34:19Elizabeth Day?

  If you could take away this period of your life where you were unable to be anonymous, you were unable to get the job that you deserved because of what happened, would you take it away?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 34:34Elizabeth Day?

  You would?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah.

• 34:36Elizabeth Day?

  Even though it's made you who you are now?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yes, and I, you know, love and appreciate who I am now, but I think for so many different reasons. Um. I would have liked a more normal life.

• 34:54Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  I would have liked to have had a more normal trajectory.

• 34:58Elizabeth Day?

  So decade of lying of lying low.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 35:01Elizabeth Day?

  And a decade of what sounds like healing.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Well, I think those two were one in the same.

• 35:08Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  So, and then the last decade has really been the reclaiming. But I think the decade before was part of the preparation. And that's one of the things that I love about reclaiming too, is that it encompasses all of these things, you know, that to have something like right definitionally, you get back something that was lost or taken from you. But so you have something, you lose it, you go through the grief of the grief of the loss, you have to be resilient, you eventually have to heal, you usually have some kind of strategy and ultimately and perseverance and ultimately you triumph,

• 35:52Speaker 01

  you know, so, but I think that that decade was preparing me to be able to reclaim.

• 36:00Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, so well put. You mentioned karmic, like something karmically earlier on. And I wonder how much you believe that we live several lifetimes and you do, so do I.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Several lifetime, I believe different dimension. I'm like the multiverse is real. I, you know, I, I loved the movie Arrival with Amy Adams and really where so much of the film was talking about time being circular. So that's very much something, you know, I, I don't put into practice enough, but I hundred percent believe.

• 36:35Elizabeth Day?

  So I wonder if I could ask you the final question on this failure, whether you feel that in this multiverse of dimensional time, that part of your purpose in this specific lifetime that we're talking about right now, right here in this podcast studio, is to have traveled this path so that you can speak in this way for others?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  I think there is part of me, like a higher version of myself that.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Has worked to try to accept that more and more because that is, this has ended up being part of my lot in life. And I have had the privilege of being able to see how I can use my pain to sort of serve a purpose and to help ease other people's pain, which is it's not something I ever thought I'd be able to do. And, and it's very, it's very rewarding. So I see that. I, I don't know at the end of my life, I don't know where I'll fall on, in thinking about it all that way.

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• 38:11Speaker 03

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• 38:41Elizabeth Day?

  Your final failure, going back in time. Cause this dates from 1999, when you launched a handbag company. And the bags were called, what were they called?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Made especially for you by Monica.

• 38:54Elizabeth Day?

  Yes. And what kind of bags were they? Tell us.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  So they were unstructured bags made with upholstery fabric. And they were unstructured and the kind of, so it came out of everything that happened. It started because of what happened in 98. That I couldn't leave the house and my stepmom taught me to knit. And I had seen a bag that I really wanted to carry my yarn around, but it was too expensive. So I had done costume design in high school. So I designed a bag and I made it on my stepmom's sewing machine. And then, you know, a couple of other friends wanted it and eventually it became a business.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And I loved doing it. I loved that the creativity that was in there.

• 39:43Elizabeth Day?

  There's something about creativity and failure that I think is really beautiful and intertwined. Because creativity in a way, it's, it's, it relies on you being liberated enough to make mistakes. And so do you think it opened up that part of you again that was like, it's actually okay for me to explore?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I think what comes up for me that is more reflective of that is I started doing my own sort of self-directed art therapy a couple of years ago and, and the fact that I, you know, it's just for me. There's not a, there's not an end goal with it. And it's just sort of, I hate the word honoring, but it's honoring the creative process.

• 40:28Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Or, or the kind of creative process within me, you know, so.

• 40:35Elizabeth Day?

  I don't know if you know this, but there's a whole corner of the internet devoted to how great your bags are. And how they deserve a reinterpretation. And they're being sold on eBay and stuff.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, wow.

• 40:45Elizabeth Day?

  And they're great.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I will tell you this, they are sturdy motherfuckers. They are really sturdy.

• 40:53Elizabeth Day?

  Creator.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. But they're, you know, I think that's the benefit of upholstery fabric and having, you know, a kind of fabric story on the inside and one on the outside. It's, it's, it's a very sturdy bag. So.

• 41:07Elizabeth Day?

  So why is this a failure?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Oh, because we, you know, the beginning launch went well and then Henry Bendels wanted the bags and we, we had an amazing launch there that was a very much, as you were saying before, a pinch me moment was pretty magical and ultimately.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  My partners and I had very different visions on how to grow the business. And so it, we ended up closing it. And so it was a, it was a failure, you know, to me to close a company. Was not by choice, you know, so it was, was heartbreaking.

• 41:52Elizabeth Day?

  I actually really love it when people choose business failures for this podcast because they are so personal and it does feel so devastating. And you said to me in the email that there was something to do with not taking the advice of your lawyer.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I had, I think that I was very eager to get going and was in business with really wonderful people. And so I, you know, just, I kept saying, nothing's ever going to go like this is all fine. It's all, I wouldn't listen to them. I, you know, they wanted to make changes in the contract and I was like, no, no, it's fine. It's fine, you know, it's like, what the fuck did I know? These are people who went to law school, who work in a very good law firm because they know what they're doing. And, and it ended up making things very complicated on the exit. So I exit as if, as if I exited, as if we sold the company, but in, in the dissolution,

• 42:52Speaker 01

  but there's, you know, that's all water under the bridge. I still am in touch with them on occasion, you know, so have seen them since then and great people, we just, you know, came to have different ideas on, on how to grow something.

• 43:06Elizabeth Day?

  And what do you think that failure taught you?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Um, to listen to, to listen to my lawyers. And, and in fact, I even, you know, recently had an instance where my lawyer had been pushing me to sort of button something up a little more. And I was like, no, no, it's a friend. It's fine. It's all fine. And, and then I felt a little burnt after. So I'm, I'm, maybe I'm not always good at, at learning those lessons, but I think it, it, it taught me to be.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  To try to, I haven't perfected it, but I think to try to find a balance of being hopeful and dreaming, but also having my feet on the ground and also being really

• 43:59Speaker 01

  mindful of when, I think when something goes wrong in a business, it, it needs to be addressed. Whether it's sort of communications or other issues. And I don't think you can just kind of keep moving, moving on from that. So.

• 44:16Elizabeth Day?

  That's very wise. And I also think talking about this just makes me meditate on the idea of instinct. Because I think particularly with women, we often have very strong instinctive responses and thoughts and feelings and beliefs. And yet, many of us have been socially conditioned out of trusting them. And you had an extra layer of being conditioned out of trusting your instinct, I imagine. And I wonder where you're at with trusting your instinct now.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  You know, I think that there are some lanes where I feel very confident trusting my instinct. And then there are ones where I doubt myself. And I'd say 60% of the time, I was wrong to have doubted myself. I'm not always right. My instinct wasn't always right, but right more often than not.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And I also, I think sometimes what's a little complicated is

• 45:23Speaker 01

  there could be a murky place between, you know, wishful thinking and intuition and trying to kind of tease that out. And remember that intuition is usually a whisper for me.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if I've gone looking for the whisper, it's probably not a whisper. But I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure if that makes sense, but.

• 45:49Elizabeth Day?

  It does make sense. Yeah. And I think that's very wise that generally if something's shouting at you, it's because you want it to be true. Or it's just you behind the wheel of a car.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:58Elizabeth Day?

  Shouting at someone else or going too slowly.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 46:03Elizabeth Day?

  I have absolutely loved meeting you and talking to you. Honestly, Monica, I cannot thank you enough. And I wonder if we could just wrap this up by asking you what the process of thinking about failure for this podcast was like for you.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Well, I struggled at first. So I think it was, I was supposed to, you know, have it to my publicist the day before. And I emailed her and I was like, I'm having trouble coming up with things. So this is going to have to be tomorrow. And I felt a little more clear headed. And it was, you know, then the failures just kept rolling. So it was failures, a disappointment and has consequences to it that can be really painful and challenging.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  But sort of like making mistakes and apologize. I like, I kind of get that that's part of life, but I do always want the A plus. So.

• 47:05Elizabeth Day?

  Yes, I hear you. I really do. And I'm going to give you an A plus.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 47:10Elizabeth Day?

  For this episode of How to Fail.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 47:13Elizabeth Day?

  I'm going to give you an A plus and a metaphorical white bunny.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:17Elizabeth Day?

  Monica Lewinsky, thank you so much for coming on.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Elizabeth. Thank you.

• 47:21Elizabeth Day?

  Thanks so much for listening and watching. This June on How to Fail, we're all about celebrating wellness from the inside. If you'd like to hear more on this, go and listen to my episode with Vicky Patterson, brought to you by Ala Lacto Free. The link is in the episode description. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.