- Seventeen years is a long time to spend on the fringes of life, sneered at and ridiculed, labelled as a woman of loose virtue and as the woman who almost brought a presidency down. Monica Lewinsky was merely 22 when she got embroiled in a relationship with the president of the United States of America and little imagined that it would lead to a scandal that would permanently discredit her and affect her life in ways she could never imagine. Last week she put all of that behind her and started a new life, on her terms.
A lot of people who heard Monica Lewinsky’s much-awaited TED talk would possibly have wondered at her first few words about falling in love.
Not because young girls don’t fall in love with their bosses but because of the endless media reports back then, which painted her as anything but a lovelorn young woman.
Instead, the media kept up a steady, relentless, witch hunt that focussed on building up a bad girl image of her-remember the pages after pages about the cigar, the beret, the blue dress and the phone calls from a star struck woman to the President of the United States of America?
Everybody forgot about the other person in the relationship of mutual consent, the President of the United States who, eventually, washed his hands off the entire event, choosing to apologise to the nation and carry on with his presidency, leaving the young intern he had an affair with, to deal with the shambles of her life.
“Like me, at 22, a few of you may also have taken wrong turns by falling in love with the wrong person. Maybe even your boss,” Lewinsky, now a woman of 41, said to the audience last week. “Unlike me though, your boss probably wasn’t the president of the United States of America.”
The former White House interns spent over a decade being a social pariah, ostracised by society, denied jobs and even her basic dignity , dealing with manic depression and an alleged suicide attempt , sometimes making weak attempts to rebuild her life by modelling for glamour magazines but never really getting her life back together.
Till last week when she categorically claimed her life back, addressing the demons in her life, the horror of cyber bullying and scandal mongering which was the reality of her life for almost 17 years and sending out a strong plea for more compassion in our relationships, in real life and on social networking sites.
“This scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution,” Lewinsky said , referring to the story break about her affair with Bill Clinton, that happened on a website rather than conventional newspapers “It was the first time traditional news was usurped by the Internet, a click that reverberated around the whole world... Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide.
I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’ I was known by many, but actually known by few. I get it. It was easy to forget ‘that woman’ was dimensional and had a soul.”
“When this happened to me, 17 years ago, there was no name for it,” she told the crowd who listened with rapt attention to the woman who admitted that the splatter of the scandal still haunts her in the form of young men, rank strangers who proposition her even today.
“Now we call it cyber-bullying.” Lewinsky said about the nightmare of having her name and stories about her being trawled, searched for and emailed endless times over the last 17 times. The turning point in her life came when Tyler Clementi, a teenaged New Jersey college student committed suicide in 2010 after being cyber-bullied for being gay.
“Tyler’s tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to re-contextualise my experiences. I began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. Every day online, people — especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this — are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day.
Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop. .Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline,” she said.
Lewinsky signed off her powerful talk, that left her and many in the audience teary-eyed, by saying she is more compassionate and forgiving of herself and her mistakes today and calling on the audience to find the compassion inside themselves too.
And answering a query that she has come across several times recently and will be thrown at her in the next few months about why she chose this moment to talk about the incident, she had this simple answer: The top-note answer (to the question) was and is: “Because it’s time. Time to stop tiptoeing around my past. Time to take back my narrative.”
Nobody who has seen her talk will deny that she has reclaimed that narrative categorically. That is why they gave her a standing ovation and roared their approval of her brave coming of age story. We hope this is the beginning of a new chapter and a new life for Lewinsky.
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?section=expressions&xfile=/data/expressions/2015/March/expressions_March17.xml
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