New York Times, Washington :
Monica Lewinsky says she became reclusive during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president in 2008 for fear that she would be used for political purposes and that she feels “gun-shy” even now as Clinton considers another run in 2016.
Despite Lewinsky’s trepidation, she writes in a forthcoming issue of Vanity Fair that she now feels compelled to emerge from the shadows because, “Should I put my life on hold for another eight to 10 years?”
It is time, she writes, to stop “tiptoeing around my past, and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past.”
She continues: “What this will cost me, I will soon find out.” Lewinsky, now 40, broke her years long silence about her affair with President Bill Clinton in the article to appear in the May 8 issue of Vanity Fair.
In excerpts released by the magazine on Tuesday – which include a photograph of her wearing a white dress and lying casually on a sofa – Lewinsky sounds off about her regrets, her feelings of humiliation and the effect that the scandal has had on her career.
Indeed, Lewinsky writes that the scandal continues to affect her ability to pursue a career despite her master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics, because employers do not want to attract the attention of the news media. But she says she has turned down eight-figure offers to exploit her celebrity status because “they didn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
She writes that she regrets her affair with Clinton, but says the popular view that the president pressured her into it is wrong.
