BILL CLINTON-MONICA
LEWINSKY SCANDAL 20
YEARS ON: WHERE ARE
ALL THE MAJOR FIGURES NOW?
It's been 20 years since the Drudge Report broke the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, which would mar Clinton's presidency and bring a House impeachment vote.
Multiple figures were involved in the scandal: Clinton, the president of the United States. Lewinsky, a 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton initially claimed he "never had sexual relations" with. Linda Tripp, the civil servant who recorded the damning audiotapes. And so on.
In 1998, you probably couldn't go anywhere without hearing about the affair. And Lewinsky couldn't go anywhere without being berated by the paparazzi.
So where are some of them now, two decades later?
Bill Clinton
Clinton avoided impeachment in 1999 after the Senate acquitted him of all charges, and he was succeeded by George W. Bush in 2001.
The former president is now involved in public speaking and humanitarian work, and is board chair of the Clinton Foundation, which addresses international causes such as AIDS prevention and global warming. The foundation has received some criticism for accepting donations from individuals and entities that had an interest in influencing U.S. policy a few years back.
In May, it was reported that Clinton is working on a book titled The President Is Missing with best-selling author James Patterson, slated for publication this summer.
The #MeToo movement has revived discussion of the Lewinsky affair, with women such as Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York saying Clinton should have resigned following revelations of his relationship with the intern.
Monica Lewinsky
Lewinsky secured witness immunity for providing grand jury testimony about her relationship with the president. In the immediate years afterward, She sold a line of handbags, appeared in commercials for diet company Jenny Craig, starred in the 2002 HBO documentary Monica: In Black and White and pursued an advanced degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics. She was also the subject of Monica: Her Story, Andrew Morton's 1999 book.
Lewinsky kept largely to herself until 2014, when she wrote a tell-all essay titled "Shame and Survival" for Vanity Fair and insisted it was “time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” She is currently a cyberbullying advocate, giving talks at Facebook and business conferences on "how to make the internet more compassionate," The Guardian reported.
She chimed in amid the growing #MeToo movement in October, tweeting simply, "#MeToo."
Juanita Broaddrick, who has long alleged that Clinton raped her in the 1970s, fired back, tweeting, "Where were you when we needed you?"
Linda Tripp
Linda Tripp, who befriended Lewinsky while the two worked in the Pentagon beginning in April 2016, became a confidant of Lewinsky's and recorded hours of phone conversations about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in fall 1997, before becoming a whistleblower and ultimately sharing them with special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
After Bush's presidency began, Tripp was fired from her job. She now lives in Middleburg, Virginia, with her husband, Dieter Rausch, and the pair run a holiday store called the Christmas Sleigh, which sells homemade ornaments.
Tripp still can't shake the 20-year-old scandal, though. An upcoming Amazon movie, Linda and Monica, will detail the pair’s relationship. In an August 2017 interview with Page Six about the movie, Tripp said Lewinsky was "lacking a moral compass."
She also told The Weekly Standard that the recent headlines about powerful men's sexual misconduct are "forcing me to relive a lot of” what transpired 20 years ago.
Hillary Clinton
Amid allegations of her husband’s infidelity, Clinton often worked relentlessly to discredit the women who came forward. As the Lewinsky affair unfolded publicly, Clinton told a close friend in 1998 that Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony tune” who wouldn’t let the president break off their relationship.
Clinton would make two presidential runs of her own, the latter ending in defeat to Donald Trump in November 2016. Though repeatedly on Trump's target list, she remained largely out of the spotlight after the election, until the publication of her book What Happened last September.
That month, in her first TV interview since her defeat, Clinton blamed Russian interference in the election as well as her own mistakes, such as her inability to connect with economically struggling voters and her use a private email server while secretary of state. In the 469-page What Happened, she describes her husband as a pillar who got her through the devastating loss to Trump.
"My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life," Clinton wrote. "We've been married since 1975. We've had many, many more happy days than sad or angry ones."
Paula Jones
Paula Jones was a former Arkansas state worker who sued Clinton, ultimately unsuccessfully, in 1994, alleging he exposed his genitals and propositioned her a few years earlier when he was governor. In a deposition for the Jones case, Clinton claimed under oath he never had sexual relations with Lewinsky, setting up a perjury prosecution that led to his House impeachment.
Clinton paid Jones a reported $850,000 in an out-of-court settlement but never apologized. A year after the lawsuit, Jones did a nude photo layout in 2000 for Penthouse, a decision she credited to being "a single mother with a looming tax bill."
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