Former White House intern, born in San Francisco, California, USA. She graduated from Lewis & Clark College at Oregon, and joined the White House in 1995, moving to the Pentagon the following year. She became known in 1998 during the official investigation into claims of sexual harassment made by Paula Jones against President Clinton (a claim later dismissed). In 1999 she was called to give evidence in the impeachment trial against the president. It was alleged that Lewinsky had had a sexual relationship with the president, and that he had persuaded her to deny the affair in her deposition to lawyers acting for Jones. Clinton subsequently denied the affair himself, while under oath (a denial he was forced by circumstantial evidence to retract during his impeachment trial). The enquiries were fuelled by a series of covert tape recordings of conversations made with her by her confidante Linda Tripp (1950 ), a former White House aide. Lewinski incurred heavy legal costs throughout the trials, and continued to maintain a high national and international profile after the impeachment. Her memoir, Monica's Story (1999), became a best-seller.
Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973 in San Francisco) is an American woman who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, while she was working at the White House in 1995-1996. Its repercussions in the Impeachment of Bill Clinton and the surrounding scandals of 1997-99 became known as the Lewinsky scandal or "Monicagate."
Early life
Lewinsky grew up in Southern California on the west side of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills.
Scandal
Between 15 November 1995 and 7 April 1996, Lewinsky had a sexual relationship with the President.
Lewinsky was transferred to Pentagon in April 1996 because her superiors felt she was spending too much time around Clinton. Since September 1997, Lewinsky's older colleague and confidante Linda Tripp was secretly recording their telephone conversations regarding the affair with Clinton. In January 1998, after Lewinsky had submitted an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, denying any physical relationship with Clinton, and attempted to persuade Tripp to lie under oath in the Jones case, Tripp gave the tapes to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and these tapes added to his ongoing investigation into the Whitewater scandal. Starr broadened his investigation to include investigating Lewinsky, Clinton, and others for possible perjury and subornation of perjury in the Jones case.
Admissions
Lewinsky admitted that her relationship with Clinton involved oral sex in the Oval Office and in adjoining rooms in the West Wing.
Clinton had previously been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, most notably in regard to a relationship with singer and former Arkansas state employee Gennifer Flowers, and an encounter with Arkansas state employee Paula Jones (née Corbin) in a Little Rock hotel room in which Jones claimed that Clinton exposed himself to her. Lewinsky's name actually surfaced during legal proceedings connected to the latter matter, when Jones's lawyers sought corroborating evidence of Clinton's conduct to substantiate Jones's allegations.
Clinton denied having had "a sexual affair," "sexual relations," or "a sexual relationship" with Lewinsky while under oath, and later claimed "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" in a nationally televised White House news conference.
In addition, Clinton said, "There is no sexual relationship [with Lewinsky]," a statement which he later said was truthful depending on one's definition of "is" (i.e., he was not, at the time he made that statement, still having a sexual relationship with Lewinsky). Under pressure from Starr, who as Clinton learned had obtained from Lewinsky a blue dress with Clinton's semen stain, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that the president had inserted a cigar-tube into her vagina, Clinton admitted on August 17, 1998, that he misled the American people and that he had had an "inappropriate" relationship with Lewinsky.
In addition, relying upon the definition of "sexual relations" as worded by Judge Susan Webber Wright, who was hearing the Paula Jones case, Clinton claimed that because certain acts were performed on him, not by him, he did not engage in sexual relations.
The affair led to a period of pop culture celebrity for Lewinsky, both as a sex symbol and as a younger-generation nexus of a political storm that was both lighthearted, and extremely serious at the same time. The neologism "Lewinsky" or "Giving (him) the Lewinski" is currently American slang widely understood to mean fellatio, though the frequency of other pop culture references and jokes involving Lewinsky have decreased over time.
After the scandal
Around early 1999, Lewinsky reportedly said "I'm well-known for something that isn't great to be well-known for."
In late 2005, Lewinsky reportedly began a master's program in Social Psychology at the London School of Economics.
After Clinton's autobiography My Life appeared in 2004, Lewinsky said in an interview with Daily Mail: "He could have made it right with the book, but he hasn't.
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