This piece by Helaine Olen in the Washington Post is the only one worth reading about the new Clinton Impeachment series on Netflix. Everything she says is right on in my opinion:
Monica Lewinsky went on NBC’s “Today” show recently to promote the new FX series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” of which she is a producer. Judging from how quickly her name began trending on Twitter, it seems people will never tire of debating the rights and wrongs of the Whitewater investigation that led to a presidential sex scandal. Tellingly, a lot of tweets asked if Bill Clinton needs to apologize to Lewinsky. Or: Should Lewinsky — yet again — offer an apology to Hillary Clinton?
One key figure was mentioned much less: Kenneth W. Starr. Yet absent the work of Starr’s team, all of us wouldn’t know, certainly not in such lurid detail, precisely what happened between the president and Lewinsky. Perhaps these days we are simply so used to our personal lives being shared, and overshared, that it’s hard to remember just how inappropriate Starr’s pursuit of this matter was. But it is his actions, not Lewinsky’s, that deserve the most condemnation.
Recall that Starr chose to investigate a tip originating from civil servant Linda Tripp — the worst friend since Judas — that Lewinsky, a White House intern, was having a relationship with the president. As independent counsel, Starr had been tasked with investigating investments that the Clintons had made in connection with the Whitewater real estate firm in Arkansas. Yet Starr and his office pursued the affair lead for months. The Lewinsky story “should’ve been dead on arrival” because “it served no useful purpose,” one regretful prosecutor said on Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast in 2018.
The initial confrontation of Starr’s prosecutors with Lewinsky — a 12-hour ordeal that began with her being ambushed at a mall food court — bordered on legal abuse. (A government report later concluded that a prosecutor “exercised poor judgment and made mistakes in his analysis, planning and execution of the approach.”) As for the investigation, no detail was too personal, or humiliating, to spare. Starr included the blue dress, the cigar and more in his report, a document that journalist Sean Wilentz deemed “pornography for puritans.” The spectacle left Lewinsky infamous, notorious and unemployable.
Most scandals fade over time. This one did not. Lewinsky made attempts to get on with her life, mostly with little luck. Only in recent years, after she used her own horrific experience to reinvent herself as a cyberbullying activist, has she been able to earn a consistent living.
Yet when Starr was asked by CBS in 2018 if he would apologize to Lewinsky, he declined. “I regret all the pain that resulted to so many, including to the nation,” Starr said. “But no, I can’t in conscience say to Monica anything other than I’m sorry that the whole thing happened.” He considers the scandal Lewinsky’s fault. Had she “cooperated” with his investigators, all could have been resolved with a minimum of fuss, he suggested. But she, in his words, “lawyered up.”
Imagine that: Lewinsky had the temerity to insist on her legal rights. Apparently, to Starr, this justifies his excessive actions and the decades-long humiliation of a woman barely old enough to legally drink when the events in question occurred.
To be clear, there is a lot of blame to go around. Fair-weather friends, talk-show hosts and many others joined in the slut-shaming of Lewinksy. Newsweek, which almost broke the story, critiqued Lewinsky’s “heavy makeup, revealing blouses and occasionally ribald comments.” Author Nancy Friday crudely suggested that Lewinsky could “rent out her mouth” as her next act. (Irony alert: Friday was the author of such 1970s classics of female sexual liberation as “My Secret Garden.”)
And then there is seducer in chief Bill Clinton. He engaged in a sexual relationship with a junior staffer in his workplace. Of course, it wasn’t just any workplace. The power imbalance screams inappropriate by 2021 standards, even if it did not register as such in the 1990s. When asked about his actions, Clinton lied under oath and allowed Lewinsky’s reputation to be shredded. Two decades later, confronted on television, he couldn’t bring himself to say Lewinsky’s name. The former president was and remains a cad.
Lewinsky, too, could have behaved better. She was an adult, albeit an immature one for her age. By her early 20s, she was old enough to know that affairs with married men are of dubious ethics. But this is a mistake many people make, and she didn’t deserve to have her life irrevocably altered for the worse because of it.
The bigger point remains that Starr is the No. 1 villain of this sorry saga. Ultimately, it’s mainly because of Starr’s appalling lack of judgment in the 1990s that any of us are watching “Impeachment” now. He spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars … to ferret out a few seamy sexual encounters. Of all the facts we can’t forget, this should be the top.
I was always team Monica because she stood up to that despicable Cotton Mather (revealed to be a total hypocrite in recent years)and his thuggish henchmen. I don’t think I would have had the backbone to do what she did.
Clinton survived the onslaught not because everyone loved him so much or thought his behavior was acceptable. He survived because of the vicious nature of his enemies. Someday I would love for someone to sit down with the various “elves” who are now Never Trumpers (George Conway, Barbara Comstock etc.) and ask them if their dirty tricks and character assassination during that episode might have been instrumental in creating the politics that gave us Donald Trump. I don’t know what they will say but I know the truth.