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The former White House intern broke her decade-long public silence to an audience of more than 1000-plus young entrepreneurs and achievers at the inaugural Forbes 30 under 30 Summit by recalling her tryst with the President.
“I fell in love with my boss,” said Lewinsky. “But my boss was the President of the United States.”
During her address, Lewinsky said she “deeply regrets” the affair which she said lasted on and off for two years not only because people were hurt but because she said the scandalous relationship went “public with a vengeance” via the internet.
“Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one,” said Lewinsky. “I was Patient Zero.”
The 41-year-old’s reason for speaking out now is to call for a “cultural revolution” against the kind of Internet shaming she experienced when the affair was exposed in the late ’90s and to put an end to cyberbullying.
Lewinsky said she was the first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet.
“There was no Facebook, Twitter or Instagram back then, but there were gossip, news and entertainment websites replete with comment sections and emails which could be forwarded,” Lewinsky explained. “Of course, it was all done on the excruciatingly slow dial up. Yet around the world this story went. A viral phenomenon that, you could argue, was the first moment of truly ‘social media.'”
According to Forbes, the San Francisco native got emotional during her speech especially when recalling the moments when she read the infamous Starr Report, which was released online in 1998.
“Staring at the computer screen, I spent the day shouting, ‘Oh my God!’ and ‘I can’t believe they put that in. That’s so out of context,'” she said.
“And those were the only thoughts that interrupted a relentless mantra in my head: ‘I want to die.'”
Earlier this year in the June issue of Vanity Fair, Lewinsky vowed to speak out in order “to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past.”
In the same VF issue she explained that the tragic death of Tyler Clementi – a gay university student who took his own life in 2010 after being publicly outted and humiliated by classmates on the internet – had stuck a chord with her own experience of harassment in the digital age.
“The tragedy is one of the principal reasons I am standing up here today,” Lewinsky said Monday of Clemneti’s death.
“While it touched us both, my mother was unusually upset by the story, and I wondered why. Eventually it dawned on me: She was back in 1998, but to a time when I was periodically suicidal; when she might very easily have lost me; when I, too, might have been humiliated to death.”
Lewinsky said she wanted to use her story of survival as a way to help others who have endured relentless cyberbullying and there are many of them – according to Forbes almost “54 per cent of young Facebook users describe being bullied or harassed online.”
The recent hacks that exposed nude photos of A-list celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence serve as a reminder that no one is safe from the toxic culture of cyber shaming.
“I had been publicly silent for a decade. But now, I must – as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock said – disturb the universe,” said Lewinsky.
“I want to put my suffering to good use and give purpose to my past,” she added.
Hours before her address Monica Lewinsky joined the world of Twitter and posted her first tweet which simply read: “#Herewego”.
About an hour after her first tweet, Lewinsky, who describes herself in her Twitter profile as a “social activist. public speaker. contributor to vanity fair. knitter of things without sleeves,” tweeted again that she was “excited (and nervous) to speak at the #Under30Summit”.
