Monica Lewinsky reveals she exposed her thong to get Bill Clinton's attention before their first White House hook-up

Monica Lewinsky details the events leading up to her first intimate encounter with Bill Clinton in the A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair, the Daily Mail reports. 

It happened on November 14, 1995, in the middle of the government shutdown when Lewinsky had been called in to help with the phones. 

On that date there had been a surprise party for one of Clinton's staffers, and at one point Lewinsky realized her thong was exposed while Clinton was near her in the room.

Lewinsky opted to keep her thong out as Clinton walked by, and a short while later when she walked by his office, Clinton smiled at her and motioned for her to come into the room.

She soon admitted to clinton that she had a “crush” on him, and not long after the two were kissing in the dark room.

“I don't talk about this very often and I still don't feel comfortable talking about it. It's one of those things where it's not as if it didn't register with me that he was the president. Obviously it did,” explains Lewinsky in a preview.

“But I think in one way the moment we were actually in the back office for the first time the truth is I think it meant more to me the someone who other people desired, desired me.”


She continued: “However wrong it was, however misguided, for who I was at that time, at 22 years old, it was how I felt.”

Lewinsky went back to her desk after that first kiss and was then asked to return to the study later, when the two became more intimate.

It was the start of a relationship that would find the two meeting in secret once a week for almost two years. 

Lewinsky also opens up about the grief and fear she felt when she was told that she would have to cooperate with the FBI investigation of Clinton, or face time in prison.

“In order to cooperate and avoid charges and I would have to make monitored phone calls which they would listen in to and record and I might have to wear a wire and go see people in person,” reveals Lewinsky in a preview for the upcoming A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair.

It was too much for Lewinsky, who says that after a few hours she began to think about commiting suicide.

Twenty years later, it still causes her to break down in tears.

'The ground completely crumbled in that moment. I felt so much guilt. And I felt terrified,' she revealed in the interview.

An FBI agent involved in the case acknowledged this, saying that Lewinsky was “alternating between being
hysterical, being angry, being abusive.”

Lewinsky admits that she was not cooperative at the time, believing she had to protect Clinton.

'They imagined that I would have flipped really easily. They had no plan in place for what would happen if i said no,' she reveals in the series.

That then gave way to thoughts of ending her own life.

'There was a point for me somewhere within these first several hours where I would be hysterically crying and then I would just shut down,' she recalled.


Ahead of the show's premiere, Lewinsky opened up about the affair in an essay for Vanity Fair, in which she expresses her disappointment that Bill does not think he should apologize to his former intern as well as her desire to tell Hillary she is sorry.

“The process of this docuseries led me to new rooms of shame that I still needed to explore, and delivered me to Grief’s doorstep,” writes Lewinsky.

She then lists off the examples of grief, ending with: “Grief for a relationship that had no normal closure, and instead was slowly dismantled by two decades of Bill Clinton's behavior that eventually (eventually!) helped me understand how, at 22, I took the small, narrow sliver of the man I knew and mistook it for the whole.”

Lewinsky spoke about her disappointment with Bill over the comments he made back in June when asked if
he owed Lewinsky a personal apology, and her disbelief that it took so long for someone to even ask that question.

It was Craig Melvin who put Bill on the spot during an interview on Today, and the former president responded to the question by saying: “No. I do not – I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.”

In response to that Lewinsky writes: “So, what feels more important to me than whether I am owed or deserving of a personal apology is my belief that Bill Clinton should want to apologize. I’m less disappointed him, and more disappointed for him.”

She then adds: “He would be a better man for it . . . and we, in turn, a better society.”

That moment was a huge shift writes Lewinsky, and one that was a long time coming.

“If you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesn’t want to answer,” writes Lewinsky.

She is also quick to admit that she has some people to apologize to for her actions.

“My first public words after the scandal—uttered in an interview with Barbara Walters on March 3, 1999—were an apology directly to Chelsea and Mrs. Clinton,” writes Lewinsky.

She then lists off the examples of grief, ending with: “Grief for a relationship that had no normal closure, and instead was slowly dismantled by two decades of Bill Clinton's behavior that eventually (eventually!) helped me understand how, at 22, I took the small, narrow sliver of the man I knew and mistook it for the whole.”


Lewinsky spoke about her disappointment with Bill over the comments he made back in June when asked if he owed Lewinsky a personal apology, and her disbelief that it took so long for someone to even ask that question.

t was Craig Melvin who put Bill on the spot during an interview on Today, and the former president responded to the question by saying: “No. I do not – I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.”

n response to that Lewinsky writes: 'So, what feels more important to me than whether I am owed or deserving of a personal apology is my belief that Bill Clinton should want to apologize. I’m less disappointed by him, and more disappointed for him.

She then adds: 'He would be a better man for it . . . and we, in turn, a better society.'

That moment was a huge shift writes Lewinsky, and one that was a long time coming.

At the time the affair began between the president and his intern in November 1995, Clinton was 49 years old and Lewinsky was a 22-year-old White House employee.

 
 Clinton would initially deny having sexual relations with Lewinsky in a sworn deposition back in January of 1998, going so far as to claim that the two were never even alone together in the White House.

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