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After more than a decade of mostly hiding from the public eye, Monica Lewinksy has decided it’s time to “time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and start telling her side of a story that dominated headlines for months in the late 1990s.
In her first television interview since 2003, Lewinsky opened up about what it was like living in the wake of the Starr Report, which investigated a series of scandals involving the Clinton White House — including allegations that President Bill Clinton had oral sex with Lewinsky while she was a White House intern.
“I was a virgin to humiliation of that level, until that day,” she said in an upcoming National Geographic documentary called The 90s: The Last Great Decade. “To have my narrative ripped from me, and turned into the Starr report, and things that were turned over or things they delved out of my computer that I thought were deleted. I mean it was just violation after violation.”
A Today Show segment featuring a sneak peek of her interview showed Lewinsky discussing the sexism she faced as well.
“To be called stupid, and a slut, and a bimbo, and ditzy, and to be taken out of context, it was excruciating,” she said.
The interview follows the publication of an impassioned essay Lewinsky wrote for Vanity Fair in May that discussed what it was like to survive in a culture of humiliation.
The 90s: The Last Great Decade premieres Sunday, July 6 at 9 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.
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