“It is September of 1998,” Monica Lewinsky tells us in her recent Ted Talk; “I’m sitting in a windowless office room inside the office of the Independent Council… listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. I’m here because I’ve been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation. […] Scared and mortified, I listen; listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day, listen as I confess my love for the President and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen deeply, deeply ashamed to the worst version of myself, a self I don’t even recognize.”
The experience she describes is probably as near to purgatory on earth as you’ll ever find. Her situation was a modern day re-enactment of the Scarlet Letter, a woman branded for life by a culture that has turned her name into a byword for sex and scandal without any thought of the woman behind the name.
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