Monica Lewinsky Cooperated With FBI Because Of Threats To Mother, Doc Shows
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Monica Lewinsky’s parents opened up about their daughter’s affair with former President Bill Clinton for a new docuseries about the 1998 scandal, Huffpost reported.
Bernard Lewinsky and Marcia Lewis were featured in Monday’s episode of the 6-part A&E series, “The Clinton Affair.” Bernard Lewinsky recalled in his interview the moment Lewis told him their daughter, who was a 22-year-old White House intern, was in a bad situation.
“She said Monica was in trouble, did I know anything about her and the president? And I said, ‘What, no, I don’t know anything. What are you talking about?’”
NBC’s the Today Show showed a clip Tuesday morning of the day Monica’s father, stepmother and brother met Clinton in the Oval Office, a few months before the affair leaked. They were given a tour of the White House, which her father and stepmother described as odd and informal.
“He was very friendly,” Bernard Lewinsky said. “He was very familiar with us and that felt somewhat strange.”
Lewis said she traveled to Washington, D.C., to be by her daughter’s side. Monica Lewinsky said the FBI had convinced her to cooperate by threatening to prosecute her mother, according to the Daily Mail — they both would have been looking at 27 years in prison for lying about the affair.
“We were both very, very frightened,” Lewis said. “Monica was distraught, she kept repeating ‘I just want to die. I just want to die.’”
In March, Lewinsky wrote a piece for Vanity Fair, “Emerging from the ‘House of Gaslight’ In the Age Of #MeToo.” In it, she revealed the scandal “alter[ed] the course of my life.” She considers the affair an abuse of power and now lives with post-traumatic stress disorder.
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