Monika Lewinsky has blasted Jay Leno for targeting her relentlessly following her bombshell affair with Bill Clinton. The 51-year-old activist and producer was dragged through international headlines in the 1990s when then-president Clinton, 78, admitted he had engaged in a sexual relationship with the former political intern. While Clinton was widely criticised for his actions, it was Lewinsky who was dragged over hot coals for her involvement in the affair - becoming the punchline of jokes and the subject of ruthless media attention.
While Lewinsky has since found respect in more recent years - producing the bombshell Ryan Murphy drama American Crime Story: Impeachment about her years in the White House - she has acknowledged that the attacks on her personality were difficult to deal with. In a new interview, she has highlighted the fact The Tonight Show host Leno, 74, routinely took aim at her with his late night comedy commentary.
Lewinsky - who was in her early 20s during her affair with Clinton - has suggested she was an unfair target of the talk show titan as she was not strictly a public figure. And she has claimed that she made it into a top ten list of targets when the star stepped down from his late night show in 2013 after almost 2,000 episodes.
Appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Lewinsky was asked if there was a difference between the way men and women treated her following the affair scandal. Lewinsky replied: “I think what was interesting that I started to see in the public arena was that it, very sadly, it was a lot of women who said worse things about me than the men.
“The men told a lot of jokes, right? So the late night hosts… I think when Jay Leno retired, some media organisation had done a study and listed the top 10 targets, his top 10 targets of his late night show, and I was on that list. I was the only person who wasn’t a public figure.”.
She later explained that she felt Clinton could have handled the news of their affair in a better way - and thinks he should have resigned his presidency over the scandal. Show host Alex Cooper asked: "When you look back once the news broke and how everything was handled by media and the White House, how do you think it should have been handled? Have you thought about that?".
Collecting her thoughts, Lewinsky said in reply: "I think that… I think that, he should have said… I'm like now thinking this through. I don't think I've answered this question before, but good question. Yeah, I haven’t been asked that before.". She then replied: "So I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was, you know, nobody's business, and to resign, you know? Or to find a way, to find a way of staying in office that was not lying, and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world, under the bus.".
