Monica Lewinsky Says Bill Clinton ‘Escaped’ Consequences of Their Affair: ‘Gross Abuse of Power’

Monica Lewinsky is looking back at her life-changing love affair with Bill Clinton.

More than 30 years after the activist, now 52, began a sexual relationship with the former United States president — who is 27 years her senior — she told British newspaper The Times that the public humiliation following the fallout “was excruciating.”

The sex scandal rocked the White House in 1998, when Lewinsky was 24. Clinton, now 79, initially denied the affair, but upon further investigation, he was impeached. He was eventually acquitted on the charges.

For the former White House intern, “Life was almost unbearable,” the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast host told The Times.

“I haven’t spoken to him in almost 30 years and I don’t know what his internal landscape is,” she added. “I think he escaped a lot more than I did.”

While Lewinsky has stated that their relationship was consensual, she feels the dynamic was “a gross abuse of power. Full stop.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes, that I didn’t make wrong choices, that my behaviour didn’t hurt other people,” she admitted to the publication. “But at the heart of it was a gross abuse of power.”

As she looked back on the headline-making scandal, she said that “the farther away you get from something, the more mature you get and the more healed you get, and as the world changes, you start to see something differently and you’re able to hold it and examine it in a way that you couldn’t before.”

According to The Times, Lewinsky thought she was in love with the politician at the time, admitting, “My 22 to 24-year-old self experienced these things, believed there were these things. I still know that there were real emotions there.”

However, when “the most powerful man in the world” infamously declared, “I did not have sex with that woman,” Lewinsky said she “had to deal with some baggage” resulting from how things unfolded.

These days, she said, “It has got a lot easier the more I’ve been able to fill out my own life, with me as my true self.”

Clinton is still married to wife Hillary Clinton, whom he wed in 1975.