Monica Lewinsky Says She Still Lives In ‘a Lot of Fear’ Nearly 30 Years After Clinton Scandal

Nearly three decades after one of the biggest presidential scandals of all time, Monica Lewinsky is still affected by the fallout.

During a recent episode of the 52-year-old’s podcast, Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky, her guest, actress Jameela Jamil, turned the tables on the host and asked her to elaborate on how she feels about her affair with then-President Bill Clinton—and the subsequent backlash—today.

“How do you feel now? Having your life, your identity, your appearance in particular picked apart, where are you at with all of this?” asked Jamil, 39.

“I think I fall in a place where I feel more confident in myself as a person … I feel like every time I’m able to be more myself in the world and have it reflected back to me that that’s what’s been received, I think that I shed skin of trauma for myself from the older days,” Lewinsky said.

But when Jamil suggested that Lewinsky now has an outlet to speak up for herself in a way she did not when she was the victim of a public and media pile-on after the scandal broke in 1998, the media personality elaborated.

“Yes. But I don’t always [push back]… I still live in a lot of fear … It just may sound crazy, which is almost like an earthquake will happen and everything I’ve built in the last 11 years—oh gosh, it is making me emotional—will be taken away again, and I’ll somehow find myself without purpose or, you know, without an income,” Lewinsky said.

So how does she cope?  “I think … it’s just trying to hold on to what’s now and not what was,” Lewinsky said