The Clinton-Lewinsky controversy maybe 20 years old, but it’s still being examined in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” a new FX series. Former White House intern turned anti-bullying activist Monica Lewinsky is now in her 30s and has given a popular TED talk on the topic of shame.
She is the show’s Executive Producer. Lewinsky’s participation, together with the lack of explicit sexual content, is indicative of the evolving cultural climate. Sarah Burgess, the author of “Impeachment,” says she didn’t feel the need to emphasize the story’s titillating aspects.
As she said to The Wrap, “graphic sexual detail was the headline in 1998, it felt like…first of all, something that much of the public already knew.” The controversial blue dress gets hardly a passing mention in the show. Where, therefore, is the blue dress that got stained yesterday? How, exactly, did a dress nearly bring down a U.S. president?
Who Is Monica Lewinsky
Monica Lewinsky, who is now worth $1.5 million, gained fame in the mid-1990s when it was disclosed that she had an affair with then-President Bill Clinton. Lewinsky is an anti-bullying campaigner, author, and public speaker.
Clinton’s impeachment and Monica’s rise to fame both stem from their romance. In 2014, Lewinsky became an advocate for the #MeToo movement and the fight against cyberbullying.
She co-wrote “Monica’s Story” with Andrew Morton in 1999 and earned a stunning $500,000 for her efforts. Monica is the inventor of a popular line of handbags and the host of Fox’s “Mr. Personality.”
Where Is Monica Lewinsky Dress Now?
Lewinsky was offered $1 million by the Las Vegas Erotic Heritage Museum in 2015 to part with the dress. In May of 2014, when Lewinsky wrote: “it’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress” in a Vanity Fair column, the museum offered her $250,000 for it. There was no deal that Lewinsky would accept.
Washington Post reports that the Smithsonian Museum never intended to purchase the garment in question. Lonnie Bunch, associate director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of American History, remarked at the time, “I don’t think you can connect an item of popular culture with one of historical value in quite that way.”
Bunch continued by saying that neither the bullets that killed Abraham Lincoln nor the clothes worn by Martin Luther King Jr. when he was shot are on exhibit at the museum. Perhaps Lewinsky and the producers of “Impeachment” are correct in saying that the blue dress should be buried because it was never the objective of the story.
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The Story Behind The Monica Lewinsky Blue Dress
Lewinsky revealed in the A&E documentary series “The Clinton Affair” how she obtained the infamous stain on her blue Gap dress. In February 1997, as President Clinton finished a radio address from the White House, he told Monica Lewinsky that his personal secretary, Betty Curie, had a gift for her.
After following Curie into the Oval Office, Lewinsky found herself in the stall next to Clinton in the bathroom. Since Curie appeared to be in the room with Lewinsky and the President at all times, “the illusion to everyone else was that I was not alone with him,” she said. “And so we moved to the bathroom and got more intimate,” Lewinsky says in the documentary series.
After he had focused on me for a while, I started paying attention to him, and eventually, he was finishing what he started with me. I took a stand and said, “I’m ready to move on,” and he gave in. Because of that, the dress became soiled. How then did this dress end up in The Starr Report?
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The Blue Dress Worn by Monica Lewinsky at Her Trial Sold at Auction for $3,300
The garment became a symbol of the Clinton-Lewinsky dispute, and Lewinsky kept it until her death in April, at age 44. Dress from Gap, size 4, worn by Lewinsky during her “passionate” January 1998 affair with President Clinton. The right half of one of the collars was discolored. The suit, which was auctioned off at a special event in Amsterdam, Netherlands on Thursday, was the most expensive item ever sold on Catawiki.
Mother Marcia Lewis sold it along with other items related to her daughter’s life, including her Beverly Hills High School yearbook and family photos from 1993-1995, when Lewinsky was still living at home after graduating from Lewis & Clark College with a degree in psychology.
In a rare public appearance this Thursday, Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose affair with President Bill Clinton nearly brought down his presidency, will be lending her support to a cause close to her heart.
Lewinsky will be honoring designer and friend Marc Jacobs and his new collection with Louis Vuitton at this year’s amfAR Gala New York. She’s been a regular at this kind of event for quite some time. Although she had been planning on attending this event for quite some time, she had never spoken publicly about it until now.
The 41-year-old mother of two has been working on a memoir since 1998 when she first became public knowledge of the scandal. It’s unclear if the book will focus on her life before and after she became an overnight international celebrity owing to the sex scandal with Bill Clinton, or whether she’ll focus on the affair specifically.
Monica Lewinsky is a household name at this point. Her involvement in the scandal rocked Bill Clinton’s presidency. But she is more than just the woman who slept with the president while he was married.
