Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It’s on Her Terms
Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It’s on Her Terms, You’re looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade.”
Monica Lewinsky was standing on the stage here at TED, glowing red lights behind her, a small metal music stand she had brought from home in front of her. She was in black slacks and a navy button-down. She was confident and poised. She looked like herself, only ... different.
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss,” Ms. Lewinsky said, looking out over the crowd of close to 1,400. “And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.”
You remember Ms. Lewinsky, of course. She was the 22-year-old who had saved the dress, who was betrayed by her friend, who was threatened with jail time, and who, ultimately, became a public laughingstock.For the last 10 years, she has mostly avoided the spotlight (though, of course, she was never out of the headlines). I have shadowed her over the last month as she — carefully — returned to the public life, culminating in her taking the stage at TED on Thursday, her most public appearance to date.
Her talk was called “The Price of Shame,” and it was a call to end cyberbullying.
It was also perhaps the best way to describe Ms. Lewinsky’s experience.“Like me, at 22, a few of you may also have taken wrong turns by falling in love with the wrong person,” she said to the crowd (there was a “pin-drop silence,” as one attendee described it to me). “Maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn’t the President of the United States of America.”
What that meant for Ms. Lewinsky, she went on to describe, was that practically overnight, she went from being a “a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one.”
She was on the cover of every newspaper. The butt of every late-night joke. She was branded “a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, That Woman,” she said. And her story was the first of its magnitude to break online, leaked to the website the Drudge Report, when Newsweek delayed its publication.
Today, said Ms. Lewinsky, that reality of the Internet magnification of humiliation is even more common. We are living, she said, in a place where humiliation has become a “commodity.”
“There is a very personal price to public humiliation,” she said. “And the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price.”
Her talk came at the right moment. Ashley Judd has just declared she plans to press charges against the Twitter users who have harassed and threatened her, and legislators are now calling for the F.B.I. to crack down on online harassment.
The talk also follows a “This American Life” report by the writer Lindy West about meeting one of her online harassers in person. The journalist Amanda Hess recently won a National Magazine Award for her article about facing online harassment, and The Washington Post recently published an article proclaiming that the online abuse of women has become so intense that it is actually driving some female bloggers off the Internet.
“There’s absolutely a cultural moment happening right now,” said Ms. West, who is writing about TED for The Guardian. (She tweeted after the talk: “Doooooodz @MonicaLewinsky just killed her TED talk on online harassment so hard she got a standing ovation IN THE LOBBY.”) “People are starting to understand that so much of what we refer to euphemistically — in an almost cutesy way — as ‘trolling’ is actually straight-ahead stalking, abuse and hate speech.”
There were the expected nasty comments on Twitter. But the majority of the reaction online and in the crowd was positive.
Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist, called it “one of the best, most courageous TED talks ever.”
Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Scandal,” simply tweeted: “YES.”
“She’s incredibly brave,” said the Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy (whose own TED Talk on the power pose has clocked 25 million hits), adding that she was “very glad she had this opportunity.”
Ms. Lewinsky hopes the conversation won’t end there. “What we need,” she said, preparing to wrap up, “is a cultural revolution ... It’s time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture.”
Shortly before she walked off the stage, she said, “You can insist on a different ending to your story.”
Monica Lewinsky was standing on the stage here at TED, glowing red lights behind her, a small metal music stand she had brought from home in front of her. She was in black slacks and a navy button-down. She was confident and poised. She looked like herself, only ... different.
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss,” Ms. Lewinsky said, looking out over the crowd of close to 1,400. “And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.”
You remember Ms. Lewinsky, of course. She was the 22-year-old who had saved the dress, who was betrayed by her friend, who was threatened with jail time, and who, ultimately, became a public laughingstock.For the last 10 years, she has mostly avoided the spotlight (though, of course, she was never out of the headlines). I have shadowed her over the last month as she — carefully — returned to the public life, culminating in her taking the stage at TED on Thursday, her most public appearance to date.
Her talk was called “The Price of Shame,” and it was a call to end cyberbullying.
It was also perhaps the best way to describe Ms. Lewinsky’s experience.“Like me, at 22, a few of you may also have taken wrong turns by falling in love with the wrong person,” she said to the crowd (there was a “pin-drop silence,” as one attendee described it to me). “Maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn’t the President of the United States of America.”
What that meant for Ms. Lewinsky, she went on to describe, was that practically overnight, she went from being a “a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one.”
She was on the cover of every newspaper. The butt of every late-night joke. She was branded “a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, That Woman,” she said. And her story was the first of its magnitude to break online, leaked to the website the Drudge Report, when Newsweek delayed its publication.
Today, said Ms. Lewinsky, that reality of the Internet magnification of humiliation is even more common. We are living, she said, in a place where humiliation has become a “commodity.”
“There is a very personal price to public humiliation,” she said. “And the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price.”
Her talk came at the right moment. Ashley Judd has just declared she plans to press charges against the Twitter users who have harassed and threatened her, and legislators are now calling for the F.B.I. to crack down on online harassment.
The talk also follows a “This American Life” report by the writer Lindy West about meeting one of her online harassers in person. The journalist Amanda Hess recently won a National Magazine Award for her article about facing online harassment, and The Washington Post recently published an article proclaiming that the online abuse of women has become so intense that it is actually driving some female bloggers off the Internet.
“There’s absolutely a cultural moment happening right now,” said Ms. West, who is writing about TED for The Guardian. (She tweeted after the talk: “Doooooodz @MonicaLewinsky just killed her TED talk on online harassment so hard she got a standing ovation IN THE LOBBY.”) “People are starting to understand that so much of what we refer to euphemistically — in an almost cutesy way — as ‘trolling’ is actually straight-ahead stalking, abuse and hate speech.”
There were the expected nasty comments on Twitter. But the majority of the reaction online and in the crowd was positive.
Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist, called it “one of the best, most courageous TED talks ever.”
Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Scandal,” simply tweeted: “YES.”
“She’s incredibly brave,” said the Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy (whose own TED Talk on the power pose has clocked 25 million hits), adding that she was “very glad she had this opportunity.”
Ms. Lewinsky hopes the conversation won’t end there. “What we need,” she said, preparing to wrap up, “is a cultural revolution ... It’s time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture.”
Shortly before she walked off the stage, she said, “You can insist on a different ending to your story.”