When Monica Lewinsky sat down with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy in February 2025, she wasn’t relitigating gossip — she was rewriting the record. Nearly 30 years after her relationship with President Bill Clinton became the defining political scandal of the 1990s, Lewinsky spoke plainly about power, consent, and the cost of being the woman the world decided to blame.
A 22-Year-Old Intern and the Most Powerful Man in the Country
Lewinsky began working at the White House as an unpaid intern in 1995, at 22 years old. Clinton was 49 and serving as the 42nd President of the United States. Their relationship started that year and continued intermittently into 1997. Investigators later documented nine sexual encounters. The relationship became public in January 1998 — not because Lewinsky chose to disclose it, but because a former colleague, Linda Tripp, had been secretly recording their phone calls.
Those recordings were handed to independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who also obtained a blue dress belonging to Lewinsky containing physical evidence of the relationship. Lewinsky faced the possibility of serious federal criminal charges before accepting immunity in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. Clinton, meanwhile, denied the relationship on national television — a denial he later retracted. The House of Representatives impeached him in December 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. The Senate acquitted him in February 1999. He finished his presidency. Lewinsky’s long road to reclaiming her story
What She Actually Said on Call Her Daddy
The interview wasn’t a soft revisit. Lewinsky made several pointed, specific statements that have kept the conversation alive months after the episode dropped.
She argued that Clinton should have resigned — or at minimum, found a way to acknowledge the relationship without letting her absorb the full weight of public backlash. She said both paths existed; he chose a third: denial. She also said her feelings at the time were real. She believed the relationship was emotionally significant. But she now understands that her youth and his institutional authority shaped everything about it in ways she couldn’t fully see at 22.
On the question of consent, Lewinsky was precise: she does not describe what happened as sexual assault. She said that clearly. But she also argued — and this is the part that tends to get dropped from the headlines — that consent and the abuse of power are not mutually exclusive. A young employee can say yes to the most powerful person in her professional world and still have been placed in a situation she never should have been in. That’s the ethical failure she’s naming: not assault, but exploitation dressed in ambiguity.
She also described, in detail, the fear she felt when investigators first confronted her with Tripp’s recordings — the confusion, the pressure on her and her family, the sense that the machinery of the federal government had turned in her direction while Clinton retained the resources and the platform to fight back.
The Gap Between His Career and Her Reputation
This is where the story becomes something beyond political history. Clinton left the White House, wrote bestselling memoirs, commanded hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking engagement, and remained a central figure in the Democratic Party for decades. Lewinsky spent years as a punchline — sexualized, mocked, and defined entirely by a relationship she was the junior party in.
Her work since — the TED Talk on public humiliation, the HBO documentary, the anti-bullying advocacy, executive producing Impeachment: American Crime Story — has been, among other things, a methodical effort to be seen as a whole person rather than a scandal’s supporting character. The Call Her Daddy interview is part of that same project, except now she’s not softening anything. She’s saying Clinton should have resigned. She’s saying the double standard was real and deliberate. She’s saying she loved him, and that the power imbalance made it wrong anyway.
That combination — emotional honesty plus structural critique — is what makes this story land differently in 2025 than it did in 1998. We’ve spent 25 years building a language for what she went through. She’s finally using it.
- how the 1990s media failed women at the center of political scandals
