Clara Ann Bagnoli ’28 & Juliette Des Rosiers ’26
Design Editor & Editor-In-Chief
On Sept. 10, Scripps College welcomed Monica Lewinsky, an international public figure and cyberbullying activist, in a series of events culminating in a sold-out Scripps Presents talk at Garrison Theater. Scandal launched Lewinsky into fame as “the president’s mistress” following an affair with President Bill Clinton in the ’90s, despite being only 24 years old and an intern. Lewinsky subsequently endured social ostracization and cyberbullying in its earliest form.
In the morning, Lewinsky joined Scripps first-years as a part of their Core curriculum. Lewinsky talked about her experiences with bullying and reflected on the scandal, even, almost, doing a Clinton impression.
Before Lewinsky’s talk with Core, Tessa Goldstein ’29 knew little about Monica Lewinsky’s life after the 1998 scandal. “She was talking a lot about the Vanity Fair article that she wrote, and I didn’t know about that,” Goldstein said.
Goldstein’s main takeaway from the lecture was Lewinsky’s take on the effect of cyberbullying on young women. “When the media negatively affects one woman, it negatively affects all women,” Goldstein said.
Although the talk by Lewinsky was presented to students as part of their Core curriculum, it was more akin to watching a conversation.
“It seemed like a little bit impersonal, I couldn’t really relate to a lot of what she was saying, but she seemed very well spoken,” Goldstein said. “I think a lot of people said that she was pretty detached, and that she was kind of only appealing to one very specific group of women.”
In addition to feeling slightly impersonal, Goldstein reflected on how the talk felt irrelevant to what she was learning in her Core A class.
“I’m not really sure what it has to do with anything in our class,” Goldstein said. “I’m doing a course on art and activism, and even my professor was like, I have no idea how to make this relate.”
Lewinsky’s second event of the day was a Student Leadership Q&A Lunch with student leaders at Scripps, hosted by the Laspa Center and moderated by two Laspa student employees.
“Going in, I was kind of like, oh my God, this woman was in this huge public-facing scandal and is coming in to talk to us at a historically women’s college that usually expects its students to be very formal,” Sky Caldwell ’26 said. “I heard that it was kind of about her reclaiming her narrative. So I kind of expected her to come in and talk from a feminist perspective [about] how women face shame for the things that men wouldn’t face.”
Following a brief biography of Lewinsky’s activism against cyberbullying in the media and her journey to “reclaiming her narrative,” the event began with a discussion about the merits of vulnerability.
Lewinsky commented that, after losing control of the public narrative during the Clinton scandal and taking a step back from the public eye, she decided to step forward into media activism to share her true self. She discussed the irony of being well-known by name yet also being truly invisible as a person. Therefore, she concluded that vulnerability and authenticity go hand in hand in gaining people’s trust, which was her ultimate goal after the scandal.
Lewinsky then went on to discuss her campaign against cyberbullying. She said it is essential to have empathy when people are suffering in silence from cyberbullying, referencing being an “upstander,” by calling out bullying either publicly or privately. She also advocated for spreading more positive content on social media and using color theory to post in more calming colors.
After Lewinsky responded to the Laspa student employee questions, the conversation opened up to those attending the event, and a few students stepped forward to ask their own questions.
First, a Scripps sophomore asked Lewinsky for advice on how to respond when women or gender-nonconforming people are pitted against each other in male-dominated workspaces. After a back-and-forth conversation with students who helped Lewinsky understand the meaning of the terms “gender-nonconforming” and “non-binary,” she began her answer by commenting on how some of the worst things said about her in 1998 were said by women. She then shifted the conversation to a discussion of the physiological competition between women, to the confusion of some students.
“I was like, okay, she could be leading somewhere interesting with this,” Caldwell said. “But then when she goes, ‘I took this psych class in college, and we talked about this thing where basically, regarding physiological men and women, men can just pop out as much sperm as they want and have as many babies they want, but women only carry one at a time, so, like, the reason women are pitted against each other is because of their biological need to compete.’”
Caldwell said that while they found the student’s question really interesting, they were disappointed by Lewinsky’s answer.
“I was flabbergasted,” they said. “That theory is male-created and has been disproved and [it] basically says that the reason women are competing against each other isn’t because of systems of oppression. It’s not because of misogyny. It’s not because of patriarchy.”
Caldwell also expressed that this and some of Lewinsky’s other answers about self-care were not emblematic of the teachings of Scripps College.
“Everything the politics department at Scripps has taught me is to look at what systems of oppression want us to do,” Caldwell said. “They want us to think that it’s all about self-love and self-care and protecting our peace. Obviously, we do struggle with that inner voice, but the inner voice doesn’t come from nowhere. That comes from misogyny, from patriarchy, from shame.”
Lewinsky’s final event of the day was the Scripps Presents at Garrison Theater.
Similar to Goldstein, Piper Brentnall ’28 knew little about the scandal itself, not even Lewinsky’s name, just that Clinton had an affair with a White House intern. Brentnall’s mom encouraged her to go to the talk after hearing Lewinsky was coming.
At the talk, Lewinsky was joined onstage by Jennifer Groscup, a Scripps psychology professor and a friend of Lewinsky’s, as Lewinsky took Groscup’s class at Columbia while getting her masters in social psychology.
The talk began with Lewinsky laying out the last 20 years of her life. She spent the first decade after 1998 in self-imposed seclusion, working to escape the identity the public had created for her. Instead, she worked to integrate that experience into her life’s purpose. She published a Vanity Fair essay titled “Shame and Survival” in 2014, where she expressed her regret for her relationship with Clinton but called out the culture that made her take the brunt of the blame.
What Brentnall found most interesting about the reaction to her article was “that the younger generation were the ones to have a problem with [the power dynamics within her affair] and that a 24-year-old woman was taking the brunt instead of a 52-year-old man.”
Lewinsky echoed sentiments from her article in the talk, connecting her public humiliation in the tabloids to the vastness of bullying in the age of the internet. She felt that her scandal reflects a larger problem of gossip spirals and capitalizing on people’s worst moments for monetization.
After recognizing the growing hate online, Lewinsky said she felt called to action to “use the suffering [she’s] gone through to help ease someone else’s [suffering].”
Lewinsky approached her activism by working with anti-bullying organizations and advertising groups to create campaigns such as #ClickWithCompassion and #DefyTheName. Within her collaborations, she also created a PSA titled “In Real Life” for National Bullying Prevention Month, which was nominated for an Emmy award in 2018.
More recently, Hulu hired Lewinsky as an executive producer on the true crime limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which follows Knox after the murder of her roommate in 2007. Knox and her then-boyfriend were twice convicted of the murder and, after serving four years in prison, were acquitted in 2015. Lewinsky said she felt an affinity for Knox and her story since they faced similar online defamation. Knox will speak at Scripps College on March 24, 2026.
Lewinsky announced that she started a podcast, “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky.” Lewinsky’s motivation to create a podcast instead of writing a book was to “take the lens of reclaiming to other people’s stories instead of just her own.”
The hour-long presentation ended with questions from the crowd. One crowd member asked about navigating the constant surveillance of social media, to which Lewinsky addressed her privilege accessing professional help with her mental health. “To deal with trauma, you need time, space, and money,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky also thanked her family and friends for their support, helping her “hold on to her real self.”
Ending on a hot topic, the last question was about her reaction and feelings surrounding the Epstein files and their potential release. Lewinsky relayed her sadness for the victims and said, “It’s hard to be a woman today.”
Photo Courtesy of Scripps College
