Bill Clinton is gearing up for a book tour, ahead of Tuesday's release of his new memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House. One snippet is already circulating and drawing attention, however, after the Guardian perused an advance copy: the former president's remarks on Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom he had a year-and-a-half-long sexual relationship starting in 1995, when she was just 22 and he was in his late 40s. That affair led to his 1998 impeachment by the US House of Representatives, though the US Senate declined to convict him.
In Citizen, Clinton, now 78, recalls a 2018 interview on the Today show, where he popped up to promote a new book he'd co-written with James Patterson. Clinton notes in the upcoming memoir that he was "caught off guard" when host Craig Melvin asked him if he felt differently now about his dalliances with Lewinsky. "I said, 'No, I felt terrible then,'" Clinton recalls. When he was asked by Melvin if he'd ever apologized to Lewinsky, "I said that I had apologized to her and everybody else I wronged," he writes. Melvin then noted to Clinton that he was told Clinton never actually apologized to Lewinsky herself.
"I fought to contain my frustration as I replied that while I'd never talked to her directly, I did say publicly on more than [one] occasion I was sorry," Clinton writes, conceding that the interview wasn't his "finest hour" (although he snarks in the book that Melvin was "barely in his teens when all this happened, and probably hadn't been properly briefed"). The ex-commander in chief also appears to have no ill will against Lewinsky.
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"I live with it all the time," he writes. "Monica's done a lot of good and important work over the last few years in her campaign against bullying, earning her well-deserved recognition in the United States and abroad. I wish her nothing but the best." The Guardian notes that Lewinsky, 51, is now an anti-bullying activist, writer, and public speaker. She hasn't responded yet to Clinton's latest remarks, but in 2021, she said in an interview that she didn't "need" a sorry from Clinton, though it would be nice. "He should wanna apologize, in the same way that I wanna apologize any chance I get to people that I've hurt and my actions have hurt," she said at the time. (More Bill Clinton stories.)
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