(Newswire.net — March 8, 2020) — Former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, said that his affair with Monica Lewinsky was a way to combat anxiety.
This is the detail he revealed in the documentary series “Hillary” which recounts the public life of his wife, Hillary Clinton, who was a 2016 presidential candidate, BBC reports.
In 1998, the impeachment was instituted against Clinton for making false statements about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky. He was acquitted by the Senate.
Monica Lewinsky was 22 at the time of the affair and worked as an associate at the White House.
In the documentary, Clinton admits what he did was bad, but he didn’t give much of a thought back then.
“You feel like you’re staggering around – you’ve been in a 15-round prize-fight that was extended to 30 rounds, and here’s something that’ll take your mind off it for a while. Everybody has life’s pressures and disappointments and terrors, fears or whatever, things I did to manage my anxieties for years,” Clinton said.
His relationship with Monica Lewinsky was mainstream news in the late 1990s, as the then president first denied the affair, before later acknowledging “inappropriate intimate physical contact.”
Clinton’s initial response to the media allegations in 1998: “I had no sexual relations with this woman” – became one of the most striking quotes in American politics.
Lewinsky said that her relationship with the former US President was consentual, but she called it a “gross abuse of power”.
“Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position…” she told Vanity Fair in 2014.
Lewinsky also said she didn’t think about the possible consequences at the time.
Hillary Clinton said in the documentary that she felt “awful” when the first information about the affair came out.
At first she wanted to leave, but she decided to stay with Bill, which split the public’s opinion on the matter.
“I made a decision to stay with my husband. I think some people thought I made the right decision and some people thought I made the wrong decision,” Hillary said in the documentary. She also said that for years she was coping and didn’t know how to deal with the situation.
Bill Clinton also didn’t know how to deal with it. “Over the years I’ve tried to watch her get a normal life back again but you’ve got to decide how to define normal,” he said.
Former US President said that the worst part was the conversation with his daughter Chelsea.
Interestingly, the movie “Wag the Dog” that was released one month before news of the Lewinsky scandal broke and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration in August 1998, prompted the media to speculate on whether intensive warfare that was initiated at that moment in time was to distract the public from a personal scandal.
The comparison was also made in December 1998 when the administration initiated a bombing campaign of Iraq during Clinton’s impeachment trial over the Lewinsky scandal, and in 1999 when Clinton’s administration initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which coincidentally borders Albania, the country in focus of the movie.