Monica Lewinsky Gave A Moving, Revealing TED Talk About Cyberbullying
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learnt the devastating consequences.”
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learnt the devastating consequences.”
In January 1998, news of an affair between US President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky broke, in a big way. And for the first time, it broke on the internet. “I did not have sexual relations with that women” became something of a cultural catch phrase; the “blue dress” had a very different meaning than it does now; and, as Lewinsky herself points out in a TED Talk she gave over the weekend, the incident is referred to in almost 40 rap songs.
Lewinsky went quiet for the better part of the decade, before re-emerging with a Vanity Fair article entitled ‘Shame and Survival‘, in May 2014. In October last year she spoke at a Forbes magazine ’30 Under 30′ summit, calling herself the “patient zero” of online harassment, and here she reprises that idea, speaking out about the real-world consequences of cyberbullying, slut-shaming and online harassment while revisiting the experience of having almost been “humiliated to death” and branded “a tramp. Tart. Slut. Whore. Bimbo. And of course, That Woman.”
“In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal, and media maelstrom like we have never seen before,” she says. “This scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution.”