Tag: Reclaiming

Monica Lewinsky is no stranger to an intense interview. The Thursday in January when we discuss her next phase marks 27 years since her darkest chapter began: “This was the day I was nabbed by the FBI,” she tells Vanity Fair. On January 16, 1998, an unsuspecting Lewinsky—then a 24-year-old former White House intern—took a trip to the Pentagon City mall. There, she was seized by federal agents who would soon begin interrogating her over her relationship with President Bill Clinton; they wouldn’t let up for nearly 12 hours. Almost three decades later, “I celebrate it in my family as Survivors Day,” says Lewinsky. “I feel very ready to step into all of me more publicly.”

Courtesy of Wondery.

After years of shaming over the scandal that defined her public narrative, Lewinsky wrote about the personal trauma she had endured in a 2014 Vanity Fair essay. There, she declared it was time to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress.” Her subsequent redemption arc coincided with an increased cultural consciousness around sexual power dynamics. During that time, she has often written about the topic of reclamation, and also took literal ownership of her story: Lewinsky both participated in the 2018 documentary The Clinton Affair and served as a producer on the FX scripted series Impeachment: American Crime Story the following year.

Now Lewinsky gets to ask the tough questions in her new Wondery podcast, Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky, an interview-based talk series about taking back what has been lost or stolen. The show will be available weekly via audio and video formats, beginning on February 18, 2025.

Lewinsky is the first to acknowledge that she’s a bit of a late bloomer in this medium. “I was joking that maybe I’d call the podcast I’m the Last Person to Start a Podcast,” she says. “I’ve had people suggest a podcast to me on and off for years, and it just felt really daunting. And it’s still daunting even as I’m in the middle of doing it. But it really became a moment for me last year, where I think I was ready for this next level of reclaiming my own story and voice—and this incredible opportunity to talk to other people about a topic I know quite intimately.”

Lewinsky wants her podcast to frame the concept of reclamation less as an isolated epiphany and more as a continued ethos. “I didn’t want to have something that felt too prescriptive,” she says. Self-help shows “are so valuable to people, but I wanted to have a show that felt like people could come and find their own experience in it—nuggets that they might be able to take away to help them, whether it’s to feel a little hopeful or it shifts their energy ’cause they laughed when they needed to, or it makes them feel a little more connected.”

Lewinsky has been the subject of her fair share of podcasts, but outside of a few exceptions, she declines most offers to be a guest herself. “I joked to somebody about my own podcast karma coming home to roost because I rarely say yes to anything,” she tells VF. To book her earliest guests, among them actor Molly Ringwald, tech journalist Kara Swisher, and The Traitors’ Alan Cumming, Lewinsky reached out to close friends who were well-versed in the art of podcasting. “It’s not always the easiest for me to just trust people,” she says. Still, Lewinsky is learning to trust her instincts as a host. “In a strange way, the more I let go, the more present I am in the conversation.”

Given her own history with highly watched interviews (an estimated 74 million people tuned in to at least a portion of her 1999 sitdown with Barbara Walters), Lewinsky is ultrasensitive to a subject’s boundaries. “I’m probably overly cautious of wanting to make sure people feel comfortable,” she says. “At the same time, oftentimes someone will say to me, ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this’ in our first meeting. Even before ’98, since I was a kid, I’ve always been that way. People will be able to trust that if anybody is going to be a safe space to have a conversation about vulnerable moments, I’m going to be that safe harbor. That’s my hope.”

Each episode ends with Lewinsky asking her guest to reveal something they’re working to reclaim—be it an experience, emotion, or physical item that has been displaced. A myriad of high-profile stories could theoretically fit into this definition of the topic. Her guest wish list includes everyone from Simone Biles and Taylor Swift to Michelle Obama and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I’ll be talking to people that are both known and new names to people,” says Lewinsky. “Maybe it’s a family that had art stolen by the Nazis or the Taliban, and got that back.” She is coy about whether Amanda Knox, who is executive producing an upcoming Hulu series about her ordeal alongside Lewinsky, would ever be a guest. “I am very excited for people to get to see the show,” she says. “We’ve been filming around the world, and I hope that people find it to be both entertaining and eye-opening.”