Monica Lewinsky and the price of shame

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2015 (4194 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Think back to the time when you were 22 years old and some of the embarrassing mistakes you made. Perhaps you drank too much at a party or dated the wrong person. Now imagine that this one indiscreet act, a case of poor youthful judgment, became worldwide news, was ridiculed for years, and will live forever on the Internet.

This sums up the humiliating experience of Monica Lewinsky, castigated in 1998 as “a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, that woman,” as she recalled recently in The Price of Shame, a passionate and inspiring TED talk she delivered before an audience in Vancouver.

Now 41, Lewinsky’s life was turned upside down by one really bad decision. At 22, as she put it, “I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.” Her boss, of course, was then U.S. president Bill Clinton, who at the time of the brief affair was 49 years old and married.

Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives — mainly because he was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice–but acquitted in the subsequent Senate trial. He weathered the storm and is currently as popular as ever. His wife, Hillary, courageously or foolishly depending on your point of view, stood by him.

Lewinsky, on the other hand, had her private telephone conversations about the relationship broadcast and commented upon. She could not find steady employment and was hounded by paparazzi for years. Her parents, she recalls, “feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.”

What escalated the attack on Lewinsky was the rise of the Internet. Social media did not yet exist in the late ’90s, yet the story of the affair was pivotal in media history since it was first publicized on the Drudge Report, one of the first successful online news websites.

“What that meant for me personally,” Lewinsky says, “was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.”

The Internet may be one of the great technological innovations of our time. It is a marvellous wonder for research and communication that we often take for granted.

Yet as Lewinsky’s talk highlights, the Internet, and especially social media, have also created a climate ripe for humiliation, trolling and cyberbullying. Centuries ago (as a Globe and Mail reader noted about a story on Lewinsky) public shaming was confined to a town; today it takes place across the digital universe.

Celebrities frequently attract the most attention, good and bad.

Recently, for example, actress Ashley Judd, a spectator at a University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball game, tweeted some critical comments about the allegedly dirty play of the Arkansas Razorbacks, the Wildcats’ opponents. Almost immediately, she was the victim of a malicious cyberattack that labelled her a “bitch” and worse, and threatened her with rape. A “tsunami of gender-based violence and misogyny” flooded her Twitter feed, as she wrote in an online essay in reply to her critics — who she also added “could kiss my ass.”

Asked why she finally opted to break her silence, Lewinsky, too identified cyberbullying as the reason she is now speaking out.

‘I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.’ — Lewinsky

She was especially moved by the tragedy of 18-year-old Tyler Clement, a university student, who committed suicide after a secret webcam video of him being intimate with another man was publicized on the Internet, triggering abuse and humiliation. This was reminiscent of the terrible ordeal of Rehtaeh Parsons, the Nova Scotia teen who killed herself after photos of her being raped were posted online. And there are far too many other similar cases. According to a recent EU Kids Online survey, seven in 10 young people have been victims of cyberbullying.

At the end of her talk, Lewinsky, who called for more compassion and empathy on the Internet, received a standing ovation. She declared that it is possible to survive public humiliation.

But she likely knows one other truth: Even if she lives to be 100 years old, some day in the distant future, news of her passing will almost certainly begin with the notoriety she gained as a young woman of 22, who was wooed by a manipulative president.

 

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.