Monica Lewinsky’s on-screen vengeance

21 October 2021, The Tablet

Watching the first episode of Impeachment (19 October) makes 1998 seem aeons ago, instead of just round the corner of recent history.

Impeachment
BBC2

Watching the first episode of Impeachment (19 October) makes 1998 seem aeons ago, instead of just round the corner of recent history. It is surprising, with its themes of sex, political power, betrayal and conspiracy, that the scandal of the US president, the intern and the alcoves should have taken so long to come to the screen. President Clinton is now in his mid seventies, as is Ken Starr, the investigator who was his would-be nemesis. Linda Tripp, the confidante who betrayed Lewinsky, died last year. And Paula Jones, the young receptionist whose claims that the president sexually harassed her in a Little Rock hotel bedroom kicked off the impeachment process, is a middle-aged Trump supporter. Monica Lewinsky herself is 48: she has survived a trashed reputation and a youth destroyed; she has never married.

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