Sunday Pick: How to reclaim your narrative (w/ Monica Lewinsky) | from How to Be a Better Human

Happy Sunday y'all, at least you here, today we're bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from Ted and pick by us for you. Monica Lewinsky is an anti-bullying activist and host of Reclaiming with Monica, a podcast of unguarded conversations about how to make sense of the world. In today's episode of How to Be a Better Human, which was recorded in front of a live audience at Ted 2026, host Chris Duffy speaks with Monica about how she finds healing. They discuss the role of public shaming online, the differences between cancel culture and accountability culture, and how to have more empathy after surviving trauma. How to be a better human looks in unexpected places for new ways to improve and show up for one another. If you want to hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts. Learn all about Ted's podcasts at podcast. Ted.com. That's coming up. This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host Chris Duffy. Today's episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the 2026 Ted Conference in Vancouver, Canada. And today's guest is Monica Lewinsky. Monica is someone who other people have tons of instant preconceived ideas and opinions about. She has been the butt of jokes and song lyrics and tabloid news stories for years because of a sexual encounter she had when she was 22 years old with then president Bill Clinton that became highly public. But I was really interested in talking to Monica because in recent years, she has been hosting a podcast called Reclaiming. It's a show where Monica and her guests talk very openly and candidly about the ways that they have been perceived and how they are trying to rewrite their own narratives and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. The show is an invitation to listeners to, and I'm quoting here, find their own connection to the stories of how we get back what was once lost or taken from us. Now Monica's story is obviously an extreme case. It was incredibly public and dramatic. Very few people are going to experience having their most embarrassing mistakes from their 20s broadcast on the nightly news every single night for months. However, I think that all of us these days have to navigate a gap between our private personal selves and the version of us that we put out into the world publicly, whether that's on social media or on a broader screen. Everyone is at some point going to have to figure out how to handle an embarrassment, a mistake, a humiliation. All of us are going to have times where we have to decide whether we judge or shame or exclude someone else or whether we offer them some grace, a possibility at redemption and reconciliation. And I think there's an incredible amount that all of us can learn from Monica's reflections on her experience about reclaiming your narrative, about power dynamics, about mistakes, about bullying, and cruelty, and about empathy and redemption. So to get us started, here is a clip from Monica's 2015 TED Talk, which was called The Price of Shame. When the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world. What that meant for me personally 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. This rush to judgment enabled by technology led to mobs of virtual stone throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and of course email cruel jokes. News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. Do you recall a particular image of me say wearing a beret? Now I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret, but the attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that I personally received was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and of course that woman. I was seen by many, but actually known by few. And I get it. It was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken. We are going to be back with this special live conversation with Monica Lewinsky in just a moment. And we are back. This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience in Vancouver, Canada at TED 2026. Monica I'm so excited to get to talk to you. Yes, Chris. Hi everybody. So the first question that I have for you is we were talking with one of the producers of the show, and she told someone who was 18 that we're doing this episode. And they said, who is Monica Lewinsky? Ah, I love it. And I actually thought that might be an interesting way to start, which is how do you answer that question? Who is Monica Lewinsky? I think that I would probably say who I am today versus who I am in Wikipedia, right? But I think today I feel especially, I think there are probably some women who are in their 50s or older in the audience. And I feel like I have found so much of myself in my 50s. And that I just keep getting more and more comfortable with who I am. And in answering who I am, I don't actually know how to answer that. I feel like that's sort of one of those questions that people who know you well can answer with adjectives. And I like to think of myself as someone who's thoughtful, fucked up, works on herself, you know. And it also feels to me like so much of the project of your podcast reclaiming is about this idea of who am I versus who do other people think I am. And the same for other people as well, right? Everyone who you interview has some version of that story. You have one of the most dramatic ones. Exactly, exactly. The idea for reclaiming as a podcast, I had initially been thinking about it as a topic for a book and had been keeping notes on my phone. And I eventually got to a point where I realized it was far more interesting to have the conversation around reclaiming with other people than it was to just talk about myself. Everybody has reclaiming moments. I think we tend to think of them as these top line notes. Like you would look at me and go, I've Monica's reclaimed her narrative. But I have also reclaimed so many different things. And in small moments, just this morning, I had a somatic therapy session over Zoom. And it was taking the time to sort of acknowledge with the therapist I work with. Oh, this is a really important thing for me that I'm saying I see this change that can be made that I want to be making. And there's a part of me that's not ready. And I'm going to be okay with that. It sounds so tiny. It sounds like such a small thing. But for someone who's always felt like she was running out of time because I lost so much time, it is it's a really big thing. I have a lot of questions that are around this same idea, right? Because I think that isn't actually a small thing. It's a really big thing, right? How do you reclaim the idea? How do you have small moments or big moments that are yours? And not what someone else is telling you your story should be? How can a regular person who's maybe going through this on a less dramatic scale? How can they take some lessons about what we can do to have ourselves be the ones defining who we are rather than letting other people define us? Well, I think I mean, I think of myself as a regular person. Sure. But I mean, like, impressive. Well, thank you. But I still think of myself as a regular person. And I think that in many ways, the process of reclaiming who you are, whether you've gone through something on a big global stage, or you have lost your job, or maybe lost part of your identity in getting divorced, or some aspect of yourself. There's so many different ways. I think that it begins in a strange way with an act that's kind of like putting on a seatbelt when you get in the car. Because I think for me, when I was going through such a difficult time in '98 and the decade after, my friends and my family reflecting back to me, kind of who my true self was, allowed me to have an anchor. So if I had been somebody who who had never invested in those relationships. I wouldn't have had that. And I think for me, that aspect started there. And that kind of goes hand in hand with what I was saying about going into my fifties of recognizing everybody moves through a healing process differently, and that healing is never linear. It's always sort of like a spiral shape. And so you will think you've mastered something when you're kind of cresting at the top. And then you realize, oh, you'll think, fuck, I like here again. But you're actually not here again. You went down in order to go up. And that's been a really important hard thing for me to accept, because I want it to be linear. Something that I heard you say that struck me was that healing this is not like healing a cut. Yeah. Can you talk about what you mean by that? I think it's exactly that we have a timeline for a cut. We know in the first few days, this is what will happen. If you put this ointment on, if you put this bandaid on, if you take care of your wound in this certain way, that you will then end up with either completely healed skin or a scar, but that's the process. And I think that emotional trauma is so different, because we, I think particularly for the times that we're living in, my hope for the younger generations is that we're already having so many more conversations about trauma in ways that we didn't when I was a kid, or we didn't when I was in my 20s. I think it'll hopefully be different for kids, because they will be being raised with an awareness of trauma. So healing emotional trauma is, again, not linear, and it's different for everybody. And I think that's what's so hard is that, especially when we're suffering, or we're watching someone we love suffer, all we wanna do is like, just tell me the three things to do, and I will do them. But those three things may not be what works for you. In part, I think because we all store trauma differently, so you and I can go through the same traumatic experience, but that very same experience is actually completely different inside our nervous system. And so that's where you are having to have grace with yourself, which is so hard. - Something I wonder about when I think about you and your story is, why are you here on a public stage? If it was me, I can imagine that there would be a real desire to change my name and go and live in another country. So why are you here? Why are you still Monica Lewinsky? Why are you not like a British farmer named Monique Louis-State? - Exactly, exactly, Monique Louis-State. So I think that there are different stages to that for me. In '99, after the impeachment was wrapping up, the idea that I could ever go change my name legally, was really not gonna happen. There was no way that that could have gone through a court system without some journalists finding out. So then that wouldn't work. And I think that also as I started to try to figure out and with my family, try to figure out how to begin to move forward, I also realized, I didn't want to change my name because in part, no one ever asked Bill Clinton, have did you think about changing your name? Now there's a little ridiculousness because obviously he was the president, everybody knows who he is, but you understand that that's often the question the woman gets asked. So I think that from there, I did want to retreat into a private life. And that was a large part of why I went to graduate school in 2005 in London, and when I came out of graduate school, the whole hope and the plan was to get a job and try to become as normal as I could be. My best friend from college who's still one of my best friends is always teasing me. She's like, it was never gonna be normal for you Monica. I'm just not normal. So, and a lot of the healing work that I had to do was the acceptance and the integration of the idea that I wasn't gonna get to leave 1998 Monica Lewinsky in the dust. She was gonna have to integrate and be part of who I am today, who I am moving forward. And ultimately in terms of re-entering the public arena, I had tried everything else. I had gone on 50 job interviews and nobody would hire me. And I tried starting a business, but I'm lever rising and I could see both sides to every decision. And so, that does not bode very well for having a business on your own. And the only opportunities, the only doors that kept opening to me were around public spaces, being in public spaces, being a public person. And ultimately in 2014 after kind of this, what I call my dark decade, I had done enough healing and was also at the same time at the end of my rope, like I don't know what else to do. I'm also now early 40s, and I can't support myself financially. So I was very lucky to come from an upper middle class family, but I didn't come from the kind of family where there were resources to just support me financially for the rest of my life. So when I wrote a first person essay in Vanity Fair in 2014, which was sort of my first public words in a decade, it was an experiment. It was jumping in with no fucking idea where I was gonna land. - There are so many amazing episodes of reclaiming, but the very first episode is you talking about your own story. And I really, I'm not just saying this because you're here. I think it is like one of the most incredible hours of audio that I've ever heard, and I think everyone should listen to it. And a big part of that is, you know, you're talking about having to face like, well, who am I gonna be? Who can I be? What paths are open to me? And the something I hadn't known about your story is that by all rights and means, you should have had your legal fees paid for. But there was kind of a vindictive way in which your legal fees were not paid. So you were truly like deeply in debt to legal fees and you had to figure out ways to move forward and you had your family support. But when people weren't going to hire you, this wasn't like, I can just do anything. Like you had to figure out how to move forward. Right, and just as backstory for anyone here who might not know in the States, from the Independent Council Act, they had had a stipulation in there that if you were investigated by an independent council and you were not indicted, you were allowed to apply to have your legal fees reimbursed. So both Reagan and then first president Bush, who was vice president at the time, both had their legal fees reimbursed from Iran Contra and Bill Clinton had a very small amount that they approved. Vernon Jordan had a very small amount of legal fees that they approved and I was denied completely. And somebody just said to me about two days ago, they were saying, well, you know, if Michael Flint got his legal fees reimbursed, you should be able to get yours. So it's like, oh, that's kind of interesting. But it seems to me like when in that episode where you're talking about it is you say that the hardest part for you actually was not in the middle of 98. It was after when the storm had kind of died down and you were there and it felt like what is left? What's left for me to move forward into? So how did you get past that part? How did you survive what you call the dark decade? I think that it was a number of different things. My therapist will often say, you know, sometimes the difficulties I might have in letting go of a situation or hope or wish or dream is a reflection of an old coping mechanism that saved my life before that I just didn't give up and part of that just not giving up included dissociation included not delusion in a, you know, DSM delusion kind of way. But a delusion of what I'm just going to focus on the hope, I'm just going to try to find the hope and that helped in some ways. I think another pillar was my mom is very polyanna-ish and it was so annoying, you know, just in 98, I know. In 98 and she would say, well, you'll see, you'll be able to go outside again. You'll see you'll be able to go out without a hat again. You'll be upset, I was like, you don't know what you're talking about it, but looking back, I think that somebody being this kind of beacon and shining light of hope was also something I could anchor on. But then there's the more practical and I had at the time, I had stopped doing more traditional therapy and I started to work with someone who now people understand it a bit more when I say it's resonance and vibrational work. So he uses sound to heal your field, your energetic field. So, that work was very, very deep for me, and I still do that work today, so I think in a year or two it'll be 20 years that I've been working with this person and saved and changed my life. But I also, from there, brought in so many different healing modalities of EFT, which is also known as tapping, I think trying anything. Anything that somebody said, oh, I did this, and I was like, I'll try it. But I think really the work I did with Ken was probably the most pivotal because it was for my soul. And I think what it did was it helped me find my light again. We're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back. And we are back. Something that is also really clear in talking to you, even just in the short time that we've been talking right now, is you have a great sense of humor. Thank you. You're definitely able to laugh about things. I think people are probably surprised by that about you. Gallows humor has always been something in my family and I'm culturally Jewish and I think that's also the Gallows humor there comes there. But I came to understand over time that it's interesting laughter and gratitude, shift your frequency and your vibration faster than anything else. And so I love to laugh and I think that it's also disarmed people in many ways. And I think that when we all laugh, it's a collective, when we all laugh together at the same thing, it's a collective experience. I mean, since we're sitting here at Ted, 11 years ago when I stood on the red circle, it was really important to me that when I had this instinct of this funny thing that had happened to me about being hit on by. Can you share it? Because I truly think that's one of the best jokes that's ever been told about that. It's a real story. It's not even like a joke. So it's a younger man is trained in it. So you're all here, Randall Lane, who gave the talk last night, a billionaire, so he created Forbes 30 under 30 conference and he had asked me to come speak and it was very first public speaking I did. And so everybody in the audience was 30 under or under 30. And this 27 year old guy hit on me that evening after my talk. And it was amazing because his pickup line was, "I can make you feel 22 again." And I, you know, he's cute. So maybe I thought about it for a second. But, you know, maturity prevailed and I was telling a friend of mine this story on the phone that night. And I was like, "You're not going to believe what happened to me." And I said, "I'm probably the only person over 40 who doesn't want to be 22 again." And so when I thought about putting that in the talk, I was actually, you know, if anybody else here has given a talk, you have 8 million people look at it to get thoughts from people. And there were some people who were very smart women who were like, "I don't think you should do this. It's sexualizing you and you're trying to move away from that." And I felt so deep in my bones because of how humor had helped me survive up until that point. And my family, I mean, in the period between the FBI staying where I learned about this investigation and the investigation becoming public. I could leave the house, but, you know, I now have this experience where I'd been apprehended by the FBI and I now knew I was upshits Creek and they'd threaten my mother and all this stuff. And so anytime I left the house, like I'd go over to the lamp and I'd say, "I'm just going out to the drugstore." You know, or my mom would jokingly go, "10 star is very attractive." And so we would just, it's because there's an absurdity. And I think when, you know, we've all heard people say you can laugh or cry, and I prefer to laugh. I laugh till I cry, even. So that's the best. For me, one of the things that I think is really powerful about humor and laughter too is that it can help you see a situation from multiple perspectives. That all of them can be true in the same moment, right? I bring that up because I think that one of, in addition to just the really powerful work that you've done and the eloquent way that you speak about it, I think one of the things that is really resonant with people is looking at what you went through in the situation and how it is seen in a really different light. That same situation is now seen in much more nuanced way. For me, as well, you know, I think that my beliefs and understanding of what happened to me and what I chose and engaged in and all those things that I think that that's shifted to. And it's such an important part of healing of the kind of elasticity that we're talking about, that, you know, you move forward and you move back. There is context changes. You might learn something, you know, it may not, for everybody, it may not be, "Oh, there's a huge cultural movement of me to 2.0." Although many, I think many women did go through the end-men. I think not only men who have been victimized themselves, but I think also, sadly, the men who were least likely to have actually done something wrong with women were the ones wondering, "Did I do something wrong?" It's been an interesting process for me, and I think that's part of the idea of healing and trauma being living things that are a part of us in a way. So, one of the things that I actually don't have, I haven't fully figured this out, but maybe you can have some thoughts on this and we can figure it out somewhat together is how shame is involved here. Obviously, there was a lot of shaming, there's a lot of public shame, and you've talked about how that was really powerful and negative piece of this that you had to overcome. But the part that I haven't quite figured out is it now feels like we live in a time politically where people are shameless, who should feel shame. And what role should shame play? Where is it positive and where is it negative? Or is it always negative? That's the part that I haven't figured out. Well, I think that both Roxanne Gay and Cara Swisher talk about the difference between cancel culture and accountability culture. And I think that's an incredibly important distinction, that there are behaviors that people engage in for which they need to be held accountable. And then there are the behaviors that are too reflexive, too reactive. I don't know if anyone else ever has this experience, but sometimes I'll be at a dinner party and I hear myself spout off on something that I only read the headline. I don't know what I'm talking about. I didn't read the article, but I think I have an opinion. And I think a large portion of what can happen sometimes in cancel culture is we will all hear a little something. And we go, yeah, that sounds like a bandwagon I would get on and we get on the bandwagon, not really even realizing the impact of what we're doing. So I think you're right. I think we're living in times where shamelessness is more rampant than it had been in the past. And I also wonder sometimes, I've been thinking about this, if we need to have, it's like we need to maybe have some more words, some more names for things like we need to kind of dissect shame and give it different names because we are talking about something that from the old, old, old days pre-printing press was a way of keeping social norms for people. And it still does that a little, but we've also come to learn so many different things. And so I wonder about that. It makes no sense. And I think so much of the destructive power of shame is this piling on and this creation of a version of someone that is a monster. For me, at least you really answered my question in drawing that line between accountability and shaming and cancel in the sense of what cancel culture means in that sense. Because I'm sometimes skeptical of like, sometimes people use cancel culture to say like, I don't think I should be allowed to be critiqued for saying something that's offensive. You know, they sometimes use that as a scapegoat when it's not actually. And I think so much in so much of what we've been talking about this week or hearing this week around engaging in dialogue, we don't have enough places and avenues in our current culture to do that. And I wonder if we did, if critique might be easier. I think sometimes maybe people get defensive because they're narcissistic assholes. And sometimes people get defensive because they're actually terrified of what could this mean. And I can't let this in at all and must defend it because the drop from here to being canceled is enormous. And the consequences can be grave even for some people. But I think sometimes we are much more harsh in our critique of the person who's the most easily available to us, the person who's the closest, rather than the person who is the most accountable, the person who's the most powerful and responsible, right? It's easier to attack the person who's listening to us than the person who's ignoring us while they go about their evil deeds. Right. Any quality keeps coming up, but it feels like the inequality in responsibility. Yeah. For people who are young and they're just figuring out their lives, right? You've talked about how a lot of what was a challenge for you post everything that happened post the scandal was getting back onto like a normal developmental track. That was something you and your therapist worked a lot on. In some ways I think nowadays, like every young person has to figure out like what is my private narrative of myself versus this public narrative that is written online. So what advice would you give to a young person who's trying to figure out like what is my internal story of who I am versus what my peers and the world says about me? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that with young people today who have all grown up with social media, they've tried different, you know, we all, as we grow up, we all try on different identities, right? How many people can go, oh, I had a punk rock phase, I did not have a punk rock phase, but, you know, I definitely had other phases and we're trying on these different identities and in trying to figure out who we are, what feels right and what do we push back against. And I think that it is probably trying to figure out who you are is hard. I think that there are things I can speak to if somebody feels their narrative has run away from them. Well, I'd be curious to hear that, yeah, and I'm curious also what helped you to figure out like who is Monica Lewinsky now? Well, I think a lot of who I am today is who I always was. And so, and that was a big part for me in the, a lot of the healing work that I did and in intentions is such a loaded word now, but in my hopes and dreams and intentions in stepping back out in 2014 was around this idea of being seen from my true self because this caricature of me had been drawn, some complete, from things that were completely made up and some, you know, things that I had done that were fucked up and bad and, you know, or mistakes I made or, or stupid things I'd said or done. So, like around when you've lost your narrative or that has happened, I think sometimes people use the word reinvention a lot and I have a really hard time with that word because I think reinvention implies that what was there before needed to change and really there's a space between someone, what's wrong with someone and what needs to change and maturing and evolving and healing, you know. So, once again, I didn't really answer your question. No, you did. It's actually, one of the things that you think of is like the idea that you are opposed to reinvention because it's, you don't want to deny the person who you were before, just for myself. Uh, I, I'll share just a, a small thing, not a dramatic one, but I didn't go to my high school reunion and the reason I didn't go is because I don't really like the version of myself who I was in high school, you know, so like for me, I just don't feel like I feel like I was really like insecure and not sure of myself and so like I, I, I feel like I was not, not my best self in the sense that I wasn't like, I didn't have a core, you know, I was just kind of like, is this going to make these people like me and will that make people like me? Yeah, I can relate. And so I didn't want to go back, but part of that is being like, that Chris isn't, who this Chris is and you're actually making me think of like, well, maybe have a little more empathy for that Chris, like you are still the same person. Yeah. Cause I, in some ways, I would like to imagine that I'm not that person anymore. That's interesting. Even though I'm asking you for approval in front of an audience, so you know, how, how different, how far have things changed? Well, you're just not the quarterback, that's the only difference. Oh, I wasn't the prom queen, so, um, but I think that there's like, and that kind of goes to the heart of all of what we're talking about, which in a way is that is, is the grace for yourself, the empathy for yourself, the recognizing who you were, how has, how did that contribute to who you are today? Most of us, if you're one of those people who notices at a party that they're someone standing on their own, if you've been that person, which I've been, you are going to notice and try to bring someone into your circle to have the conversation because you've experienced that, and there probably are ways that you show up more empathetic in the world because of what that high school experience was, but that integration, I mean, that's kind of what I was talking about of having to integrate, you know, 1998, beret wearing Monica Lewinsky and who I wanted, who I had become, who I wanted to become, who I hoped I had become, that's the grace for yourself, that's the self forgiveness. So one thing I think you do gain when you go through something terrible is like a fellowship with other people who have been through something terrible like that too. You can understand what they're going through in a way that other people can't. And some of that is like, you know, talk about Gallows humor, right? If an ER nurse makes a joke to another ER nurse, it's funny. And if I go into an ER and make that same joke to the ER nurse, she goes like, you have no idea what you're talking about. You don't have the shared context. So it feels like some of what we've talked about and some of what you know, you've done in your work is to take that fellowship with other people who have had their narrative taken away from them, who have been publicly shamed and to try and at least make them understand that you see them and that there is a path forward. Yes. And I think a lot of the work that I do, just even in a small narrow way, I executive produced a show called The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox that's on Hulu right now that came out last fall. And it's a scripted series on Amanda's experience. She's also an EP on the show. And I brought the show to 20th Television and put the project together because I understood what it meant to be misunderstood on a global stage as a young woman. And I understood what it meant to have that long tale follow you. And how people will tell you to just move on and yet they don't actually allow you to have a narrative that is any different from what had happened from the narrative they're telling you to move on from. And it was very important to both Amanda and myself and Hulu was wonderful about this, was showing the aftermath. So the story, in telling her story, it could have very easily ended when she gets out of prison, yay, but she comes home and what it means to find yourself in a totally new normal and how does that impact your family and what happens in those quiet moments. It's important for us to all understand, but then it's important because this will likely happen to someone else and every time someone moves through it, it gets easier and it's a little better for the next person and we get a little farther in helping people understand those things. So there is I think that sense of fellowship, but I also want to say too, when you haven't had the experience of everything falling apart and you get through it and then you actually do look back later and you go, oh, I think God, that thing that I thought was the worst thing in the world that I didn't want to get out of bed for happened. And when you have enough of those experiences, it also allows you to be more resilient when it happens again and you don't maybe fall as far down, you get up faster, you maybe don't catastrophize as much. And so that's what's hard about it too because we shouldn't have to go through so much and you don't want to gloss over what is difficult and at the same time, so often in life, and those horrible things happen, I don't want to say this overlining, but something goes away for something better to come in. Have you been able to get to the place or do you feel like that? Oh, yeah. You wouldn't take away all the trauma. Oh, no, I would 100% take away all the trauma. I was like, 100%. 100%. I mean, people are like, "Would you change it now that you can help people?" And I'm like, "Yes, yes, I would." So my life looks nothing like the life that I had dreamed for myself. And I feel very privileged to be in a place where I can help other, like, ease other people's suffering, but it has come at a cost, you know. It's come at a cost for me, and yeah, but I have had the experience of now a number of times, something that I had kind of put all my eggs in the basket, I put all my hope behind this idea. I worked so hard for something, and it didn't happen, and it fell apart. And that ended up being a moment where I now go, "Thank God that happened." Thank God. And so it's meant the more times that I've then found myself, because unfortunately, it was not just one experience. that's happened numerous times. The last time it happened, I didn't get that upset. I was like, all right, I'm gonna just plow forward because I know that this will have happened for a reason. - One thing that I personally appreciate a lot, and I imagine that people listening and people in the room also can really appreciate is to hear you talk about something like a dark decade. And then to know that there is another side to that, I feel like when I have been in really dark periods in my own life, it's hard to imagine that you can be in a dark place, and then there can be something else. And so especially when it's like, I think it's easier to imagine if you're like, I had a rough day, well maybe tomorrow will be better. But then to think like, you had a decade that was really, really bad. And your life is not like that anymore. I think that's actually a really important message for people that it can last for a long time, and it still isn't forever. - Yeah, and things can get better, and you can still have to deal with the difficulty that you had back then. Like it doesn't always just poof a race, even when you're in a better place, and that's sort of again, that dance with trauma is the ability to know, and that's kind of the core of resilience, right? Is sort of bouncing back faster and easier every time, because that's what life has made of. That's sorry to get, woo, woo, that's this dimension, you know, so that's what we came here for. - How do you think about forgiveness and what forgiveness means? - I do subscribe to the belief that one, forgiving someone does not excuse their behavior. And I think that is such, that was a really important thing for me to learn and understand, and the other is that forgiveness helps you more than it does the other person. It's always better when the forgiveness comes because somebody has made amends. Someone has taken responsibility for how they've harmed someone else, but that doesn't always happen. - Do you feel like anyone has made amends to you, like personally privately? - Nobody who was a key player in 1998. I think personally, I have had many experiences where people, whether it's in a private moment or even on social media, people will say, you know, I laughed at all those jokes, and I'm really sorry. And I have this own little cuckoo thing for myself where it's like, anytime somebody says something positive to me, which I would consider that positive, it erases two negative things from the past. So I take those moments in, you know? - You talked about this and you're talking, you talked about it in the podcast, but the idea, right, like that when all this happened that you were 22, you had graduated from college months before. - Months before, I feel like this was, you know, my first job out of college. - I've noticed, even in our conversation, you're public interiors, you're very conscientious to not say, like you always say, I did some, like I made mistakes, but I would say. - Right. - This is so not your mistakes to make, right? Like that's a 22 year old, like. - Right, I think that was-- - This is a system that was deployed against you. - What's always felt really important to me and something that I interrogated personally so much in the Me Too era is there is a difference between women who have had experiences where they have been forced into some sort of sexual relationship with their boss, and they did not want to be there at all. And every moment of it was excruciating trauma, and that was not this. There are many questions about the power differentials. We didn't, you know, abuse of power was something we only really ever talked about and thought about with Nixon in that kind of a Watergate scenario. It was an extreme gross abuse of power. I wrote a piece on the survivors, the Epstein survivors in part, because I had been appored by a conversation I had in London where someone was saying, oh, this woman who had been around at the time said that those girls were happy to be there. They were getting handbags, you know, and it's like, what do you, you know, like this is grooming, and so it makes you think about, okay, well, where is the line in what we see, and the line in what we experience ourselves? You know, you begin to interrogate that, but I think what I cannot deny is I knew that he was married. So there are also plenty of people who cross those lines all the time. Many people in here probably have. I'm sure everybody in here knows somebody, whether it's you or someone else who's had an affair. It is very, very, very common. The person who is married is the one who's more responsible, but there is always the possibility that those behaviors that you've engaged in hurt other people who didn't make a choice. And I engaged in that. So that's where I feel it's important. It's interesting because that's evolved for me too. In a big way of, as I, you know, matured and gotten older, and I'm now this age where it's like, I think I could no sooner have a relationship with a 24-year-old than, you know, than I could a 94-year-old. So again, part of the abuse of power came, even when the investigation was, became public because of how I was thrown under the bus, because of how I was lied about, how I was talked about, I think because there had been this servicing narrative that was out there about me, that I felt this deep need in a protective way for myself and in a way to hold on to what had actually transpired was also a declaring of my agency too. So it's, you know, it's complicated. - After you had gone through everything, you went and got a master's in social psychology. And I'm really curious about that choice because it seems like you were learning about social psychology and classroom, but no one knew more about social psychology than you in your life. And so I'd love to hear just like what resonated with the academic research and also what struck you as like these people do not, these theories do not get what I have been through. - So I think there were definitely moments, my advisor, Dr. Jeff Chelevitz, she tells a funny story of how we studied, I went to school in graduate school in London, no fucking idea that there's a difference between American and European social psychology, FYI. So we were learning about this thing called social representations and she tells it much better and she's a Brazilian accent. But she, that I like walked into her office and I was like, I am a social representation. Like, you know, it's so it is a very weird thing to kind of to see yourself in that way. In categories of things that you're learning that are different or I had an experience in there's a class where you learn all the research modalities. Basically they were like, well, you have to use reputable sources like the New York Times and I'm like the New York Times gets it wrong a lot, you know? And so that was an interesting perspective for me. But one of the hardest aspects for me and I think with the public shaming that I went through and this is probably true of most public shamings is that there's often some sort of like tiny kernel, it may not be truth but it's what you fear is a truth about you and to have that amplified by other people is incredibly painful. There is still a version of me that is hearing all the negative things that were said about me publicly and the fear of that. It's lessen the more I've done and that doesn't happen so much anymore and it's so much why I have so much compassion for young people and this happens to people of all ages online now but especially young people who are growing up online. When I was a kid the worst thing that would happen is like everybody in the school knew something or as an adult now if one of us spills a glass of wine at a dinner, you're embarrassed, there's a perimeter around how many people saw this embarrassing thing but when it's online there is no way to draw a border and I think that becomes a very complicated psychological experience because you literally feel like everyone is laughing at you and I think that was some of what made the day the star report was put online come out so like that experience exposure, that global exposure. But I think we've seen this with a lot of people now who have survived public shaming. And the important part is that, as awful as it is, it doesn't have to be the end of your life, you know? - I was very moved in hearing you talk on your podcast about how one of the most powerful parts for you of the Ted Talk coming out and your vanity fair article coming out was how people would say to your family, really positive things about you. How much your work mattered to them and how that was such a profound shift for you in the private versus the public. - Right, and I think sort of going back to something I was saying to you about the Amanda Nox show and her family is there's collateral damage whenever these public shaming happen. And when they happen on smaller, more private levels, they can have collateral damage too, but it's just not quite as big. But, you know, I have a younger brother who was a sophomore in college when this happened. And he had to graduate college and move into the world. He chose to keep our last name. And, you know, he'd done nothing wrong. And yet he had to bear the brunt of what it meant for our family last name to become synonymous with a sexual act for a long time. So, I think that there is that balance now that is I feel it's like a triple dose of pride when my dad, he's retired now. So he has this breakfast group on the weekend and someone in the breakfast group listened to the podcast and loved the episode. You know, that there is that I can feel the pride on them and I can feel how without us talking about it, it's a healing moment. And I'm so grateful because I have a niece and nephew who are eight and 10. And pretty soon there's gonna have to be a conversation around like anti-Monca's a public person. And what does that mean? And I'm so grateful that there are these other things to point to, then just the worst thing that could have happened, you know, so very grateful. We can't end on a better note than that. Oh, okay. Thank you so much, Monica. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you for being here. And I also, I just wanna say if there's anybody in the room here today who had been in the room 11 years ago when I gave my talk, I found myself feeling emotional as we round out here in Vancouver, just so much gratitude for the people who were in the room that day who made it possible for me to actually get up onto the red circle 'cause boy, did I wanna run away. And just help change my life. And so I'm just, so just thank you. Thank you. This was an honor. Well done. Thank you so much. - That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to everyone who made this episode possible thanks to all the on-site staff at the Vancouver Convention Center who made the live recording run so smoothly. Thank you to today's guest Monica Lewinsky. You can listen to reclaiming wherever you find podcasts. I really recommend you check out the show, especially that very first episode and all of the more recent episodes. They are really, really special. I am your host, Chris Duffy. And you can find more from me on my website, chrystuffycomedy.com, including information about my live show dates and also my book Humory about how to laugh more every day. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was packaged delicately and then carried across the Canadian border just for you. On the Ted side, our show is made by Daniela Beller as open Van Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shashar Brooks, Valentina Bohemini, Laney Lap, Tensikasun Manivong, and Tony Leite, Joseph DeBrien. Ryan Lash put together this video and Matthias Salis checked our facts. On the PRX side, our show is brought to you by Morgan Flannery Norgill, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please send this episode to someone who you think would like it, someone who you'd like to talk about it with. We will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening and take care. (upbeat music)