New Details Revealed By Monica Lewinsky On That Stained Blue Dress And Her Affair With Bill Clinton
The highly anticipated A&E series The Clinton Affair has many reliving the controversial tryst between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. The series gave Lewinsky her moment to finally tell her side of the story, including what really stained the infamous blue dress.
In the series, Lewinsky admitted to wearing the dress after fooling around with then-president Clinton because she and no one else noticed the semen stain.
“I went to dinner that night. None of these people said to me, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go to the bathroom, you’ve got stuff all over your dress,’” Lewinsky said in The Clinton Affair.
Lewinsky detailed how the dress, which wound up being a major piece of evidence during Clinton’s trial, was stained in the first place.
According to Lewinsky, Clinton had invited the then-intern to a White House radio address.
“He said he had a present for me. I didn’t quite know — would I get to see him alone? Wouldn’t I?” Lewinsky said.
“As I went through to shake his hand after and take a picture with him, he said, ‘Oh, go see Betty, she has something for you,’” Lewinsky said referring to Betty Currie, Clinton’s personal secretary at the time.
“She brought me into the Oval Office and all three of us went into the back study, and she went into the dining room to hide there,” said, adding, “because the illusion to everyone else was that I was not alone with him.”
The president gave Lewinsky a box with a hat pin and a “really beautiful copy” of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, she recalled.
“It was a very meaningful present to me. It’s an intimate book that you don’t give lightly. Whatever had been nagging in me — is what I’m feeling real? Is that there? Whatever those insecurities were, they kind of vanished in some way with him giving me this gift,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky then explained how this was the first physical interaction she had with the president since she was “banished” to the Pentagon, a decision made to keep her from affecting the 1996 presidential election.
“And so we moved to the bathroom and were more intimate. There was some attention paid on me and then I was reciprocating, where up until that point he had always stopped before completion on his part,” Lewinsky said.
“I sort of stood up and said I wanted to move past that stage and so he finally said OK,” she said of the moment her dress was soiled.
“So that finished and then I hugged him after. And he hugged me,” she said. “And off I went.”
In 1998 grand jury testimony, she said she initially thought the marks on her dress “could be spinach dip or something.”
Although there are many moments of the series that have some calling Lewinsky out for having sexual relations with a married man, others felt that she was indeed a victim.