Former President Bill Clinton, 73, expressed remorse for how his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky shaped her life.
“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly I think. Over the years, I’ve watched her trying to get a normal life back again, but you’ve got to decide how to define normal,” he said in a documentary about his wife, Hillary Clinton, according to the Daily Mail.
Bill Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky, 46, led to his impeachment in 1998.
The former president revealed in the documentary, which airs Friday on Hulu, that the affair was one of “the things I did to manage my anxieties for years.”
“I’m a different, totally different person than I was … 20 years ago,” he said. “Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of whatever.”
“It wasn’t like I thought, ‘How can I think about the most stupid thing I could possibly do and do it?’” he said.
Lewinsky, who has become an anti-bullying advocate, has said in recent years that her relationship with Bill Clinton was “a gross abuse of power.”
“I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent,” Lewinsky wrote. “Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege,” she wrote in 2018.
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