Monica Lewinsky reveals eye-watering amount her family spent on legal fees following Bill Clinton scandal
After getting caught in arguably the most scandalous love affair in American history, Monica Lewinsky was forced to cough up a lot of cash.
She was just 22 when she and 49-year-old Bill Clinton began a sexual scandal whilst working closely together - she as a White House intern, and he as the President of the United States.
The politician was also married at the time, to wife Hillary.
After their steamy romance was exposed in 1998, however, Clinton denied all allegations of sexual relations with Lewinsky whilst under oath.
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She, on the other hand, claimed she'd enjoyed 10 encounters with the president in the Oval Office over an 18-month period.
The affair resulted in Clinton initially being impeached by the House of Representatives, before being acquitted of all charges in 1999.
He remained in position until the end of his second presidential term in 2001, whilst Lewinsky was left battling mind-blowing six-figure legal fees.
Only recently, however, have followers of the story learned exactly how much she was forced to hand over to cover the cost of the court case.
Speaking in her newly-launched podcast this week, Lewinsky, now 51, began by acknowledging the monumental mistake she and Clinton had made during their years in Washington D.C.
"I fell in love with D.C. and the White House and the job and the environment, and then, very unfortunately, I fell in love with my boss who was married and also the most powerful man in the world," she confirmed.
"What followed was an inappropriate relationship that lasted for two years."
Lewinsky then went on to reveal that she and her family were forced to pay $1 million in legal fees, claiming they initially believed these costs could be wavered when it was proven the affair had happened. Sadly, however, they didn't.
"[It was] another stripping of my sense of justice and the way the world works," she told podcast listeners on Thursday (19 Feb). "And I think I had lost so much of that in the investigation. There was just a sense of unfairness.
"I had made mistakes, but it felt like there was one set of rules for most people, and somehow, I had to abide by a different set of rules."
Following the ruling, Lewinsky was granted transactional immunity by the Office of the Independent Counsel - this meant, however, that she'd be restricted in what she could talk about publicly.
Thankfully, she was able to collaborate with British author Andrew Morton to release her biography Monica's Story, which detailed her point of view on the affair - this saw her take home around $500,000.
Lewinsky made a further $1 million for selling the international rights to her 1999 interview with ABC's Barbara Walters.
Even after both of these endeavours, however, she was still left fighting to survive, with legal bills and living costs continuing to mount.
Her heartache was only made worse by the fact that, following she affair, she struggled to attain professional work.
Speaking on the podcast, she recalled: "I was trying to find places that did the work that I was interested to do and then try to see if I knew people who knew people there so I wasn’t going in cold.
"When I came out of graduate school, I think I interviewed at maybe 50 different places, and it became clear I was not going to get a job."
She added: "I did all the things that were on the plan of trying to move forward.
"My family and I were at a loss of what to do and how to do it."
In 2006, Lewinsky obtained a master's degree in psychology from the London School of Economics, and in 2014, she turned her attention towards activism on cyberbullying, having endured trolling in the years since the scandal.
Discussing her own mental health in the podcast, she admitted: "I think what surprised me almost the most was that some of the hardest times and the times I came closest to not wanting to be here anymore were in the aftermath because I didn’t realise how much I had lost."
"When I came to realise how much I had lost, when I came into my anger, when I came into this period of my life where I could not move forward."
Claiming that at her lowest she 'couldn't see a future', Lewinsky added that she'd often spend evenings crying in bed, not wanting 'to wake up'.
Rhianna Benson