How to reclaim your narrative (w/ Monica Lewinsky)

How to Be a Better Human

In a live conversation recorded at TED 2026 in Vancouver, host Chris Duffy interviews Monica Lewinsky about her decades-long journey of reclaiming her narrative after becoming the focal

Key takeaways

• Monica Lewinsky describes herself as 'patient zero' of global online reputation loss following the highly publicized 1998 scandal involving President Bill Clinton.
• She explains that emotional trauma healing follows a spiral pattern rather than a linear timeline, requiring patience and self-compassion when setbacks occur.

Main topics

• Reclaiming personal narrative
• Public shaming & digital reputation loss

Notable quotes

"I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously."

Conclusion

The episode provides a grounded framework for processing public scruti

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. That's bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time, and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that makes this show. Thanks for listening, and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, on to the episode. Speaker 1 (0:54) 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. Speaker 3 (2:55) When this 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. Speaker 3 (3:15) What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. Speaker 3 (3:27) I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously. Speaker 3 (3:37) 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. Speaker 3 (3:57) News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. Speaker 3 (4:08) Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret? Speaker 3 (4:16) Now, I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret. Speaker 3 (4:22) But the attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that I personally received, was unprecedented. Speaker 3 (4:31) I was branded as a tramp. Tart. Slut. Whore Bimbo. And of course, that woman. Speaker 3 (4:45) I was seen by many, but actually known by few. Speaker 3 (4:51) And I get it. It was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken. Speaker 1 (5:02) We are going to be back with this special live conversation with Monica Lewinsky in just a moment. Speaker 5 (5:18) There's a lot of concern that AI could interfere with how kids learn and develop. But what happens when we actually ask students how they want to use these tools? There's an opportunity to help young people build self-awareness around AI and learn to use it in ways that empower rather than undermine them. The Speaker 4 (5:37) narrative out there is that they cheat. But what you actually see is that so many students, when they learn how to use it, are looking at sort of problems in the world that they want to solve and building solutions and not waiting for permission. They're just building. That was VP Speaker 5 (5:52) and General Manager of Education at OpenAI, Leah Belsky, who joined me, Molly Graham, on my podcast, Work Life, to address how we can find solutions to real, valid concerns around AI's widespread implementation in education. What do we want humans to be able to do in a world where intelligence is infinitely accessible? Listen to Work Life anywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (6:21) And we are back. This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience in Vancouver, Canada at TED 2026. Speaker 2 (6:29) Monica, I'm so excited to get to talk to you. Speaker 3 (6:30) Yes, Chris. Hi, everybody. Speaker 2 (6:34) 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? Oh, Speaker 3 (6:46) I love it. And Speaker 2 (6:50) I thought that might be an interesting way to start, which is how do you answer that question? Who is Monica Lewinsky? Speaker 3 (6:56) Gosh, 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 Speaker 2 (7:37) with Speaker 3 (7:38) adjectives. And I like to think of myself as someone who's thoughtful, fucked up, works on herself, you know. It Speaker 2 (7:49) 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 possible. Exactly. Speaker 3 (8:05) 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... 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, 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 am 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. Speaker 6 (9:14) It Speaker 3 (9:15) 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's a really big thing. Speaker 2 (9:28) 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? Speaker 3 (9:53) Well, I think, I mean, I... think of myself as a regular person. Sure. Speaker 2 (9:57) But I just mean like impressive and, you know. Well, Speaker 3 (9:59) 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. Speaker 6 (10:32) Because Speaker 3 (10:32) 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. Speaker 3 (10:49) if I had been somebody 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 50s 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 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. Speaker 2 (11:39) Something that I heard you say that struck me was that healing this is not like healing a cut. Speaker 3 (11:44) Yeah. Speaker 2 (11:45) Can you talk about what you mean by that? Speaker 3 (11:47) I think it's exactly, you know, that we have a timeline for a cut. We know, you know, that in the first few days, this is what will happen. If you put this ointment on, if you put this Band-Aid 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, right? But that's the process. And I think that emotional trauma is... 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, right? 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. Speaker 2 (13:27) Something I wonder about when I think about you and your story is why are you here on a public stage? Like if it was me, I can imagine that there would be a real desire to like 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 Lewiston? Exactly. Speaker 3 (13:50) Monique Lewinsky. 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 going to 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... Speaker 3 (14:22) 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, you know, 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