Monica Lewinsky was just a 20-year-old intern when she became involved with the most powerful man in the country at the time, President Bill Clinton. Their sex scandal rocked the entire country from the White House. 

 

Now, Monica Lewinsky herself will be a producer in the fourth season of 'American Crime Story', a series that will tell in detail her relationship with the former president. 

 

At the time this scandal not only caused commotion because of the age difference between them two or the sexual details that came to light about their encounters, but the American public was amazed by how the Republican Party promoted this fact in their favor and got Clinton out clean from the impeachment trial he faced.

 

23 years later, Monica told all the details of this relationship to recreate the scenes in the docuseries. The episodes will be titled 'Impeachment' and will be broadcast on FX Networks.

 

Brad Simpson, producer of the series, said that "Monica Lewinsky was the main consultant on the show", although the team also searched on books and watched other documentaries, as well as records of judicial testimonies that they were able to review.

 

It was important for the production to show Lewinsky's experience as an intern who came to Washington and went through the pressure of working in the White House. In addition, they will tell what it was like to be in a relationship with the president of the United States and everything that happened when the story was discovered.

Despite the criticism, Monica Lewinsky managed to convince the production and the writers of the series to add a scene describing the moment when she showed her red underwear to Clinton in one of their encounters in the Oval Office.

 

Screenwriter Sarah Burgess excluded the scene at the outset for fear of "re-traumatizing Monica."

 

However, Lewinsky herself decided to let people know what the events were like, which appeared in the Starr Report, an exposé by attorney Ken Starr, whose investigation into the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship led to the president's impeachment in 1998. 

 

"Ultimately, I felt two things: one was that I shouldn't get a pass because I'm a producer; and two, that it was unfair to the team and to the project because it would leave everyone vulnerable," Lewinsky told The Hollywood Reporter referring to the importance of adding the scene as part of her story.

 

In 2018 Lewinsky wrote a letter to Vanity Fair magazine in which she recounted that her relationship with Clinton was "not sexual assault" but that there was a strong case of "abuse of power" linking her case to the #MeToo movement. "This is not just my problem. Powerful people, often men, take advantage of subordinates in countless ways all the time." 

The overall plot of the 'Impeachment' series is based on the perspectives of three women - Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and Paula Jones. Tripp was a White House staffer and one of Lewinsky's closest friends at the time, but she also secretly recorded the phone conversations they had and made them public. Jones, on the other hand, sued President Clinton for sexual harassment. Tripp passed away in 2020, and Jones was not consulted in the creation of the script.

 

'Impeachment: American Crimes' premieres Sept. 7 on FX. At the moment, the first two seasons are available on Netflix: the first chronicles the crime, judicial process and imprisonment of former American athlete O. J. Simpson, and the second is 'The Assassination of Gianni Versace'.