The Starr report has made life harder for the scattered feminists who have tried to make the case, always a shaky one, that Monica Lewinsky was the victim of sexual opportunism at the hands of her boss. Even the most cursory reading—the kind that begins at Section II of the narrative, “1995: Initial Sexual Encounters,” and skims breathlessly through to conclude at Section VII, “May 1997: Termination of Sexual Relationship”—makes it clear that Lewinsky was the agent of her own enthrallment. But the report does, nonetheless, reveal in vivid detail the relentless sexual exploitation of a young woman who has been cornered by an older, vastly more powerful man. The man in question is Kenneth Starr, and his report isn’t an account of sexual abuse; it is sexual abuse. It’s a metaphorical mugging of Lewinsky.
Substitute sexual intercourse for the verbal intercourse in which Starr forced Lewinsky to participate, and the whole investigation looks very much like an assault. First, Starr drives Lewinsky to bare herself to him, pressuring her with months of intimidatory leaks, threats, and proxy roughings up (as in the subpoenaing of Lewinsky’s mother, Marcia Lewis, who, with her expensively youthful appearance, made a fine stand-in for her daughter). He ransacks her computer not just for her correspondence but for evidence of her private thoughts, rooting out drafts of letters she apparently had no intention of sending. He rifles through her closet, trophy-hunting. And he compels her, in her grand-jury testimony, to speak with a specificity somewhere between the pornographic and the gynecological. The report doesn’t tell us precisely what Starr’s people asked her; he used the trick, cravenly familiar to all journalists, of omitting those tawdry questions which prompted the revelations. But it is fair to assume that he didn’t get the girl to talk about her bouts of phone sex or to detail the precise coordinates of the Presidential ejaculation without indulging in some serious probing. And then, having turned Lewinsky inside out, Starr exposes her to public view, stripped naked. It may be true that no public figure has had his sexual privacy so violated as Bill Clinton has, but it’s also true that no figure, public or private, has had her inner life so rawly and mercilessly exposed as Monica Lewinsky has. Having the world know of your Oval Office gropings is humiliating, but how much more humiliating to have the world know of your sad, deluded fantasies about being the second Mrs. Clinton.
It will be argued that Lewinsky, ultimately, surrendered eagerly to Starr—that she was dying to rat on Clinton after he repudiated her on national television. But this is a little like saying that the victim of sexual assault who decides, in the end, that her best hope for safety lies in not biting or scratching her assailant was asking for it all along. Lewinsky, on the evidence of her own testimony, is hardly a sympathetic character, but that doesn’t excuse Starr’s wanton pursuit and use of her. Starr wanted to see the President laid low, and Lewinsky got laid low in the process. And now Bill Clinton is not the only man in Washington whose profoundest gratification has come from Monica opening her mouth. ♦
