CNN’s David Axelrod Asks Monica Lewinsky if Clinton Affair is Tied to ‘Difficult Relationship’ She Had with Her Father

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CNN’s David Axelrod invited Monica Lewinsky to his podcast on Thursday, during which he asked if the infamous affair she had with former President Bill Clinton was tied to her “difficult” relationship with her father.

While on The Axe Files podcast, Lewinsky reflected on her childhood and her relationship with her parents, sharing that there were “a lot of different traumas that happened” when she was growing up.

Roughly 10 minutes into the episode, she said that while she was raised in a wealthy household, she struggles to recollect “moments of joy” when looking back at her childhood.

“I wanted to be daddy’s little girl. And my dad was raised by German Jews and I think didn’t didn’t quite know how to do that,” she said. “And I really in some ways, I feel like I couldn’t actually understand the dysfunction or the difficulties, until my parents actually got divorced, and that was when I realized I saw myself struggling to hold onto the fantasy like of what I thought my family was or what I wanted my family to be, that there was this hope that we could always become that if and now that was now that was shattered when I was 14 and my parents divorced.”

She went on to share that she left her home in the wake of her parents’ divorce to attend community college at age 14, adding, “I definitely didn’t have the tools to navigate these things. But my relationship with my dad was rocky.”

Lewinsky’s comments prompted Axelrod to ask what he called a possibly “impertinent question.”

“You say you had a difficult relationship with your dad. You you had a relationship with an older man in Portland. And then you had this, this, sadly, famous affair, and I’m wondering if any of this all blends together,” he said. “Does it make more sense in the context of your growing up and your relationship with your dad and so on?”

Lewinsky noted that it’s common for childhood trauma’s to impact someone’s adulthood, but pointed out that many of her friends had similar experiences with their parents and “did not end up in global scandals.”

“I think what in some ways what happened for me is I had experiences when I was younger, like when I was 14, and ones that were younger than that, that I didn’t even know, I compartmentalized and shoved away. And we didn’t even have language for it back then,” she added. “And I think that actually those, some of those experiences probably influenced and impacted me more and impacted my relationship with my dad more, and therefore other men than sort of that neatly tied-up package of, oh, I just have father issues.”

Lewinsky then shed light on some of the incidents she “compartmentalized and shoved away,” sharing that she had a crush on an older camp counselor when she was 14 and that she had “an unwanted sexual experience” when she lost her virginity.

She went on to share that when she was 17-years-old, a male teacher in his young twenties had “kissed me at the end of a two hour conversation in a parking lot at high school.”

“That’s, of course, going to impact how one relates with the other men in their lives,” she said, adding, “And it impacts the choices.”

“I had boyfriends here and there, normal boyfriends, while I was growing up. And I think that there was definitely — I think you find that there are people who’ve had sexual boundaries crossed in their lives who just totally shut down and they just don’t go anywhere near relationships,” she continued. “And then there are people who maybe make really poor choices because they’re actually terrified of intimacy, because of whatever those experiences were. Or they’re looking for some kind of a validation in a different way, and, I think with a lot of my choices, I was taught better. I knew better, and I made bad choices.”

Listen above, via The Axe Files.