Monica Lewinsky Is (Reluctantly) Revisiting ‘That Woman’

The actor Alan Cumming has been a friend since they were introduced by a mutual friend in 2000, back when “she almost wasn’t really human to people,” he said. (He described how, when they would go out to eat, on more than one occasion a diner had reached over the booth divider just to touch her.) “When you realize what she’s been through, the fact that she is who she is — this warm, kind, hilarious, witty person — it’s just remarkable.”

It’s true: Spend more than a few minutes with Lewinsky and you quickly realize she is far smarter, and funnier — often at her own expense — than she often got credit for. She is still careful, and at times circumspect, but she is a bit looser, a bit more self-assured, than she was even a few years ago.

These days, she uses her name (well, mostly) in public. She is comfortable cutting off an interview — or walking off a stage — if it goes to a place she isn’t comfortable. She is financially independent for the first time — making a living from producing, speaking and consulting fees.

And she can laugh about things she couldn’t always. Like, say, the Clintons.

When I was writing about her in 2015, Lewinsky abruptly pulled out after an artist who’d painted Bill Clinton’s portrait said in an interview that a “shadow” in his painting, owned by the National Portrait Gallery, was meant to represent the affair. She was really sorry, she said, but she just felt too exposed to go forward with the article. She eventually changed her mind.

But on a recent afternoon, when we walked into a production studio for a meeting and were confronted with three giant posters bearing Hillary Clinton’s face — ads for the Hulu documentary, “Hillary” — she just chuckled. “Well, that’s funny,” she said.

“It just doesn’t impact me the same way, you know?” she said later, when I asked how it affects her to see the Clintons in the news. “They don’t loom nearly as large as they did for two decades in my life.”