Monica Lewinsky said on Wednesday that she feels cancel culture has become “a little too broad,” becoming the latest high-profile figure to criticize the way public shaming occurs in the age of the internet.
Lewinsky made the remark to Trevor Noah during an appearance on “The Daily Show” to discuss the new documentary she executive produced, “15 Minutes of Shame,” which examines how public shaming has exploded since the invention of the internet, targeting the vulnerable, as well as people in power.
“I don’t know what you think about cancel culture and the term ‘cancel culture,’ but I think, for me, it’s just become a little too broad,” Lewinsky told Noah.
“I think that really what felt important was for people to come to understand what happens in these shamings, and what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of that tidal wave of negativity. It has exacerbated from being just shamed; it also can be violence, and that violence — particularly for women — it doesn’t just live online,” she explained.
Lewinsky said that it became clear to her that “what happened to me — and I made a mistake — but what happened to me was now happening to many other people, especially young people.”
She added that public shaming is also “very much about power.”
“Are there people in power who should face consequences? Absolutely,” Lewinsky said. “But are there people who are not in positions of power who are facing the same consequence and it’s ruining their lives in a way that is very different? Yes to that, too.”
Lewinsky’s documentary takes viewers through some of the history of public shaming, detailing how the internet became a powerful tool to shame people like Lewinsky herself when her sex scandal with former President Bill Clinton became public in 1998. At the time, the press salivated over the story, which broke largely over the nearly brand new internet. In the film, Lewinsky refers to herself as “patient zero” with regard to public shaming.
The affair between Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old White House intern, and the former president, then 49, led to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against Clinton and his impeachment later that year, but Clinton was acquitted on all charges.
“One of the factors – and we do take people through this in the film – is around the idea of how shame had been used since the beginning of time as a social tool. When the printing press was invented, it all of the sudden leap-frogged into being something that could now be commoditized,” Lewinsky said Wednesday on the show.
“Once the tabloid culture bled into every area of our culture, leading up to Princess Diana’s death – which was a function of paparazzi living in that world, the tabloid world, that’s where their income comes from – and so there was that moment,” she said. “That was only five months before 1998, so we didn’t make a cultural shift.”