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Bill Clinton Faces Criticism After He Says He Doesn’t Owe Monica Lewinsky an Apology

HeadlineJun 05, 2018

Former President Bill Clinton is facing criticism after he told NBC’s Craig Melvin that he did not owe an apology to former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Craig Melvin: “I asked if you’d ever apologized, and you said you had.”

Bill Clinton: “I have.”

Craig Melvin: “You’ve apologized to her?”

Bill Clinton: “I apologized to everybody in the world.”

President Bill Clinton: “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine—first and most important, my family, Monica Lewinsky and her family.”

Craig Melvin: “But you didn’t apologize to her.”

Bill Clinton: “I have not talked to her. I—I thought it—”

Craig Melvin: “Do you feel like you owe her an apology?”

Bill Clinton: “No, I do—I do not. I’ve never talked to her. But I did say, publicly, on more than one occasion, that I was sorry. That’s very different. The apology was public.”

After widespread outrage about these comments, Clinton said he had apologized publicly, speaking at the Schomburg Center in New York City Monday night. In the late 1990s, President Clinton had a sexual affair with Lewinsky, who was at the time a 21-year-old unpaid intern at the White House. In a Vanity Fair essay published earlier this year, Lewinsky wrote, “I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”

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