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I did to manage my anxieties: Bill Clinton on affair with Monica Lewinsky

WION Web Team
WashingtonUpdated: Mar 06, 2020, 11:40 PM IST
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Photograph:(Reuters)

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Hillary said she felt 'devastated and so personally hurt' when Bill Clinton told her about the affair with the White House intern

In a documentary series, former US president Bill Clinton,73, said he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky to help him "manage my anxieties".

The former president who faced impeachment due to the affair, said that he was motivated by life's "pressure and disappointments and terrors, fears of whatever, things I did to manage my anxieties for years." Although Clinton was acquitted in 1999 but it left a scar on his presidency.

In the series, Bill Clinton said that he hated to hurt her daughter Chelsea. His wife Hillary said she felt "devastated and so personally hurt" when Bill Clinton told her about the affair with the White House intern who was just 22-years-old then.

The affair began in 1995, Bill Clinton said Monica Lewinsky's life has been "unfairly" defined by it. "It was awful what I did," Bill Clinton said, adding," "We all bring our baggage to life and sometimes we do things we shouldn't do."  

"Over the years I have watched her trying to get a normal life back again. But you got to decide how to define normal," Bill Clinton said.

The Clinton's touched upon the #Metoo movement, with Hillary said: "It is a funny time we live in, the kind of public opinion shifts and people say, 'Oh, so noble, she stayed in her marriage' to 'Oh, it is so incomprehensible that she stayed in her marriage."

"You know that there are forces (at) work in a society that people are working through themselves," she said in the documentary with Bill Clinton saying he felt "so grateful" that his wife stuck by him. 

"God knows the burden she paid for that," the former US president said.