#yeah! i mean he was allowed to sexually assault interns and shit but yeah! protect the children!
No. Nope. No. We're not doing that. We're gonna stop that shit right now.
A 22-year-old is not a fucking child. We are not going to participate in the continual infantilization of adult human beings. Monica Lewinsky was not a child. She was an adult when their affair began and had been an adult for four years.[1] By the time the affair ended, she was older than I was when I had been married for multiple years and had my daughter.
In her own words, she was not assaulted. We are not going to reinterpret her experiences to fit our desired narrative over the words she has used to describe her experience. She had enough of that from Republicans, The Drudge Report, and late-night talk show hosts 28 years ago, thank you very much.
To be very clear, we are also not excusing what she described as a "gross abuse of power"[2] on behalf of the 49-year-old President, either. But we are also not redefining an adult as a child or something that the victim of that gross abuse of power says was not assault.
We are not going to participate in removing even more agency from the person who was, in her own words, "the most humiliated person in the world"[3] by turning her into a) multiple people or b) a fucking child. She was one person who has a name, and she was a fucking adult.
He was, you know, impeached. This is sort of a contrast to the absolutely zero consequences happening to Trump legally, there were multiple trials [4], including one where Clinton was found liable for civil contempt of court and fined $90,000, an impeachment trial on two Articles of Impeachment which lasted twenty-one days, and a later loss of his law license in Arkansas, followed by a permanent disbarment from the United States Supreme Court, meaning he is permanently disallowed from arguing before the Supreme Court.[5] I genuinely do not know how you can argue he was "allowed" to do anything with a straight face. That relationship was, to be clear, perfectly fucking legal in a way that all of the assaults in the Epstein Files very much are not, because Ms. Lewinsky was a goddamned adult, but he 100% did face actual permanent consequences for lying about it in court and to Congress.
The Lewinsky scandal is largely credited as the main reason why the 2000 election was close enough for Bush to steal it. (And he did, but that's another conversation.) Hillary Clinton was called on to answer for her husband's actions almost 20 years later, during the 2016 campaign, and she's a totally different human being, as is Al Gore. So acting like there were no consequences the same way that there are zero meaningful consequences for Trump right now is really fucking weird, bud.
It is deeply inappropriate and really fucking weird to try to turn an adult into a child to win a rhetorical argument. Epstein's victims were actually children, some of them single-digit in age at the time they were trafficked and raped, and it is disgusting beyond belief to equate a consensual relationship undertaken by an adult who had graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in psychology with, you know. Children.
Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you?
1. "Monica Samille Lewinsky (born July 23, 1973)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Lewinsky
2. "“There are even some people who feel my White House experiences don’t have a place in this movement, as what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognise that it constituted a gross abuse of power.”." The Guardian, February 27, 2018.
3. "In 1998, ...I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world." Monica Lewinsky, "Shame and Survival," Vanity Fair, June 2014
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton, like, come the fuck on, this is basic history shit.
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/01/national/clinton-disbarred-from-practice-before-supreme-court.html
