Monica Lewinsky is making her past something to be proud of.
The former White House intern, whose affair with President Bill Clinton in the mid-‘90s became a global scandal and played a major role in his 1998 impeachment trial, recently shared why she commemorates the anniversary of the day she was seized by FBI agents in 1997.
In fact, the 51-year-old shared that she and her family refer to Jan. 16 as “Survivor’s Day.”
“That was the worst day of my life thus far,” Lewinsky—who was just 24 years old at the time of the scandal while Clinton was 51—explained in an interview with Rolling Stone published Feb. 14. “It’s connecting to that, but in a way that brings it back to myself.”
But the annual commemoration doesn’t have a somber tone.
“We celebrate,” Lewinsky continued. “Sometimes my mom buys me a gift or I buy myself a gift, and just make a moment of really acknowledging. That’s when I connect to my past the most.”
She emphasized that she’s been able to loosen her grip on her past mistakes in recent years adding, “I think the gift the world gave me in these last 10 years of finally being able to have movement forward and being taken seriously as a human being, it allowed me to just shed a lot of that.”
Indeed, in the years following her affair with the former president—who will celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary with Hillary Clinton later this year—Lewinsky was the subject of public ridicule. And after more than a decade of silence—after initial attempts to share her account—she published a moving essay for Vanity Fair in 2014, where she reclaimed her story once and for all.
Now that she’s the age Clinton was at the time of the affair, Lewinsky has a stark analysis of what their illicit relationship really was.
“It is textbook abuse of power,” the Reclaiming podcast host reflected.“It’s interesting because it feels as I get older I look at it differently. I’m now 51. The idea of being in a relationship with a 24-year-old is insane to me, on so many levels.”
And the anti-bullying advocate has learned in recent years to use her status as a public figure to support her own career and others.
“There’s just so many different ways of unwrapping what you thought something was,” she added, “what it meant to you at the time, how you see it now.”
