A CNN panel on Monday criticized Hillary Clinton's comments over the weekend saying that her husband President Bill Clinton's affair with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewsinky was not an abuse of power because she was an adult.
"I thought we had moved to a place where a president of the United States or a company or a fast food franchise cannot have an extramarital affair with a 22-year-old intern because of the power imbalance. Am I wrong?" host Jake Tapper asked.
On Sunday, CBS correspondent Tony Dokoupil asked Clinton, "Do you think Bill should've resigned in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal?"
Clinton said, "Absolutely not."
When asked if the affair was not an abuse of power, Clinton said Lewinsky "was an adult" at the time.
Lewinsky herself says that the affair was an abuse of power on President Clinton's part. In February, Lewinsky wrote in Vanity Fair that "what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power."
Lewinsky also said that she "was diagnosed several years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracized back then."
"Watching this interview, it made me think—I don't think the #MeToo movement would have happened with a President Hillary Clinton. Because people always turned a blind eye to this, because they know what Bill did," CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter said.
"When we talk about abuse of power, it wasn't just the age difference, it wasn't just the fact that she was an intern and he was the president, although that was a big part of it. Because Bill Clinton didn't come clean, Monica Lewinsky was hauled into a hotel in Pentagon City, threatened with jail time, her parents were threatened with jail time. Her life was ruined. It wasn't just the affair, it was her life that got ruined because of that abuse of power.
Lewinsky wrote in early 2018: "I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot. (Although power imbalances—and the ability to abuse them—do exist even when the sex has been consensual.)"