Monica Lewinsky got a standing ovation after she said that “public shaming as a blood sport must stop.”
Speaking at the Cannes Lions festival in France on Thursday, the 41-year-old gave a speech similar to the TED talk she gave in March. She described herself as the “patient zero” of Internet shaming.
“Like me, at 22, a few of you may also have taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss,” Lewinsky told the audience. “Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn’t the President of the United States of America.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
“Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply. In 1998 after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into a political, legal and media maelstrom, that we had never seen before.”
“This scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution..what that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure, to a publicly humiliated one worldwide,” she said. “I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.”
“I was branded as a tart, slut, whore, bimbo, floozy and of course ‘that woman’, I was seen by many but truly known by few. It was hard to remember ‘that woman’ had a soul and was once unbroken.”
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