In late January 1998, little known blogger Matt Drudge exposed then President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with an unnamed White House intern, sparking a political scandal that has followed the Clintons for the past two decades.
The report included salacious details regarding Clinton’s courtship of the intern — later identified as Monica Lewinsky — and recounts how Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff initially reported the story and planned to name the intern until his piece was rejected by “top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication.”
“A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president’s sexual preference,” reads the bombshell report that catapulted Drudge to the top of the Washington journalistic world.
The story, which in many marks the dawn of digital journalism, describes Lewinsky’s penchant for writing “long love letters to President Clinton” and her frequent midnight visits to the White House, where “she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57.”
The historical implications of the revelation cannot be overstated. It led Clinton, then already under investigation for sexually harassing Paula Jones, to lie to federal investigators and the American people regarding the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky. That infamous televised lie: “I did not have sex with that woman,” uttered just nine days after the initial Drudge report, led to Clinton’s eventual impeachment.
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