Monica Lewinsky Describes Growing Up in Los Angeles—as She Joins Forces With Amanda Knox

Monica Lewinsky is back in the news, but it’s for her part in a new series, “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” which drops Wednesday on Hulu.

The woman who had an affair with then-President Bill Clinton and became known as “the former White House intern” has partnered with Amanda Knox as executive producers on the eight-part series.

In an interview with “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, Lewinsky said she saw Knox as “another woman who had suffered in the media, had been feasted on, on the world stage.”

Lewinsky’s life in the spotlight throughout the decades is not what the young woman who grew up in Beverly Hills, CA, imagined. She told The Wall Street Journal she comes “from a long line of strong women on both sides” of her family. She said that her first full sentence at 2 years old was “you’re not the boss of me.”

Lewinsky shared in the interview that her dad, Bernie, did a medical residency in London, when her mom, Marcia, was pregnant with Monica. She was born in 1973 and, at that time, the family moved to San Francisco where her dad was an Army doctor.

Eventually, the family moved to the Los Angeles area and settled in Beverly Hills, where her dad was an oncologist in private practice. During that time, Lewinsky’s mom had a baby boy.

She fondly recalls in the interview with the WSJ how the creative influences on her life came from both sides of the family. Lewinsky grew up painting, drawing, and cooking with her father, whom she described as an “amazing chef and baker.”

Lewinsky said they moved to a few different homes in Beverly Hills until they settled down in a $1.6 million, two-story, Spanish-style home when she was 7. Her grandmother lived in the guesthouse.

It was 1988 when her parents divorced. She was 14. “We weren’t the first family in school to experience this, but it was challenging and destabilizing,” Lewinsky said.

She went to Beverly Hills High School, but described the first couple of years as “complicated.” Lewinsky said the drama department was her refuge, but she was more interested in costume design. She transferred to Bel-Air Prep for her junior and senior years, describing it as “smaller and more manageable.”

Lewinsky said going to college at Lewis & Clark in Portland, OR, allowed her to find herself. “There was less pressure on how I looked, and more of my soul was able to flourish,” she says.

The summer after she graduated in 1995, a family friend recommended the White House internship program. She said her essay focused on her studies as a psychology major. “If psychology is the mind of the individual, the White House is the mind of the country,” wrote Lewinsky.

That caught the attention of recruiters, who gave her an unpaid position that Lewinsky describes as a “pit stop before going on for a Ph.D. in forensic psychology.” She now jokes that the White House internship looking good on her resume was the worst career advice she’s received.

Throughout the years, Lewinsky has quietly built her life and recently started speaking more about her time as a White House intern and her affair when she was just 24 years old.

When news of the scandal broke, Lewinsky stayed inside her mother’s apartment in the infamous Watergate building.

Earlier this year, she was candid during an interview with “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper, revealing for the first time that she believes Clinton should have “resigned” from his position when the world learned of the affair.

“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign,” she said.

Now, Lewinsky, 52, is the founder of Alt Ending Productions and host of a podcast titled “Reclaiming.” She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in L.A.

Behind the scenes

Lewinsky says she met Knox at a speaking engagement in 2017 where they shared stories of resilience.

Knox, 38, found herself in the headlines in 2007 when her roommate, Meredith Kercher, was murdered while the two students were studying abroad in Italy at the time. An Italian court convicted Knox of Kercher’s murder in 2009, along with Raffaele Sollecito—a fellow student Knox was dating at the time. Both convictions were overturned on appeal in 2011. Knox had served four years in prison.

During this time, Rudy Guede was found guilty of Kercher’s murder. He served 16 years in prison and was released in 2020.

But Italy’s highest court ordered a new trial for Knox and Sollecito in 2013 and both were re-convicted of murder in 2014, before the high court overturned the convictions the following year. Knox was acquitted in 2015.

Knox and Lewinsky both feel they share similarities. “We were both interrogated. We’ve both been, you know, viciously turned into characters of ourselves in the media,” Knox said in the GMA interview. “And I think that the thing that we actually were both most interested in was making sure that this show had a wider lens.”

The women said they made certain the project honors Kercher, who never returned to her family in London.