Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, and the Creepiest Literary Agent of all Time
Maybe it’s just me, but I thought we’d already heard all there was to the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton deal several times over. Maybe it’s just me but I honestly don’t care to hear about Lewinsky giving head to the President of the United States in the Oval Office anymore. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m also a little sick and tired of Vanity Fair publishing this content time and time again. This one is for the history books now, not for pop culture. It’s been done.
The reason I stopped reading Vanity Fair was because they printed a piece about Bill Clinton having affairs right about the same time Hillary Clinton was up against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary a few years back. The two candidates were back to back at that point, and then right after that ridiculous article in Vanity Fair Clinton fell behind. It may or may not have had anything to do with the primary, but I never forgot it. There was absolutely no viable reason for them to print that piece. At least not on the surface. And yet the timing was just too perfect.
In any event, good old Monica Lewinsky has surfaced yet once again and she’s now breaking her silence…once again. And she’s doing it in another gonzo piece for Vanity Fair. But that’s not all. Wait until you see who she compares herself to this time. If I hadn’t read it myself I wouldn’t have believed it.
Monica Lewinsky is opening up about her affair with former President Bill Clinton for the first time in years, sharing how the Internet has driven her and others to “global humiliation.”
Lewinsky, who penned an essay for Vanity Fair that will be available digitally on May 8 and on newsstands May 13, said she finally came forward about her experience because of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old who committed suicide after video of him kissing another man was broadcast online.
“[T]hanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet,” Lewinsky said.
Lewinsky said she and her mother were both disturbed by the circumstances surrounding Clementi’s death.
I’m not even going to comment on the way she compared herself to an innocent victim like Tyler Clementi. How she could have the audacity to capitalize on that passes me by. You can read the comment thread that goes with this article and many have already commented on this much better than I could. In fact, this is one comment thread that makes the whole thing worth while.
Side note: For those who don’t know, or weren’t around when all this went down, pardon the expression, with Monica Lewinsky, you should read this about Linda Tripp.
Tripp’s action in secretly recording Lewinsky’s confidential phone calls about her relationship with the President caused a sensation with their links to the earlier Jones v. Clinton lawsuit and with the disclosing of notably intimate details. However, Tripp claimed that her motives were purely patriotic, and she was able to avoid a wiretap charge in exchange for handing in the tapes. She then claimed that her firing from the Pentagon at the end of the Clinton administration was vindictive, but it was shown to be a standard routine. Still, she was able to claim generous compensation for unauthorized revelations about her security clearance.
And I don’t think anyone should ever forget about creepy literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, and the part she played in this entire mess.
Lucianne S. Goldberg (born Lucianne Steinberger; April 29, 1935), also known as Lucianne Cummings, is an American literary agent, author and the publisher of the website Lucianne.com. An avowed critic of U.S. President Bill Clinton, she helped bring the Lewinsky scandal to light, which triggered impeachment proceedings that nearly removed Clinton from office.
She’s one agent I never queried back then, and for valid reasons. She repped Kitty Kelly, the one who wrote the unauthorized biocrapography about Elizabeth Taylor. Kelly also wound up suing Goldberg and she won a nice sum thanks to what was referred to in court as Goldberg’s sloppy book-keeping. When you have an agent, authors, the agent gets your check and takes his or her 15% off before sending you your check…you don’t get paid first by the publisher and then you pay the agent. It’s the other way around. The agent gets paid first and you get a check from him/her. It’s always been done this way. It usually works out fine, unless of course you have a sloppy agent.
Goldberg has been running this odd right wing web site on the fringes for a long time now. I’m not too political, but this one web site screams creepy. The photo of her alone on her own site look as if it dates back to the early part of the last century.
Goldberg was a prominent presence on the conservative website, Free Republic in the late 1990s, posting under the name “Trixie”. She and other conservatives, including Matt Drudge, left the site when the webmaster, in Goldberg’s words, “let all the Y2K, gun-nut, Jew-baiting crazies take over [the forum] and flame the plain-old conservatives. She then founded her own website, Lucianne.com, and for a time, was a nationally syndicated talk radio host whose show featured a Washington correspondent.
But that’s not all there is to good old Lucianne/Trixie, agent and author and spy with multiple fake names. In a question and answer piece she did about two years ago this is what she said about gay marriage:
Cotto: One of the gravest concerns frequently cited with modern conservatism is the rise of hot-button social issues. What is your opinion about this?
Goldberg: If you mean same sex marriage, abortion, stem cell research on the unborn and gun control I don’t see them “rising.” We’ve never liked these ideas and never will. That’s consistent and unmoving.
Since that interview, there have been polls that suggest public opinion in general is moving toward acceptance of gay marriage and a good deal of that is because so many conservatives are gay, have gay family members, and want to go down on the right side of history now.
The photo on this web site with the interview is what good old Lucianne/Trixie looks like now.