Lewinsky: 'I thought fling with Clinton would be fun'

Monica Lewinsky today spoke of how she first became involved in a relationship with former US president Bill Clinton in a tell-all documentary shown on American television.

She told of her first real encounter with Clinton when he invited her into his private office after she blurted out: ‘‘I have a crush on you.’’

Lewinsky said they had previously flirted.

And she said of starting the affair: ‘‘I thought it would be a fun fling, I thought whatever. I am young, he’s the president, he’s cute, it’s irresponsible but it’s cool.

‘‘And I didn’t really even think of him or see him as a real person. As I got to know him I saw him as a real person and started to have very real feelings about him - unfortunately.’’

The former White House intern described why she kept her now notorious navy blue dress with its incriminating stains.

Lewinsky said she originally put it away in her wardrobe before later getting it out again to try on.

She then realising it was stained and remembered she wore it the last time she was with Clinton.

She then kept ‘‘in the same way that people will cherish a sweaty T-shirt from a rock star from a concert.

‘‘It’s so weird but it was also a remembrance of what happened and it was a reminder of him.’’

Lewinsky said she was later encouraged by Linda Tripp - the confidante who would betray her by exposing the relationship after taping phone conversations - not to have the dress dry cleaned.

Dressed in a black trouser suit and white shirt, Lewinsky spoke in detail about her affair with Clinton as she appeared in a much-publicised HBO documentary called Monica in Black and White.

The 100-minute show featured 28-year-old Lewinsky sitting on a stage and answering questions from a New York collegiate audience.

She was paid for her participation in the documentary which followed the lifting of her immunity agreement with investigator Kenneth Starr.

Sometimes giggling, sometimes tearful, Lewinsky revealed her relationship with Clinton and how hurt she was by his suggestions that it was one-sided and that in effect she simply ‘‘serviced’’ him.

She said: ‘‘There was a big part of me that was so incredibly offended by how he described what happened.

‘‘He testified that I serviced him - that he didn’t touch me, I touched him.

‘‘People couldn’t call me a liar or a stalker but that didn’t change a lot of people’s image of me being a whore.’’

Lewinsky said she felt ‘‘abandoned’’ by Clinton, who initially claimed he never had any sexual relations with her and who, she claimed, encouraged the press stories which painted her as a predator.

‘‘He knows that most of the things that were said about me weren’t true and he not only allowed that to happen but encouraged that.’’

Lewinsky spoke of her belief that a previous relationship with a married man - her high school drama teacher Andy Bleiler, which began when she was a teenager - paved the way for her affair with the president.

‘‘It made me very comfortable with the notion that it was OK to be with a married man,’’ she said.

‘‘I think that if I had not had a previous relationship with a married man I don’t think that having a relationship with the president would have been familiar to me and been something I was comfortable with.’’

Lewinsky also told of the humiliation of having to give intimate details of her sexual encounters with Clinton to a grand jury during Starr’s investigation into the ex-president.

‘‘To have all that on interview for the entire world to read was pretty violating and embarrassing,’’ she said.