Wednesday, May 6, 2015

ELEVEN by Sandra Cisneros

ELEVEN
by Sandra Cisneros
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.
Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. Today I wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if I was one hundred and two I’d have known what to say when Mrs. Price put the red sweater on my desk. I would’ve known how to tell her it wasn’t mine instead of just sitting there with that look on my face and nothing coming out of my mouth.

 
“Whose is this?” Mrs. Price says, and she holds the red sweater up in the air for all the class to see. “Whose? It’s been sitting in the coatroom for a month.”
“Not mine,” says everybody. “Not me.”
“It has to belong to somebody, ”Mrs. Price keeps saying, but nobody can remember. It’s an ugly sweater with red plastic buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a jump rope. It’s maybe a thousand years old and even if it belonged to me I wouldn’t say so.
Maybe because I’m skinny, maybe because she doesn’t like me, that stupid Sylvia Saldivar says, “I think it belongs to Rachel.” An ugly sweater like that all raggedy and old, but Mrs. Price believes her. Mrs. Price takes the sweater and puts it right on my desk, but when I open my mouth nothing comes out.
“That’s not, I don’t, you’re not…Not mine.” I finally say in a little voice that was maybe me when I was four.
“Of course it’s yours, ”Mrs. Price says. “ I remember you wearing it once.” Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not.
Not mine, not mine, not mine, but Mrs. Price is already turning to page thirty-two, and math problem number four. I don’t know why but all of a sudden I’m feeling sick inside, like the part of me that’s three wants to come out of my eyes, only I squeeze them shut tight and bite down on my teeth real hard and try to remember today I am eleven, eleven. Mama is making a cake for me for tonight, and when Papa comes home everybody will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to you.
But when the sick feeling goes away and I open my eyes, the red sweater’s still sitting there like a big red mountain. I move the red sweater to the corner of my desk with my ruler. I move my pencil and books and eraser as far from it as possible. I even move my chair a little to the right. Not mine, not mine, not mine. In my head I’m thinking how long till lunchtime, how long till I can take the red sweater and throw it over the schoolyard fence, or leave it hanging on a parking meter, or bunch it up into a little ball and toss it in the alley. Except when math period ends Mrs. Price says loud and in front of everybody, “Now, Rachel, that’s enough, ”because she sees I’ve shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s hanging all over the edge like a waterfall, but I don’t care.
“Rachel, ”Mrs. Price says. She says it like she’s getting mad. “You put that sweater on right now and no more nonsense.”
“But it’s not –“
“Now!” Mrs. Price says.

 
This is when I wish I wasn’t eleven because all the years inside of me—ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one—are pushing at the back of my eyes when I put one arm through one sleeve of the sweater that smells like cottage cheese, and then the other arm through the other and stand there with my arms apart like if the sweater hurts me and it does, all itchy and full of germs that aren’t even mine.
That’s when everything I’ve been holding in since this morning, since when Mrs. Price put the sweater on my desk, finally lets go, and all of a sudden I’m crying in front of everybody. I wish I was invisible but I’m not. I’m eleven and it’s my birthday today and I’m crying like I’m three in front of everybody. I put my head down on the desk and bury my face in my stupid clown-sweater arms. My face all hot and spit coming out of my mouth because I can’t stop the little animal noises from coming out of me until there aren’t any more tears left in my eyes, and it’s just my body shaking like when you have the hiccups, and my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.
But the worst part is right before the bell rings for lunch. That stupid Phyllis Lopez, who is even dumber than Sylvia Saldivar, says she remembers the red sweater is hers. I take it off right away and give it to her, only Mrs. Price pretends like everything’s okay.
Today I’m eleven. There’s a cake Mama’s making for tonight and when Papa comes home from work we’ll eat it. There’ll be candles and presents and everybody will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to you, Rachel, only it’s too late.
I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven. Because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny—tiny you have to close your eyes to see it.


Did the Princeton Preppy Murder His Hedge-Fund Dad?

The January killing of hedge-fund manager Thomas Gilbert Sr., allegedly by his 30-year-old son, Thomas Gilbert Jr., stunned New York society. For many in the younger man’s circle, however, it wasn’t such a shock. Benjamin Wallace charts the implosion of a silver-spoon life.
For the past 11 summers, the village of Sagaponack, on the eastern end of Long Island, has been the site of a Monday-night ritual hippie-ishly incongruous with the moneyed community of homeowners in this part of the Hamptons. At Sagg Main Beach, a flat, broad ribbon of sand dividing the Atlantic Ocean from Sagaponack Pond, the crowds begin to gather near six P.M., when a small circle of musicians starts pounding out Brazilian music on drums and sleigh bells, and beachgoers cluster around to listen and dance and take in the sunset with a beer.
Last September 1, at a drum circle near the end of the season, 32-year-old Peter Smith was hanging out with family and friends when he saw a face at once familiar and unwelcome. Smith’s family had been coming to Sagaponack since 1973; his father, a retired Lazard Frères banker, had bought a historic house just down the road from the beach. The house had a timber frame and gabled roof, and part of it dated to the 1600s; Mr. Smith (also named Peter) was house-proud, often seen in a painter’s cap and tool belt as he devoted countless hours to the home’s meticulous restoration. But it was no museum piece, instead serving as a hub for loved ones and the larger community, including friends like Louis Malle, Larry Rivers, and former roommate Oliver Stone, and for years it was the site of an annual blowout summer party that drew as many as 800 people.

Gilbert at his arraignment in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on February 5, 2015.
By Steven Hirsch.
Peter the younger, a co-founder and C.O.O. of a shop-local e-commerce start-up called MadeClose, was popular and sociable, but when Tommy Gilbert approached him on the beach that evening, he was terrified, friends of Smith’s say. (Smith declined to be interviewed.) Only two years earlier, the young men had been friends, with much in common. Both had attended the elite Buckley boys’ school, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Both came from families who belonged to the insular Wasp preserve known as the Maidstone Club, in East Hampton. Both loved to surf. For a time, they had been roommates in Brooklyn.
But then Gilbert had developed an obsessive vendetta against Smith, according to mutual friends, which culminated in a brutal attack on the street in October of 2013 that put Smith in the hospital and led him to obtain an order of protection against Gilbert. Now, though, nearly a year later, as vaguely tribal rhythms competed with the crashing surf for the crowd’s attention, Gilbert, in violation of the order of protection, “literally came out of the darkness,” someone close to Smith says, and ominously told Smith it was his last chance to have the order rescinded and be his friend once more. As others physically blocked Gilbert from Smith, “he was trying to get Peter to leave the crowd and walk down the dark, desolate beach with him, away from the bonfires and people.”
.
Four months later, the Smith house on Sagg Main Street would be in ashes, Gilbert’s father dead with a bullet wound in his head, Tommy in jail, and large swaths of New York society horrified and bewildered.

“A LITTLE BIT OFF”

On paper, Tommy Gilbert seemed sprung from the daydreams of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He grew up in what his father called “a small mansion” in Tuxedo Park, New York, and then at various tony Manhattan addresses (a Park Avenue apartment, a town house on East 61st Street). He was the son of an investment banker and a former debutante and was raised in an environment of extreme privilege. From Buckley, he’d gone to Deerfield Academy, then Princeton. He was a strapping six feet three inches, gym-bodied and catalogue-model-handsome, with a man-bun-worthy sweep of blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Anyone glancing at the galleries of black-tie society pictures online would have seen a dashing man-about-town, seemingly at ease among his fellow swells.
But those trappings concealed a less gilded truth. Thirty years old and five years out of college, Gilbert seemed never to have a full-time job and was on an allowance from his parents reported to have been $600 a week plus the $2,400 monthly rent for his modest apartment on West 18th Street, in Chelsea. He told friends about having come up with an algorithm that was earning him a living as a day trader and spoke of starting a hedge fund, even filing papers with the S.E.C. last May to register a hedge fund he named Mameluke Capital, but his Wall Street talk appears to have gotten ahead of itself. He had failed the Chartered Financial Analyst Level II exam—a helpful credential for Wall Street work—not once but twice, he confided to a female friend. “It seemed like something his heart wasn’t really in or he cared to pass,” she says. “When I asked him about it, he didn’t seem like he was even studying.” That didn’t make him unique, as an old Buckley school-mate who met Gilbert for drinks at the Stumble Inn, on East 76th Street, two Christmases ago says: “Growing up on the Upper East Side, he’s not the only kid to be 30 and still supported by his parents. He seemed like a guy who was a failure to launch.” Adds another Buckley alumnus in Gilbert’s circle, “When you heard him say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a hedge fund I’m working on,’ you were like, Yeah, clearly that’s not happening, ‘cause having a very social conversation in your backyard is high-pressure for you.”
Other than his looks, it was Gilbert’s social unease, more than anything, that made an impression. In recent years, many people meeting him for the first time found Gilbert quiet to the point of strange. He would respond to polite questions with awkward silence, have trouble making eye contact, and show obvious discomfort when talking with strangers. Women initially magnetized by his beauty would lose interest after five minutes of labored conversation. He did odd things: this past November, at a cocktail fund-raiser for the Harbor Science & Arts Charter School at the Hotel Americano, in Chelsea, he was the only person wearing a tuxedo. Someone who knew the Gilbert family through the Maidstone describes Tommy as “a little bit off…. He just had a blank stare and was never animated. He’d almost sound scripted, which made me think maybe he was on a mood leveler.”
The Buckley School’s student council in 2000.
He hadn’t always been so. At Buckley, he’d been verbose and cocky, a member of the student council and starting running back and captain of the football team at a school that emphasizes athletics. He was, in the words of a former school-mate, “a golden boy.” It was after he went to Deerfield, in northwestern Massachusetts, that something changed. “That’s when I first started hearing stories about him,” another ex-Buckleyite says. Kids who, along with Gilbert, had gone from Buckley to Deerfield began relating anecdotes of how, when they approached their old friend at the boarding school to talk, “he’d literally run away.”
At Princeton, he majored in economics, writing a senior thesis titled “The Word Effect: Effects of the Word Content in the Financial Times on Firms’ Earnings in the U.K.,” but his degree was also not without an asterisk. He had taken six years to graduate, which may or may not have had something to do with an incident on May 8, 2007, four weeks before Gilbert was originally slated to receive his diploma. That afternoon, he was arrested by Princeton Borough Police and charged with possession of cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms and with third-degree aggravated assault for attacking an emergency-first-aid worker who was tending to him, according to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, which was unable to provide further details. Gilbert entered New Jersey’s pre-trial intervention program, upon the successful completion of which, in September 2008, the assault charge was dismissed. It took him until the spring of 2009 to finally get his degree.
Still, according to people who socialized with him, Gilbert lacked close friends, and in the summer of 2012, in the Hamptons, Peter Smith befriended him. With their shared Buckley-Maidstone pedigree and love of surfing, Smith took Gilbert under his wing, inviting him to live with him in his row-house apartment, in Williamsburg. When others called Gilbert strange, it was Smith who came to his defense. When others left Gilbert off of invitations, it was Smith who went out of his way to include him. It was in his relationship with Peter Smith, however, that Gilbert’s unraveling would find a disturbing and violent focus.
At first, being roommates was uneventful. Gilbert’s anger, when it surfaced, was directed at his father, friends of Smith’s say; he’d regularly rant about how mean and controlling he was. But then Gilbert and Smith went on a surfing trip to Costa Rica, and there Gilbert was erratic, according to these friends, leveling accusations that Smith had been flirting with a young socialite named Lizzy Fraser, a Barnard graduate once dubbed “the ghost of Edie Sedgwick reincarnate” by Gawker, whom Gilbert had dated and remained interested in. (“Peter had zero interest in her,” a knowledgeable source says.) Friends say after they returned to Brooklyn, Gilbert’s angry behavior continued; he’d shout at his father over the phone and slam doors. Smith, growing alarmed, and having decided to invite his girlfriend to live with him, asked Gilbert to move out.
The Smith family’s house in Sagaponack before a fire destroyed it, on September 15, 2014.
From PatrickMcMullan.com.
Gilbert did not react to the eviction peaceably, by two accounts. Smith was spending a lot of time at a second house in Sagaponack owned by his family, working to launch his start-up in the company of a small team of colleagues and a recently acquired puppy named Rocket, a highly energetic Weimaraner, with which Smith, adhering to the instruction of a dog trainer, was sometimes strict. One day, Gilbert showed up at the house and, a friend says, began “freaking out on” Smith, accusing him of abusing the dog. Not long after, according to several sources, Gilbert showed up at the house again and stole a flagpole from out front; the next day, he returned and impaled the front door with it. The Smiths didn’t call the police, because the family was hoping it could be resolved privately.
For months, Smith had been telling family and mutual friends about Gilbert’s behavior, and almost invariably they thought he must be exaggerating. “Peter was the only one who had seen the frightening and dangerous side of Tommy, and nobody took it seriously,” a source says. “Nobody thought this handsome, well-educated, privileged Princeton man was capable of violence.” Gilbert’s looks may have gotten him a pass. “If Tommy looked like me,” says a friend, “people would have thought he was an insane person fairly quickly.”
The skeptics were silenced on the evening of October 3, 2013. That night, both Gilbert and Smith had been invited to attend the premiere of And After All, a short film co-produced by their friend Jack Bryan and starring Annabelle Dexter-Jones (and in which Gilbert appeared as an extra), but as Smith emerged onto the street from his building near Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg, Gilbert stepped out of the darkness and jumped him, Smith later told police, slamming Smith’s head repeatedly against the pavement. Afterward, Smith called James Bohannon and texted him a picture of his face. Gilbert had broken his nose and given him a concussion. Bohannon also spoke with Gilbert that night: “I said, ‘What are you doing? Peter’s our friend. We’ve known him our whole life. This is where you can make a decision either way.’ ” Gilbert didn’t respond. “That was the odd thing. He didn’t defend it at all. He just said, ‘Peter’s crazy—you don’t understand.’ ” Another friend who spoke with both men that night says, “When I was talking to Tommy on the phone, the thing that made me think, This guy’s not on this earth and possibly dangerous, was the flag thing”—Gilbert was “aggressively manic” in describing the incident, with “repetitive language, contradictions, raw anger, all in one diatribe.” After being attacked in Williamsburg, Smith filed for and was granted the order of protection.
Even then, Gilbert seemed not to appreciate the gravity of what he’d done. “Afterwards,” another source says, “Tommy was like, ‘Hey, buddy, why can’t we be friends? Hey, buddy, friends fight.’ Peter was terrified.” The rest of their social circle finally started taking what Smith had been telling them seriously. “For no reason,” Bohannon says, “Tommy was creating this insane idea in his head that Peter was out to get him. Everyone knew this was out of nowhere. It just definitely seemed like some sort of mental event was going on that was scary.”
“That was a real turning point in everybody’s association with Tommy,” echoes another friend. “I don’t know a lot of people who hung out with him after that.”

THE TOMMY SITUATION

If Thomas Gilbert Jr. had an enviable education, Thomas Gilbert Sr. was a person of exalted position. The second of two sons of Abner Gilbert, a textiles-machinery executive who’d been C.E.O. of Cutting Room Appliances Corporation, in New York, Tom Gilbert Sr. was an Andover-Princeton-Harvard man. At 70, he ran a hedge fund, lived on Manhattan’s Beekman Place—where he and his wife, Shelley, had raised both Tommy and a younger daughter, Clare—owned a summer home in the gated Georgica Association, in Wainscott, and, besides belonging to the Maidstone, was a member of the exclusive River Club, on East 52nd Street.
In college, as in later life, Tom senior had been known for being exceptionally put-together in his dress, complementing his wide-wale corduroys with saddle shoes. At Princeton, he was a first-string center halfback in soccer and also a varsity squash player. Lanny Jones, who’d go on to become the managing editor of People, was on the soccer team and in the Colonial eating club with Gilbert and remembers him as “an elegant guy. He had a certain Gatsby-esque quality, and I don’t mean that negatively at all. He was a gentleman, a throwback.” Later in life, Gilbert took part in squash tournaments as far away as Kuala Lumpur and played the archaic racket sport known as court tennis. He wasn’t too stuffy to quip, in notes to fellow Princeton alumni, that his wife’s occupation was variously “Housewife, Consort,” and “The Boss of Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert and Gilbert & Company.” But it was also clear that he was someone for whom pedigree was of signal importance: even at 70, he still listed in his accomplishments an award from Andover for the highest academic achievements of any entering freshman.
Firefighters battle the blaze at the Smith house; Gilbert is “a person of interest.”
By Michael Heller.
Appearances were deceiving in his case, too, for he was evidently feeling money pressure. His career path had meandered, starting on Wall Street (eventually with the old-line investment bank Loeb Partners), but in recent years he had jumped from one entrepreneurial venture to the next and wound up at the unlikely destination, at his age, of starting his first hedge fund. The Gilberts still lived on the East Side but in less grand circumstances than just a few years earlier, having moved from the town house on East 61st Street to a one-bedroom apartment on Beekman Place that rented for $6,000 a month. The hedge fund, three years after launch, had only $7.3 million under management, a pittance in that world. The Georgica house was up for sale, and last year Gilbert Sr. took out a $4 million equity loan against it. (In an S.E.C. filing the year the hedge fund began, Gilbert reported having raised a total of just $575,000 from three investors, so it’s possible the money was to be an infusion to boost the fund’s nominal size.) When his estate recently went to probate, in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, its value was revealed as $1.6 million, a shockingly small amount for someone with his social affiliations who’d made a career on Wall Street. In the last year, he seemed stressed, and a Hamptons resident who had dealings with him goes as far as to say, “I think he was a failed person who didn’t have the resources to maintain that lifestyle.” (The Gilbert family did not respond to requests for interviews.)
It’s unclear what steps, if any, Gilbert’s parents were taking to deal with their son’s escalating violence. Rothschild says he told her that he’d been on Xanax for his anxiety years earlier, and that he’d undergone a lot of psychotherapy since; other sources say Gilbert had been on some kind of psychiatric medication within the last year, and reportedly he saw a psychiatrist as recently as December. “Tommy is somebody who got a really textbook example of mental illness,” says someone who has known him since childhood, and who spoke with him about the medications he was on. “He’s a sweet, high-achieving guy who was taken down by chemicals in his brain.”
Among his and Peter Smith’s circle of friends, over the past year and a half, “the Tommy situation” was never far from their thoughts. In the year after Gilbert assaulted Smith in Williamsburg, the local S.P.C.A. showed up over and over at the Sagaponack house where Smith was working, having received phone calls warning that a dog was being abused there. It was obvious to Smith and mutual friends that Gilbert had placed the calls. “That was completely preposterous,” Bohannon says of the idea that Smith would treat the dog poorly. “I actually adopted it from foster care and gave it to Peter. He took amazing care of it.” After yet another of the S.P.C.A. visits, says a different friend, “Peter confronted Tommy’s dad and said, ‘You’ve got to figure out your fucking son ‘cause he’s a crazy person.’ It was always: ‘Tommy’s Tommy—what are you going to do? Hahaha.’ But I think in private he really gave it to Tommy.”
Thomas Gilbert Jr. and then girlfriend Briana Swanson pose with the Nesquik bunny in Manhattan in July 2014.
A childhood friend remembers a 13th-birthday party in Locust Valley with a small group that included Tommy Gilbert, where “Tommy brought the fireworks, and that was fine—we’d arranged it ahead of time. But the fireworks were the thing we got caught for. They were loud.” The birthday boy’s “parents were like, What the fuck? We said Tommy brought them. Tommy’s parents refused to believe it. They said, ‘No. We asked him—he said no. We don’t think it happened.’ So there was a tendency, when Tommy would do something extreme, for them to underplay it. I don’t know if that was just their way of dealing publicly, and internally they were harsh about it.”
By last spring, Gilbert’s violence wasn’t directed only at Smith. He went to sleep for several hours in the Maidstone men’s locker room one day, and when a golf pro asked him to leave, other members say, Gilbert threatened to kill him and he was banned from the club indefinitely. Then last summer, on the evening of July 5, Bohannon’s band, Mr. Badger, was playing at Stephen Talkhouse, a popular Amagansett bar with live music. Gilbert was there, and before the band went on, Bohannon spoke briefly with him. “He seemed on edge.” Before the night was up, Gilbert had assaulted two of their mutual friends—Bosco Diaz and Timmy Briggs—attempting to choke one before being pulled off by bouncers and ejected from the bar, according to friends of all three men. He managed to re-enter and attack a second time, and was then thrown out for good. Once again, the issue had been Lizzy Fraser.

A FIRE IN THE HAMPTONS

Gilbert had lived a more marginal existence in the past year: he was estranged from his old circle of friends, his ties to his own family frayed, his finances precarious, his employment nonexistent, even his housing in jeopardy. According to a friend, he was living in his parents’ Georgica house without their permission. In March, Gilbert Sr. called the police after finding the thermostat turned up and a stain on a rug on the second floor. Rothschild recalls that the only time she saw Gilbert receive a phone call in the months that they dated was when his mother called to ask if he’d been at the Hamptons house, because the alarm had gone off.
By May, the relationship with Rothschild had run its course, and through a mutual friend he met a woman named Briana Swanson, a chef who’d appeared briefly on Gordon Ramsay’s reality show Hell’s Kitchen.Within weeks of meeting, she had moved into Gilbert’s Chelsea apartment, where, according to a knowledgeable source, she soon saw firsthand the fraught mixture of family dysfunction and financial anxiety that consumed him. He told her he had permission from his parents to build a small cabin on their property in Georgica, and they camped a couple of nights in a tent on the beach nearby while he spent the days clearing brush from the site, but his parents were renting out the house, and he had to abort the project after the tenant arrived and asked him what he was doing. Gilbert and Swanson ended up leasing an apartment in Amagansett instead, but he was often a week late with his part of the rent.
Sometimes, their relationship was normal. He’d surf for hours while she read on the beach. He’d work up a huge appetite through his strenuous activity, and she’d cook for him. He could be affectionate, walking over to kiss her, putting his arm around her even as he drove his Jeep, giving her his ice-cream Snickers after she dropped hers. He could also be intensely private. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near his computer, according to a source, nor near either of the small safes he kept in the Amagansett and Chelsea apartments. He talked about modeling or acting, and sometimes videotaped himself reading parts, but it was clear that these efforts weren’t leading to any work.
Socialite Lizzy Fraser, a former girlfriend of Gilbert’s, at a fund-raiser in New York in 2010.
From PatrickMcMullan.com.
Gilbert made no secret of the tensions with his family. On Father’s Day, he didn’t call his father, and he reportedly last spoke with his parents in August. He and Swanson never went to the Maidstone, a source says, though Gilbert didn’t mention that he’d been banned. He told Swanson about the order of protection Smith had against him, which upset him because it meant he couldn’t see a lot of his friends. He mentioned, one time when he’d grown especially quiet, that he was trying out a new medication. According to later reports, he fretted because his father had told him he was going to whittle down his weekly allowance to $400 or even $300.
After the Stephen Talkhouse incident, Gilbert’s paranoia began to increase around Swanson too, a knowledgeable source says. She’d wake up to find him scrolling through her texts. He’d accuse her of being in cahoots with his old friends, of flirting with men he had introduced her to, of “messing” with him. But it was Peter Smith, once again, on whom Gilbert would destructively fixate. After Gilbert confronted Smith on the beach on Labor Day, and although his actions constituted a violation of the order of protection, Smith didn’t go to the police. That would change two weeks later.
At 5:35 A.M. on September 15, a ground-floor window was broken at the Smith house at 850 Sagg Main Street, triggering an alarm. Ten minutes later, the house, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was an inferno. At 5:42 A.M., the Bridgehampton Fire Department responded, and it was soon joined by the Sag Harbor, Southampton, and East Hampton Fire Departments, as well as 75 volunteer firefighters. The house was too hot for them to enter, so the firemen fought the fire from outside, taking around three hours to extinguish it. By then the south side of the house had burned to the ground, and the north side, though still standing, was severely damaged. (The Smiths would eventually have the whole site bulldozed.)
A neighbor reported seeing a man in the cemetery across the street, watching the fire from among the tombstones, and investigators later found a gas can and gas-soaked rags there. The Smiths and those familiar with what they had been going through strongly suspected that Gilbert must have done it. Most concerning, at the day and time the house was set on fire, Peter would usually have been there sleeping. Smith now informed police of Gilbert’s approach on the beach two weeks earlier, and on September 18, as Gilbert was driving on North Wainscott Road, East Hampton police stopped him and charged him with violating the order.
He was released, but he was now a person of interest in the fire investigation, particularly after the police spoke with Briana Swanson. A knowledgeable source says Swanson had arrived in the Hamptons on the 13th, and the next morning, before she’d even removed her bag from his car, Gilbert suggested they go to lunch. Once they were in the car, though, Gilbert drove her to the train station instead, telling her to go back to the city—he needed space; he needed to work. On the 18th, Swanson, unaware of the fire three days earlier, tried calling and texting Gilbert and was unable to reach him. When she saw him in the city a few days later, he explained that he’d been arrested for violating the order of protection. Gilbert didn’t say anything about a fire.
A few days later, they broke up after Swanson arrived back at the Chelsea apartment and saw a flirty text exchange with another woman on Gilbert’s tablet. She left the apartment with her clothes in garbage bags, texting a friend who told her about the fire for the first time. Later, according to several people with knowledge of the events, Swanson told investigators that the rags found in the cemetery across from the Smith house in Sagaponack appeared to match a set of purple bedsheets Gilbert had recently bought.

HANDCUFFS AND HOLLOW-POINTS


On January 4, Tommy Gilbert went to his parents’ apartment building at 20 Beekman Place, took the elevator to the eighth floor, and persuaded his mother to go out and buy him a sandwich. He wanted to speak with his father, who just an hour earlier had played doubles at the River Club. Shortly after, neighbors heard a gunshot, and his mother, returning to the apartment because of what she reportedly told police was “a bad feeling,” found her husband in their bedroom, on his back between the bed and the wall near the windows, dead with a single bullet hole in his head and his hand clasping a .40-caliber Glock pistol on his chest. Police believed this to have been an attempt to stage the scene as a suicide, and when they arrested Tommy Gilbert late that night, after breaking down the door of his Chelsea apartment, they found a disturbing collection of items, including hollow-point bullets, a red-dot laser gunsight, handcuffs, and a credit-card-skimming device along with 21 blank white credit cards.
Gilbert on the beach in Montauk in May 2014.
Since then, Gilbert’s onetime friends and school-mates, people who grew up to believe that if you went to certain schools and belonged to certain clubs and looked a certain way you could reliably be expected to conform to certain rules of behavior, have wondered what, if anything, could have been done to avert the terrible recent events. In the months before Thomas Gilbert Sr. died, a lot of people had become afraid of his son. It was openly known, among what one social acquaintance estimates as “150 to 400 people,” that Gilbert was under suspicion for the fire at the Smith house in Sagaponack. Briana Swanson was so frightened that in October she fled town, going home to Iowa but telling Gilbert she was going south; according to a knowledgeable source, she actually detoured through South Carolina and posted pictures on Facebook of the cabin where she was staying, then un-friended him, so that as far as he knew she was still in South Carolina. “We knew that unless he got help something bad was going to happen,” Bohannon says. “I had no question someone was going to get killed,” says another friend.
On February 5, Gilbert, who had been held at the Rikers Island jail since his arrest on a charge of second-degree murder, was escorted into a Lower Manhattan courtroom for his arraignment with his hands cuffed behind his back. Asked by Judge Melissa Jackson what plea he wished to enter, Gilbert paused briefly before saying, in an assertive voice: “Not guilty.” His hair and beard had been roughly trimmed since his last hearing, and he was wearing an orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit; as news photographers with telephoto lenses took his picture, his attorney, from the high-profile defense firm of Brafman & Associates, asked the court to disallow cameras on the grounds both that Gilbert’s inelegant appearance was “prejudicial” and that this was a circumstantial case with no eyewitnesses, so propagation of his image could muddy the waters should a witness later come forward. “Counsel, please,” the judge said with an almost audible eye roll, noting widespread news coverage of the case as she denied the application.
The Smith family have told friends that they hope to rebuild their Sagaponack home exactly as it was.


Monica Lewinsky on the Culture of Humiliation - Vanity Fair

She tried public appearances. She tried being reclusive. She tried leaving the country, and she tried finding a job. But the epic humiliation of 1998, when her affair with Bill Clinton became an all-consuming story, has followed Monica Lewinsky every day. After 10 years of self-imposed reticence, and now hoping to help victims of Internet shaming, she critiques the culture that put a 24-year-old through the wringer and calls out the feminists who joined the chorus.
‘How does it feel to be America’s premier blow-job queen?”
It was early 2001. I was sitting on the stage of New York’s Cooper Union in the middle of taping a Q&A for an HBO documentary. I was the subject. And I was thunderstruck.
Hundreds of people in the audience, mostly students, were staring at me, many with their mouths agape, wondering if I would dare to answer this question.
The main reason I had agreed to participate in the program was not to rehash or revise the story line of Interngate but to try to shift the focus to meaningful issues. Many troubling political and judicial questions had been brought to light by the investigation and impeachment of President Bill Clinton. But the most egregious had been generally ignored. People seemed indifferent to the deeper matters at hand, such as the erosion of private life in the public sphere, the balance of power and gender inequality in politics and media, and the erosion of legal protections to ensure that neither a parent nor a child should ever have to testify against each other.

How naïve I was.
There were gasps and sputters from the audience. Numerous blurred, faceless people called out, “Don’t answer it!
“It’s hurtful and it’s insulting,” I said, attempting to gather my wits. “And as insulting as it is to me, it’s even more insulting to my family. I don’t actually know why this whole story became about oral sex. I don’t. It was a mutual relationship.… The fact that it did is maybe a result of a male-dominated society.”
The audience laughed. Maybe they were surprised to hear these words coming from me.
I looked straight at the smirking guy who had asked the question. “You might be better poised to answer that.” After a pause, I added, “That’s probably cost me another year of therapy.”
You could argue that in agreeing to participate in an HBO documentary called Monica in Black and White I had signed up to be shamed and publicly humiliated yet again. You might even think I would have been inured to humiliation. This encounter at Cooper Union, after all, paled in comparison with the 445-page Starr Report, which was the culmination of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s four-year investigation of the Clinton White House. It included chapter and verse about my intimate sexual activities, along with transcripts of audiotapes that chronicled many of my private conversations. But the “B.J. Queen” question—which was included in the show when it aired on HBO in 2002—sat with me for a long time after the audience left and the taping wrapped.
True, this wasn’t the first time I’d been stigmatized for my affair with Bill Clinton. But never had I been so directly confronted, one-on-one, with such a crass characterization. One of the unintended consequences of my agreeing to put myself out there and to try to tell the truth had been that shame would once again be hung around my neck like a scarlet-A albatross. Believe me, once it’s on, it is a bitch to take off.
Had that awkward moment at Cooper Union aired only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating. That clip would have gone viral on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TMZ, Gawker. It would have become a meme of its own on Tumblr. The viralness itself would have merited mention on the Daily Beast and Huffington Post. As it was, it was viral enough, and, thanks to the all-encompassing nature of the Web, you can, 12 years later, watch it all day long on YouTube if you want to (but I really hope you have better things to do with your time).
I know I’m not alone when it comes to public humiliation. No one, it seems, can escape the unforgiving gaze of the Internet, where gossip, half-truths, and lies take root and fester. We have created, to borrow a term from historian Nicolaus Mills, a “culture of humiliation” that not only encourages and revels in Schadenfreude but also rewards those who humiliate others, from the ranks of the paparazzi to the gossip bloggers, the late-night comedians, and the Web “entrepreneurs” who profit from clandestine videos.
Yes, we’re all connected now. We can tweet a revolution in the streets or chronicle achievements large and small. But we’re also caught in a feedback loop of defame and shame, one in which we have become both perps and victims. We may not have become a crueler society—although it sure feels as if we have—but the Internet has seismically shifted the tone of our interactions. The ease, the speed, and the distance that our electronic devices afford us can also make us colder, more glib, and less concerned about the consequences of our pranks and prejudice. Having lived humiliation in the most intimate possible way, I marvel at how willingly we have all signed on to this new way of being.
In my own case, each easy click of that YouTube link reinforces the archetype, despite my efforts to parry it away: Me, America’s B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, “That Woman.”
It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.
In 1998, when news of my affair with Bill Clinton broke, I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world. Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.
For several years I tried my hand in the fashion-accessory business and became involved in various media projects, including the HBO documentary. Then I lay low for the most part. (The last major interview I granted was 10 years ago.) After all, not lying low had exposed me to criticism for trying to “capitalize” on my “notoriety.” Apparently, others talking about me is O.K.; me speaking out for myself is not. I turned down offers that would have earned me more than $10 million, because they didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Over time, the media circus quieted down, but it never quite moved on, even as I attempted to move on.
Meanwhile, I watched my friends’ lives move forward. Marriages. Kids. Degrees. (Second marriages. More kids. More degrees.) I decided to turn over a new leaf and attend grad school.
I moved to England to study, to challenge myself, to escape scrutiny, and to reimagine my identity. My professors and fellow students at the London School of Economics were wonderful—welcoming and respectful. I had more anonymity in London, perhaps due to the fact that I spent most of my waking hours in class or buried in the library. In 2006, I graduated with a master’s in social psychology. My master’s thesis examined social bias in the courtroom and was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of Pretrial Publicity and the Third Person Effect.” I liked to joke that I was trading the blue dress for blue stockings, and the degree provided new scaffolding to hang my life experiences on. It would also prove, so I hoped, to be a gateway to a more normal life.
I moved between London, Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Oregon, interviewing for a variety of jobs that fell under the umbrella of “creative communication” and “branding,” with an emphasis on charity campaigns. Yet, because of what potential employers so tactfully referred to as my “history,” I was never “quite right” for the position. In some cases, I was right for all the wrong reasons, as in “Of course, your job would require you to attend our events.” And, of course, these would be events at which press would be in attendance.
In one promising job interview that took place during the run-up to the 2008 primary season, the conversation took an interesting turn. “So here’s the thing, Monica,” the interviewer said. “You’re clearly a bright young woman and affable, but for us—and probably any other organization that relies on grants and other government funding—it’s risky. We would first need a Letter of Indemnification from the Clintons. After all, there is a 25 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton will be the next president.” I gave a fake smile and said, “I understand.”
Another job interview, this one typical: walked into the stark, terminally cool reception area of a hip-yet-prestigious advertising agency in Los Angeles, my hometown. As always, I put on my best “I’m friendly, not a diva” smile. “Hi. Monica Lewinsky here to see So-and-So.”
The twentysomething receptionist pushed her black-rimmed hipster frames up her nose. “Monica who?
Before I could answer, another twentysomething, in skinny jeans, plaid shirt, and bow tie, rushed over and interrupted: “ Ms. Lewinsky.” Like a maître d’, he continued, “Pleasure to have you here. I’ll let So-and-So know you’ve arrived. Soy latte? Green tea? Filtered water?”
I found myself sitting at a small round table, face-to-face with So-and-So, the agency’s head of strategy and planning. We talked. She kept wincing. This was not going well. I tried to keep myself from getting flustered. Now she was not only wincing but also clearing her throat. Was that perspiration on her brow? It hit me: she was nervous, in full-tic mode.
I’ve had to become adept at handling any number of reactions in social situations and job interviews. I get it: it must be disconcerting to sit across from “That Woman.” Needless to say, I didn’t get the position.
I eventually came to realize that traditional employment might not be an option for me. I’ve managed to get by (barely, at times) with my own projects, usually with start-ups that I have participated in, or with loans from friends and family.
In another job interview I was asked, “If you were a brand, which brand would you be?” Let me tell you, when you’re Monica Lewinsky, that is one loaded question.
In September of 2010, the culmination of these experiences began to snap into a broader context for me. A phone conversation with my mother shifted the lens through which I viewed my world. We were discussing the tragic death of Tyler Clementi. Tyler, you will recall, was an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who was secretly streamed via Webcam kissing another man. Days later, after being derided and humiliated on social media, he committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
My mom wept. Sobbing, she kept repeating over and over, “How his parents must feel … his poor parents.”
It was an unbearably tragic event, and while hearing of it brought me to tears, too, I couldn’t quite grasp why my mom was so distraught. And then it dawned on me: she was reliving 1998, when she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She was replaying those weeks when she stayed by my bed, night after night, because I, too, was suicidal. The shame, the scorn, and the fear that had been thrown at her daughter left her afraid that I would take my own life—a fear that I would be literally humiliated to death. (I have never actually attempted suicide, but I had strong suicidal temptations several times during the investigations and during one or two periods after.)
I would never be so presumptuous as to equate my own story with Tyler Clementi’s. After all, my public humiliation had been the result of my involvement with a world-renowned public figure—that is, a consequence of my own poor choices. But in that moment, when I felt the depths of my mother’s anguish, I wished I could have had a chance to have spoken to Tyler about how my love life, my sex life, my most private moments, my most sensitive secrets, had been broadcast around the globe. I wished I had been able to say to him that I knew a little of how it might have felt for him to be exposed before the world. And, as hard as it is to imagine surviving it, it is possible.
In the wake of Tyler’s tragedy, my own suffering took on a different meaning. Perhaps by sharing my story, I reasoned, I might be able to help others in their darkest moments of humiliation. The question became: How do I find and give a purpose to my past? It was my Prufrockian moment: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” Or, in my case, the Clinton universe.
Despite a decade of self-imposed silence, I have been periodically resuscitated as part of the national conversation, almost always in connection with the Clintons. For instance, in January and February of this year, Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and a possible 2016 Republican presidential aspirant, managed to drag me into the pre-election muck. He fought back against the Democrats’ charges of a G.O.P. “war on women” by arguing that Bill Clinton had committed workplace “violence” and acted in a “predatory” manner against “a 20-year-old girl who was there from college.”
Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any “abuse” came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.
So, trying to disappear has not kept me out of the fray. I am, for better or for worse, presumed to be a known quantity. Every day I am recognized. Every day. Sometimes a person will walk past me again and again, as if I wouldn’t notice. (Thankfully, 99.9 percent of the time when strangers do say something to me they are supportive and respectful.) Every day someone mentions me in a tweet or a blog post, and not altogether kindly. Every day, it seems, my name shows up in an op-ed column or a press clip or two—mentioned in passing in articles on subjects as disparate as millennials, Scandal, and French president François Hollande’s love life. Miley Cyrus references me in her twerking stage act, Eminem raps about me, and Beyoncé’s latest hit gives me a shout-out. Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant “Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,” not “Monica Lewinsky’d.”
With every man I date (yes, I date!), I go through some degree of 1998 whiplash. I need to be extremely circumspect about what it means to be “public” with someone. In the early years post-impeachment, I once left a front-row seat along the third-base line at a Yankees game when I learned that my date—a guy whose company I thoroughly enjoyed—was actually in another relationship. It was only a green-card marriage, but I freaked that we could be photographed together and someone might call the gossip rags. I’ve become adept at figuring out when men are interested in me for the wrong reason. Thankfully, those have been few and far between. But every man that has been special to me over the past 16 years has helped me find another piece of myself—the self that was shattered in 1998. And so, no matter the heartbreak, tears, or disenchantment, I’ll always be grateful to them.
In February of this year, around the same time Senator Paul put me back into the unwanted spotlight, I became the “narcissistic loony toon,” the latest twist on Me as Archetype.
A snapshot of a scenario I’ve grown all too accustomed to, even as I attempt to move on with my life: A shrill ring interrupts the rhythms of my day. The call—from the doorman of the apartment building where I’m staying in New York—leads me to an exasperated “What? Again?” They’ve reappeared: the paparazzi, like swallows, have returned to the sidewalk outside, pacing and circling and pacing some more.
I hit the computer. Time for a little self-Google. (Oh, dear reader, please do not judge.) My heart sinks. There’s an explosion on Google News. I know what this means. Whatever day I’ve planned has been jettisoned. To leave the house—and risk a photo—only ensures that the story will stay alive.
The cameras have returned because of the headlines: a conservative Web site has gone poking around the University of Arkansas archive of one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends and admirers, Diane Blair, and has unearthed a cache of memos from the 1990s. In some of them, Blair, who died in 2000, quotes the former First Lady about her husband’s relationship with me. Though Hillary, according to Blair’s notes, claimed to find her husband’s “lapse” inexcusable, she praised him for trying to “manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon.’ ”
I field the usual calls from friends who lend moral support whenever these volcanic media stories erupt. They diffuse the tension with good-natured teasing: “So, are we changing your monogram to NLT?” I try to ignore the former First Lady’s long-buried comments. Given my experiences with Linda Tripp, I know better than anyone what it’s like to have a conversation with a girlfriend exposed and scrutinized, taken out of context. But, even so, it begins to gnaw at me. I realize that Hillary Clinton was—unlike me when Tripp was prying loose my innermost secrets and insecurities and recording them surreptitiously—fully aware of this documentation: she’s the one who, according to the memos, asked Blair to keep a record or diary of their discussions for archival purposes.
Yes, I get it. Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband’s mistress. She may have faulted her husband for being inappropriate, but I find her impulse to blame the Woman—not only me, but herself—troubling. And all too familiar: with every marital indiscretion that finds its way into the public sphere—many of which involve male politicians—it always seems like the woman conveniently takes the fall. Sure, the Anthony Weiners and Eliot Spitzers do what they need to do to look humiliated on cable news. They bow out of public life for a while, but they inevitably return, having put it all behind them. The women in these imbroglios return to lives that are not so easily repaired.
But there is another layer here that is making me bristle: Narcissist? Loony?
You might remember that just five days before the world had ever heard my name the F.B.I.—after my friend Linda Tripp approached Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s office with information about my affair with the president—entrapped me in a terrifying “sting” in the Pentagon City mall. At age 24, cornered in a hotel room on January 16, 1998, with mainly male interrogators taking orders from Starr, I was discouraged from contacting my attorney and threatened with 27 years in jail for filing an affidavit denying the affair with Clinton, among other alleged crimes. I was offered immunity from that threat if I agreed to place monitored calls and wear a wire in conversations with two of the president’s confidants and possibly the president himself. I refused. Confiding in Linda Tripp turned into an unintended betrayal. But this? The mother of all betrayals. That, I couldn’t do. Courageous or foolish, maybe, but narcissistic and loony?
These 16-year-old descriptions of me triggered memories of past anguish, particularly in the area of women lobbing derision at one another. So where, you might be wondering, were the feminists back then?
It’s a question that troubles me to this day.
I sorely wished for some sign of understanding from the feminist camp. Some good, old-fashioned, girl-on-girl support was much in need. None came. Given the issues at play—gender politics, sex in the workplace—you’d think they would have spoken up. They didn’t. I understood their dilemma: Bill Clinton had been a president “friendly” to women’s causes.
It also didn’t help that my case was not one of conventional “sexual harassment”; that charge against Bill Clinton had been made by Paula Jones, who brought a colossal lawsuit against him. My name surfaced only because, thanks to newly won advances by feminists, investigations of such cases were now allowed to cast a wider net. The Jones case became a stick that the right wing used to strike back at the Clinton-supporting feminists: Why wouldn’t they enthusiastically support an investigation into a case of sexual harassment? What if the president had been a Republican? Charges of hypocrisy flew.
A handful of representatives of the modern feminist movement did chime in, obliquely. Yet, instead of any meaningful engagement, we got this: January 30, 1998. Day Nine of the scandal. Cocktails at Le Bernardin, in Manhattan. In attendance: writers Erica Jong, Nancy Friday, Katie Roiphe, and Elizabeth Benedict;Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx; Marisa Bowe, the editor of Word, an online magazine; fashion designer Nicole Miller; former dominatrix Susan Shellogg; and their host, Le Bernardin co-owner Maguy Le Coze. The New York Observer brought this coven together to trade Interngate insights, to be recorded by Francine Prose. (Sadly, the gal who would really make this coven complete is missing: Maureen Dowd, or Moremean Dowdy, as I used to refer to her. Today, I’d meet her for a drink.)
Oh, to have been at that cocktail party:
Marisa Bowe: His whole life is about having to be in control and really intelligent all the time. And his wife is really intelligent and in control all the time. And the idea of just having stupid sex with some not-brilliant woman in the Oval Office, I can see the appeal in that.
Imaginary Me: I’m not saying I’m brilliant, but how do you know I’m not? My first job out of college was at the White House.
Susan Shellogg: And do you think it’s tremendously selfish? Selfish and demanding, having oral sex and not reciprocating? I mean … she didn’t say, “Well, you know he satisfied me.”
Me: And where exactly “didn’t” I say this? In which public statement that I didn’t make? In which testimony that’s not been released?
Katie Roiphe: I think what people are outraged about is the way that [Monica Lewinsky] looks, which is interesting. Because we like to think of our presidents as sort of godlike, and so if J.F.K. has an affair with Marilyn Monroe, it’s all in the realm of the demigods…. I mean, the thing I kept hearing over and over again was Monica Lewinsky’s not that pretty.
Me: Well, thanks. The first picture that surfaced was a passport photo. Would you like to have a passport photo splattered across publications around the world as the picture that defines you?
What you are also saying here is that the primary quality that would qualify a woman to have an intimate relationship with a powerful man is physical attractiveness. If that’s not setting the movement back, I don’t know what is.
Erica Jong: My dental hygienist pointed out that she had third-stage gum disease.
Shellogg: What do you think will happen to [her]? I mean, she’ll just fade out quietly or write a book? Or people will forget about her six months from now?
Nancy Friday: She can rent out her mouth.
Me: (Speechless.)
Jong: But, you know, men do like to get close to the mouth that has been close to power. Think of the fantasy in the man’s mind as she’s going down on him and he’s thinking, “Oh my God.”
Elizabeth Benedict: Do for me what you did to the President. Do that.
Me: (Still speechless.)
Jong: I think it’s a tribute to how far we’ve come that we’re not trashing Monica Lewinsky.
The catty confab appeared under the headline SUPERGALS LOVE THAT NAUGHTY PREZ. (Writing inVanity Fair, Marjorie Williams called it “the most embarrassing thing I had read in a long time.”) To me, it illustrates a perplexing aspect of the culture of humiliation, one that Phyllis Chesler recognized in her bookWoman’s Inhumanity to Woman: that women themselves are not immune to certain kinds of misogyny. We see it today in how the “mean girls” at school lurk on the modern playground of the Web (or around a pundit’s roundtable on TV or at a French restaurant), ever eager to pile on.
I still have deep respect for feminism and am thankful for the great strides the movement has made in advancing women’s rights over the past few decades. But, given my experience of being passed around like gender-politics cocktail food, I don’t identify myself as a Feminist, capital F. The movement’s leaders failed in articulating a position that was not essentially anti-woman during the witch hunt of 1998. In the case of the New York Supergals, it should not have been that hard for them to swoon over the president without attacking and shaming me. Instead, they joined the humiliation derby.
I , myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened. At the time—at least from my point of view—it was an authentic connection, with emotional intimacy, frequent visits, plans made, phone calls and gifts exchanged. In my early 20s, I was too young to understand the real-life consequences, and too young to see that I would be sacrificed for political expediency. I look back now, shake my head in disbelief, and wonder: what was I—what were we—thinking? I would give anything to go back and rewind the tape.
Like many other Americans, I’ve been thinking about Hillary Clinton. What might happen, I’ve wondered, if she does run in 2016? And what if she wins—and then wins a second term?
But when I think about these matters, there’s a dimension at play for me other than just the fact that we might finally have a woman in the White House. We all remember the second-wave feminist rallying cry The personal is political. Many people (myself included) proclaimed that my relationship with Bill Clinton was a personal matter, not one to be used in a high-stakes political war. When I hear of Hillary’s prospective candidacy, I cannot help but fear the next wave of paparazzi, the next wave of “Where is she now?” stories, the next reference to me in Fox News’s coverage of the primaries. I’ve begun to find it debilitating to plot out the cycle of my life based, to some degree, on the political calendar. For me, it’s a scenario in which the personal and the political are impossible to separate.
In 2008, when Hillary was running for president, I remained virtually reclusive, despite being inundated with press requests. I put off announcing several media projects in 2012 until after the election. (They were subsequently canceled—and, no, I wasn’t offered $12 million for a salacious tell-all book, contrary to press reports.) And recently I’ve found myself gun-shy yet again, fearful of “becoming an issue” should she decide to ramp up her campaign. But should I put my life on hold for another 8 to 10 years?
Being a conscientious Democrat—and aware that I could be used as a tool for the left or the right—I have remained silent for 10 years. So silent, in fact, that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
So why speak now? Because it is time.
I turned 40 last year, and it is time to stop tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.) Despite what some headlines will falsely report about this piece, this is not about Me versus the Clintons. Their lives have moved on; they occupy important and powerful places on the global stage. I wish them no ill. And I fully understand that what has happened to me and the issue of my future do not matter to either of them.
It also goes back to the personal and the political. I have lived many of the questions that have become central to our national discourse since 1998. How far should we allow the government into our bedrooms? How do we reconcile the right to privacy with the need to expose sexual indiscretion? How do we guard against an overzealous government demanding our private data and information? And, most important to me personally, how do we cope with the shame game as it’s played in the Internet Age? (My current goal is to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.)
So far, That Woman has never been able to escape the shadow of that first depiction. I was the Unstable Stalker (a phrase disseminated by the Clinton White House), the Dimwit Floozy, the Poor Innocent who didn’t know any better. The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power. I became a social representation, a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.
Unlike the other parties involved, I was so young that I had no established identity to which I could return. I didn’t “let this define” me—I simply hadn’t had the life experience to establish my own identity in 1998. If you haven’t figured out who you are, it’s hard not to accept the horrible image of you created by others. (Thus, my compassion for young people who find themselves shamed on the Web.) Despite much self-searching and therapy and exploring of different paths, I remained “stuck” for far too many years.

No longer. It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress. And move forward.