CNN host Alisyn Camerota said Monday that she has a “hard time putting a 2018 lens” over former President Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“I have a hard time putting a 2018 lens over bad behavior in the ’90s and the ’80s, as we’ve seen so much over the past two years, because we didn’t even have that language,” Camerota said.
Camerota was discussing Hillary Clinton’s Sunday interview with CBS, in which she said her husband should “absolutely not” have resigned in the wake of the scandal.
{mosads} Clinton said she did not believe her husband’s relationship with Lewinsky was an abuse of power.
Camerota weighed in on Clinton’s comments, saying that while she doesn’t excuse the former president’s “behavior,” she doesn’t know what Hillary Clinton is “supposed to say at this point.”
“We didn’t call something a ‘power imbalance,’ and we didn’t call relationships a ‘power differential,’” Camerota said. “That just wasn’t language that we used.”
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has come under renewed scrutiny in the “Me Too” era, with many supporters of the movement saying Clinton should have resigned over the relationship.
Bill Clinton, who was 49 years old and president at the time of the relationship, has been the topic of criticism over the relationship with then-22-year-old Lewinsky amid conversations about power imbalance in relationships.