Bill Clinton: Monica Lewinsky Affair Was to Manage My Anxiety

Everyone has anxieties. Some of us have to take medicine and others, like former President Bill Clinton, have an affair with their intern.

In a new four-hour documentary set to stream on Hulu starting Friday, titled Hillary, Clinton claims that his tryst with Lewinsky during his time in office was one of the “things I did to manage my anxieties.”

Clinton, 73, likened his time in the White House to being a boxer “staggering” after a 30-round fight. The affair, he claims, was “something that will take your mind off it for a while,” according to the New York Post.

“Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of whatever,” he said in justifying seeking distractions to “manage my anxieties for years.”

“Nobody thinks they’re taking a risk,” Clinton says in the doc, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “That’s not why we do stupid things.”

Clinton adds that he’s no longer the same person he was 20 years ago when he cheated. The Post notes that the affair with his then-intern led to Clinton’s impeachment by the “House of Representatives in 1998, before he was ultimately acquitted.”

Clinton also admits that when he was initially caught, he lied to his wife about the affair and recalls how he had to confess when it became obvious that he was caught.

“I went and sat on the bed and talked to her. I told her exactly what happened, when it happened. I said I feel terrible about it,” he tells the doc.

“We’ve been through quite a bit in the last few years. I said I have no defense, it’s inexcusable what I did.”

Hillary admitted she was “devastated.”

“I could not believe it. I was so personally just hurt and I can’t believe this, I can’t believe you lied,” she said.

The couple attended marriage counseling sessions, which Hillary described as “painful, painful discussions” and Bill noted were “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do but it was necessary.”

“She deserved it, Chelsea deserved it and I needed it,” he says.

“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly I think.”

Then he claimed that the former intern needs to move on but how is she supposed to when he keeps talking about it?