CNN anchor Jake Tapper interviewed Monica Lewinsky on Tuesday and the two noted their dinner date nearly 24 years ago. (Watch the clip above.)
Lewinsky appeared on “The Lead with Jake Tapper” to promote “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” the FX series she’s producing about her affair with former President Bill Clinton that led to his impeachment.
An episode shows a dramatization of Tapper and Lewinsky’s night out at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., prompting Tapper’s upfront admission.
“First of all, Monica. Yes, I have to disclose — full disclosure — in tonight’s episode, our G-rated date from December 1997 ... is portrayed,” Tapper said. A laughing Lewinsky interrupted him to say “our one date.”
Tapper said the actor portraying him in “Impeachment” is “way better looking than me now or then,” to which Lewinsky replied reassuringly, “Nooo.”
The CNN host then quickly segued into questions about the series.
But Tapper did go into depth about their encounter in a 1998 story for the Washington City Paper, after the Clinton scandal became news. The article was titled: “I Dated Monica Lewinsky” with the deck “Behind the tawdriest of headlines, there’s a woman I wouldn’t mind bringing home to mom.”
Tapper wrote that he met her at a bar party and she sweetly helped him pay for his pool game. He got her number through a friend, they chatted a few times, some plans fell through, and they finally went to dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant.
He noted she drank beer while he had bourbon and she refreshingly offered to pay her share, which he declined.
“We talked about some of her past relationships, though the president’s name did not come up,” he wrote. “It was a first date, one I wasn’t sure would be followed by a second, and how was I to know that the woman on the other side of the table would set the presidency into seismic rumblings?”
They shared an “innocent goodbye” afterward and the second date got lost in the rush of New Year’s, according to Tepper. “I don’t expect to see Monica again,” he wrote. “To be honest, I’m not sure I would have seen her even if she hadn’t ended up buried beneath the headlines.”
Clinton was impeached in December 1998 on charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice for concealing his affair with Lewinsky. A few months later he was acquitted and served the rest of his second term.
Tapper mentioned to Lewinsky on Tuesday that “American Crime Story” offered an “honest and unglamorous version” of her. To which she replied: “It was important to me that the the credibility of the show be there. I felt that if I was sort of smoothing over and photoshopping essentially my history in that way, that it wasn’t right and it wouldn’t be fair.”