Regrets? She's had a few, Lewinsky says of Clinton scandal

WASHINGTON - Monica Lewinsky, the one-time White House intern whose 1990s affair with former United States president Bill Clinton nearly brought down his presidency, broke a long silence on Tuesday, saying that she regretted what happened.

Writing in Vanity Fair magazine, Ms Lewinsky, 40, said it was time to stop "tiptoeing around my past - and other people's futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story."

Her affair with Mr Clinton was one between consenting adults and the public humiliation she suffered altered the direction of her life, she wrote.

"Any 'abuse' came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position," she said in excerpts of the article published on the magazine's website.

Ms Lewinsky added: "I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and president Clinton. Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened."

The affair led to Mr Clinton being impeached by the US House of Representatives in 1999. The US Senate acquitted him and Mr Clinton completed his second term in 2001.

Ms Lewinsky dropped out of sight after the scandal. She got a master's degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics and has lived in Los Angeles, New York and Portland, Oregon.

"I turned down offers that would have earned me more than US$10 million (about S$12.5 million), because they didn't feel like the right thing to do," she said.

Ms Lewinsky said she was strongly tempted to kill herself several times during the investigations and in one or two periods afterwards.

Her name resurfaced in US political discourse in February, when former first lady and Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton was quoted as calling her "a narcissistic loony toon" in an article.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a likely Republican presidential contender, accused the Democrats of "hypocrisy" for claiming to back women's rights while giving Mr Clinton a pass for his"predatory" behaviour towards Ms Lewinsky.

Spokesmen for the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation in New York had no immediate comment on the article.

Ms Lewinsky said she was motivated to speak out by the 2010 suicide of a Rutgers University student who killed himself after a video of him kissing a man was streamed online.

"I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet," Ms Lewinsky wrote.

Her 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".