We are in this place where we're just so excited that the other side loses and we're just going to publicly shame each other as a substitute for winning elections or passing legislation or doing anything that happened in a functioning democracy.

We use to try to take someone down right because legal institutions have broken down democratic institutions broken down right all these institutions have broken down and so what do we have left.

Publicly shaming each other. Exactly. Good fucking luck to us.

I'm John Favreau. Welcome to offline.

Hi there. I guess this week is Monica Lewinsky who stopped by the studio to speak with me about online public shaming.

This is obviously a topic that she's had a lot of personal experience with. She's called herself patient zero of having a reputation destroyed by the internet since what happened to her in 1998 was one of the first big stories to be broken online.

By the drug report. She stayed out of the spotlight for years after that, but around 2014 she re-entered public life and started speaking out against online bullying and public shaming.

She wrote a long piece in Vanity Fair. She gave a TED talk that has 20 million views on YouTube and she's currently doing an awareness campaign for bullying prevention month.

But what I really wanted to talk to her about was her latest television project.

Not the American crime story impeachment series that she's co-produced though that's a great watch.

But I wanted to talk to her about a documentary she co-produced on HBO Max called 15 Minutes of Shame.

It's a film about what Monica calls our culture of humiliation.

How the internet and social media platforms fuel bullying and shaming and meanness and harassment.

It is fantastic. I've watched it twice now and I was really excited to talk to her about it in this conversation where we cover what it was like for her in the years after her public life.

How she decided to re-enter public life. Why social media make shaming and bullying so tempting and easy and what we can actually do about it.

As always, if you have questions, comments or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at Crooked.com. Here's Monica Lewinsky.

Monica Lewinsky, thank you so much for doing offline.

Hi, John. Thanks for having me.

So I'll start by pointing out one positive thing about the internet. It's what connected the two of us.

Yes, exactly.

I remember it was like in 2018, I think. I had just seen the Clinton affair documentary on A&E.

And I think I tweeted something about how everyone owes you an apology or a lot of people owe you an apology.

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