沉默羔羊物是人非 莫妮卡莱温斯基回来了

Monica Lewinsky was sitting in a Manhattan auditorium last month, watching teenage girls perform a play called “Slut.” Ms. Lewinsky was in blue jeans and a blazer, her hair pulled out of her face with a small clip. She was wiping away tears.

上个月在曼哈顿，莫妮卡·莱温斯基(Monica Lewinsky)坐在观众席中观看一出名叫《荡妇》(Slut)的话剧，演员都是十几岁的女孩子。她身穿蓝色牛仔裤和运动上衣，头发用一枚小夹子别着。她抹着眼泪。

In the scene, a young woman was seated in an interrogation room. She had been asked to describe, repeatedly, what had happened on the night in question — when, she said, on their way to a party, a group of guy friends had pinned her down in a taxi and sexually assaulted her. She had reported them. Now everyone at School knew, everyone had chosen a side.

在一场戏里，一个年轻女人坐在审讯室中，被要求一再描述某个夜晚发生的事情——她说，那天晚上，从派对回家路上，一群男性朋友把她堵在出租车里强暴了她。她举报了他们。如今学校里所有人都知道了这件事，所有人都对自己的立场做出了选择。

“My life has just completely fallen apart,” the girl said, her voice shaking. Her parents were in the next room. “Now I’m that girl.”

“我的人生完了，”女孩的声音在颤抖。她的父母就在隔壁。“现在我成了‘那女孩’。”

The play concluded, and Ms. Lewinsky fumbled through her purse for a tissue. A woman came and whisked her to the stage.

剧终后，莱温斯基从手袋里摸索出纸巾。一个女人走过来，很快引着她登上舞台。

“Hi, I’m Monica Lewinsky,” she said, visibly nervous. “Some of you younger people might only know me from some rap lyrics.”

“嗨，我是莫妮卡·莱温斯基，”她显然有些紧张。“有些年轻人可能只是从说唱乐歌词里听过我的名字。”

The crowd, made up largely of high school and college women, laughed. “Monica Lewinsky” is the title of a song by the rapper G-Eazy; her name is a reference in dozens of others: by Kanye, Beyoncé, Eminem, Jeezy. The list goes on.

台下的观众主要是高中和大学女生，她们笑了起来。《莫妮卡·莱温斯基》是说唱乐手G-Eazy的一首歌；另外坎耶(Kanye)、碧昂斯(Beyoncé)、埃米纳姆(Eminem)、Jeezy等几十个歌手也都唱过她。

“Thank you for coming,” Ms. Lewinsky continued, “and in doing so, standing up against the sexual scapegoating of women and girls.”

“感谢你们的光临，”她接着说。“感谢你们反对女人和女孩成为性事件中的代罪羔羊。”

She walked back to her seat after speaking, and a woman behind her leaned forward. “I saw you, but I didn’t realize I was sitting next to Monica Lewinsky,” she said.

说完这番话，她回到自己的位子上去，身后的女人凑过来对她说。“我先就看见你了，不过真没想到你就是莫妮卡·莱温斯基。”

A line of girls soon approached. “Thank you for being here,” said a teenager in a striped shirt and gold hoop earrings. She asked if she could take a photo, and Ms. Lewinsky winced a little, then politely told her no. “I totally understand,” the girl said.

几个女孩很快走过来。“感谢你的光临，”一个穿条纹衬衫、戴金色圈圈耳环的十来岁女孩说。她问莱温斯基能不能拍照，莱温斯基微微有些迟疑，之后礼貌地拒绝了。“我完全理解，”女孩说。

When she was asked later about her reaction to the play, Ms. Lewinsky said: “It’s really inspiring to hear people bring awareness to this issue. That scene in the interrogation room was hard to watch. One of the things I’ve learned about trauma is that when you find yourself retriggered, it’s helpful to recognize when things are different.”

被问到对这场戏的看法，莱温斯基女士说：“看到人们意识到这个问题，这真的很令人振奋。审讯室中的那一幕非常令人难过。我从自己的创伤中学习到，当痛苦的回忆再度被触发时，如果你能意识到如今一切都已经不一样了，这会非常有帮助。”

A LOT IS DIFFERENT for Monica Lewinsky these days, starting with the fact that, until last year, she had hardly appeared publicly for a decade. Now 41, the former White House intern once famously dismissed by the president as “that woman” holds a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics.

现在，对于莫妮卡·莱温斯基来说，很多事情的确都已经不一样了，到去年，她已经十年没怎么公开亮相。这位现年41岁的前白宫实习生，曾是总统口中著名的的“那女人”，并因此遭遣散，如今她拥有伦敦政治经济学院的社会心理学硕士学位。

She splits time between New York and Los Angeles, where she grew up, and London, and said it’s been hard to find work.

她从小在洛杉矶长大，如今在纽约、洛杉矶与伦敦三地居住，并说找工作很难。

Mostly she has embraced a quiet existence: doing meditation and therapy, volunteering, spending time with friends.

大部分时间里，她安静低调地生活：做冥想、接受心理治疗、做义工，和朋友们在一起。

But the quiet ended last May, when she wrote an essay for Vanity Fair about the aftermath of her affair with Bill Clinton — the story a result of a years-long relationship with the magazine and its editor, Graydon Carter. (She was first photographed in its pages by Herb Ritts in 1998.)

但是去年五月，平静的生活结束了，她为《名利场》(Vanity Fair)撰文，写了自己与比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton)的性丑闻之后发生的事情——这篇文章是她与《名利场》主编格雷顿·卡特(Graydon Carter)合作一年的结果。1998年，《名利场》曾经刊登过她的照片，摄影师是赫布·李特斯(Herb Ritts)。

In the essay, which was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award, she declared that the time had come to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and “give a purpose to my past.”

这篇文章最终入围2015年国家杂志奖，她在文中宣布，如今已是时候，“埋葬那顶贝雷帽和那条蓝裙子”，并且“为我的过去赋予意义”。

That new purpose, she wrote, was twofold: it was about reclaiming her own story — one that had seemed to metastasize — but also to help others who had been similarly humiliated. “What this will cost me,” she wrote, “I will soon find out.”

她写道，这个新的意义是双重的——她的故事已经广为流传，如今，她要对之进行重新讲述；不仅如此，她也希望能帮助那些曾经遭遇类似羞辱的人们。“这样做将会令我付出什么代价，”她写道，“很快就会知道了。”

It hasn’t appeared to cost her, at least not yet. In fact, the opposite has occurred.

这件事似乎没有令她付出代价，至少到目前还没有。事实上，完全相反的事情发生了。

Over the last six months, she has made appearances at a benefit hosted by the Norman Mailer Center (she and Mr. Mailer had been friends), at a New York Fashion Week dinner presentation for the designer Rachel Comey, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and as her friend Alan Cumming’s date at an after-party for the Golden Globes. (Mr. Cumming has known her since the 1990s.)

在过去的六个月里，她在很多活动中亮相，包括诺曼·梅勒中心主办的慈善活动（她是诺曼先生生前好友）；设计师瑞秋·科米(Rachel Comey)在纽约时装周上的晚餐招待会；《名利场》的奥斯卡派对；在金球奖的庆功派对上，她还作为艾伦·卡明(Alan Cumming)的女伴出席，卡明是她的朋友，两人90年代就认识了。

Recently, she took part in an anti-bullying workshop at the Horace Mann School, and joined a feminist networking group. (“I consider myself a feminist with a lowercase ‘f,’ ” she told me. “I believe in equality. But I think I’m drawn to the issues more than the movement.”)

最近，她到霍瑞斯曼高中参加了一个反欺凌的研讨会，并参加了一个女性主义网络组织（“我觉得自己是一个低调的女性主义者，”她告诉我，“我相信平等，但我更关注议题，而不是行动”）。

Perhaps most interestingly, in October, onstage at a Forbes conference, she spoke out for the first time about the digital harassment (or cyberbullying) that has affected everyone from female bloggers to Jennifer Lawrence to ... her: “I lost my reputation. I was publicly identified as someone I didn’t recognize. And I lost my sense of self,” she told the crowd.

最有意思的或者是去年10月发生的事，她在一次福布斯会议上登台，讨论网络骚扰（或者说网络欺凌）问题，这个问题影响着所有人，从普通的女博客写手到詹妮弗·劳伦斯(Jennifer Lawrence)，乃至……她自己：“我名誉扫地，在公众眼中，我成了自己也认不出的样子。我丧失了自我意识，”她对听众们说。

She just took that declaration one step further on the main stage at TED in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Thursday, where she issued a biting cultural critique about humiliation as commodity. The title of her 18-minute talk (and, perhaps, the line that best sums up her experience), which received a raucous standing ovation: “The Price of Shame.”

星期四，她在加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省温哥华做了TED讲演，把自己的宣言又向前推进一步，演讲中，对于羞辱成为一种商品这个问题，她做出了辛辣的文化批评。她的讲演时长18分钟，题为“蒙羞的代价”，这句话或许正好可以用来总结她的经历，讲演结束后，听众们长时间起立，热烈鼓掌。

THIS IS NOT Monica Lewinsky’s first attempt at reinvention. But it’s also not the Monica of more than a decade ago: the one who created a handbag line and tried her hand at reality TV.

这并不是莫妮卡·莱温斯基第一次努力获得新生，但是十几年前的莫妮卡和现在还不一样：当时她创立了一个手袋品牌，还开始涉足真人秀电视节目。

This iteration is a bundle of contradictions: warm yet cautious. Open yet guarded. Strong but fragile.

她的转变充满矛盾：既温暖又审慎，既开放又警惕，既坚强又脆弱。

She is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control.

她可爱，风趣，有些自我贬低的倾向。同时她也非常聪明，这一点并未充分被人称道。但她同时也无法自拔地陷在一个时空隧道里。

At 41, she doesn’t have many of the things that a person her age may want: a permanent residence, an obvious source of income (she won’t comment on her finances), a clear career path.

41岁的她并没有许多同龄人可能会渴望的东西：永久的住处和一份明显的收入来源（她拒绝评价自己的财务状况），以及一个清晰的事业蓝图。

She is also very, very nervous. She is worried about being taken advantage of, worried her words will be misconstrued, worried reporters will rehash the past.

她也非常非常紧张。她担心被人利用，担心自己的话被误解，担心记者会一味重复她的过去。

She is prepared, almost always, for doomsday: the snippet of a quote that might be taken out of context; questions about the Clintons, whom she declines to discuss. “She was burned ... in myriad ways,” said her editor at Vanity Fair, David Friend.

虽然并非时刻都在提心吊胆，但她的确常常准备着迎接厄运：她担心自己的话被断章取义地引用，或是被问到关于克林顿夫妇的问题（她拒绝谈论他们）。“她受着……许许多多的煎熬，”《名利场》负责她那篇文章的编辑大卫·弗兰德(David Friend)说。

Ms. Lewinsky wouldn’t call this a reinvention, though. This, she says, is simply the Monica who in spite of the headlines, in spite of the incessant paparazzi-style coverage, “was seen by many, but truly known by few,” as she put it on the TED stage.

不过，莱温斯基并不把自己的经历称之为脱胎换骨。她说，现在的她只是一个不在乎报刊头条，不在乎没完没了的狗仔体报道的莫妮卡，“很多人都见过她，但没有什么人真正了解她”，在TED演讲中她这样说道。

“This is me,” she told me. “This is a kind of evolution of me.”

“这就是我，”她对我说，“这是我的进化。”

I had approached her after the Vanity Fair essay in part because I was intrigued, but also because I had a tinge of guilt. I had come of age in the Lewinsky era; my first job out of college was at Newsweek, where the story of the reporter who had uncovered the affair — then saw his story leaked to the Drudge Report — was legend.

《名利场》刊出那篇文章后，我开始同她接触，因为我对她感到好奇，不过也是因为我心中怀有一丝歉疚。莱温斯基事件的时代，我已经步入成年；我大学毕业后的第一份工作就是在《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)，正是《新闻周刊》的记者发现了这桩性丑闻，之后这个故事被泄露给网站“吉拉德报道”(Drudge Report)，这个故事如今已经成为传奇。

I distinctly remember my high school self, wide-eyed, poring over the soft-core Starr report with friends.

我还清楚地记得高中时代的我，睁大了眼睛，和朋友们一起狼吞虎咽地读着《斯塔尔报告》(Starr Report)中那些香艳的内容。

None of us had the maturity to understand the complexities, or power dynamics, of the president’s affair with a young intern. When I was 16, one dominating image of Monica Lewinsky seemed to overshadow all others: slut. Of course, that 22-year-old intern was only a few years older than me.

我们都不够成熟，没法理解总统与年轻实习生的风流韵事之中也包含着复杂的东西，或者说包含着权力的变数。我16岁那年，莫妮卡·莱温斯基以荡妇姿态出现，这样一个显著的形象似乎遮蔽了一切。当然，那个22岁的实习生其实只比我大几岁而已。

And so I emailed her. I told her I was interested in her effort to re-emerge, and had been particularly fascinated by the reaction to it, as if there were a kind of public reckoning underway. Feminists who had stayed silent on the first go-round were suddenly defending her, using terms like “slut-shaming” and “media gender bias” to do it.

于是我给她写了电子邮件，告诉她我对其尝试复出的努力很感兴趣，人们对她复出的反应也让我觉得有意思，公众对这件事的认识好像在不断发展。女性主义者们一开始对她保持沉默，突然又开始用“把女人贬为荡妇”(slut-shaming)、“媒体的性别偏见”等字眼为她辩护。

The late-night host David Letterman was on air expressing remorse over how he had mocked her, asking, in a recent interview with Barbara Walters, “With some perspective, do you realize this is a sad human situation?” Bill Maher said of reading Ms. Lewinsky’s piece in Vanity Fair, “I gotta tell you, I literally felt guilty.”

深夜秀节目主持人大卫·莱特曼(David Letterman)公开在节目中表示自己为曾经嘲笑她感到后悔，他最近访问芭芭拉·沃尔特斯(Barbara Walters)的时候问道：“从某些角度看来，你是否意识到这是一种悲哀的人类处境？”比尔·马赫(Bill Maher) 读了莱温斯基在《名利场》上的文章后说，“我得告诉你，我真的感到内疚。”

And young women were embracing her: rushing up to her after public events, messaging her on social media, asking if they could take selfies. (“Meeting her felt like meeting a pop culture icon,” said Amari Leigh, 17, a cast member in the “Slut” play. “It’s crazy to think that one thing she did, when she was not that much older than I am now, impacted her whole life.”)

年轻女人们接纳了她：她们在公开活动之后涌向她，在社交媒体上给她留言，要求同她合影。（“见到她就像见到流行文化符号，”17岁的艾美莉·李[Amari Leigh]说，她在《荡妇》话剧中出演角色。“她在比我大不了多少的时候做了一件事，结果影响了她整整一生，想想真是太疯狂了。”）

“However you felt about the actual event, the way it played out was pretty grotesque,” said Rebecca Traister, a senior editor at The New Republic who was just out of college when the Clinton scandal broke and wrote about it later.

“不管你当时对真正的事件有什么看法，它呈现出来的方式实在非常怪诞，”《新共和》(The New Republic)的资深编辑丽贝卡·特雷斯塔(Rebeccca Traister)说，克林顿丑闻曝光时她刚刚大学毕业，之后写过关于这件事的文章。

Ms. Traister said she was taken aback when she reread her own article: “Whether it’s guilt, or sophistication, or thinking a little harder about sexual power dynamics, I think people have started to think: ‘Oh right, she probably does have a right to tell her story. And that’s a good thing.’ ”

特雷斯塔说，重读当时写的文章令她自己也感到吃惊：“不管是出于愧疚也好，还是因为成熟了也好，抑或是对于性权力的变数有了更深入的思考也好，我觉得现在人们开始觉得：‘对啊，她可能确实有权利讲出她自己的故事。而且这是好事。’”

This time, Ms. Lewinsky appears determined to tell it on her terms. She has a P.R. agent screening requests and approaches media as one may expect: with the caution of a woman who has been raked over the coals.

这一次，莱温斯基显然决心从她自身的角度来讲述。不出所料，作为一个曾经遭受公开谴责的女人，她有一个公关代理来帮助她，审慎地过滤各种媒体的要求和接触。

She has reason to. Just weeks ago, a short interview with the artist Nelson Shanks was published online. In a question about which portrait subject he had found most difficult to capture, Mr. Shanks noted that his painting of Bill Clinton, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, had a shadow as a metaphor for Ms. Lewinsky — created from the shadow of an actual blue dress he had placed on a mannequin. The piece posted on a Sunday. By the next morning, it was everywhere.

她有理由这样做。就在几个星期前，网上登出了一则艺术家纳尔逊·尚克斯(Nelson Shanks)的小采访。采访者问他，什么样的肖像画最难处理，尚克斯提到了比尔·克林顿的画像，这幅画目前挂在国家肖像画廊，画上有一重阴影，是关于莱温斯基的隐喻——他让模特穿上一件蓝色裙子，投下阴影，据此创作了油画上的阴影。访谈是在周日贴出来的。翌日清晨，就已经传得到处都是了。

Ms. Lewinsky woke up to a flooded inbox and panicked.

莱温斯基一觉醒来，收到无数电子邮件，顿感惊慌失措。

She was really, really sorry, she told me, but she simply couldn’t move forward with an article.

她告诉我，她非常非常抱歉，但她真的没法再接受一篇文章了。

We exchanged emails and calls. The article was back on, no it wasn’t, yes it was.

我们互相写了几封电子邮件，打了几通电话。那篇文章被淡忘了，还没有，哦，已经被淡忘了。

You want to know what it’s like to live in Monica Lewinsky’s world? This is it.

你想知道生活在莫妮卡·莱温斯基的世界里是什么感觉？这就是了。

I MET MS. LEWINSKY the following Tuesday at her apartment.

一周之后的星期二，我来到莱温斯基的家中。

She was rehearsing in front of a small metal music stand. Her speech coach, Pippa Bateman, was on Skype from Britain.

她对着一个小小的金属制乐谱架排练。她的演讲指导老师皮帕·巴特曼在英国，通过Skype指导她。

I quietly sat on the couch and noted the details in the room: a bookshelf blocked off the bedroom area; on it, photos of friends and family, Monica as a child. On an end table were roses, crystals and a lit candle.

我静静地坐在沙发上，观察着屋子里的细节：一个书架隔挡出卧室区，书架上有朋友和家人的照片，还有莫妮卡的童年照片。桌子一头放着玫瑰花、水晶饰品，燃着一支蜡烛。

She handed me a script. “It’s changed a bit, so you can follow along,” she said. (By the time she appeared onstage at TED, in front of a packed room, she was on Version 24 of her speech.) On the back, she had scribbled a reminder: “Push in arm muscles, engage back and neck.”

她递给我一份草稿。“改动了一点，你可以看看，”她说。（在TED的演讲台上对着满满一屋子人发言时，她的讲稿已经改到第24版）在讲稿背后，她写下了一点小提示：“运用胳膊上的肌肉，绷紧后背和脖子。”

She was working through the middle of the speech, where she would describe her questioning by investigators in a room not unlike the one we saw portrayed in “Slut.” It was 1998, and she had been required to authenticate the phone calls recorded by her former friend Linda Tripp. They would later be released to Congress.

她当时在练习讲演的中段，在这一段里，她要描述自己当年如何在一间屋子里接受调查者的提问，这情景有点像《荡妇》里的那一幕。那是在1998年，她被要求证实她以前的朋友琳达·特里普(Linda Tripp)录下来的电话对话。这段话后来被送交国会。

“Scared and mortified, I listen,” she said.

“我听着，又惊恐又窘迫，”她说。

“Listen as I prattle on …

“我听着自己天真的喋喋不休……”

“Listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self, being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth …

“我听着自己的声音：时而狡猾、时而粗鲁、时而愚蠢、时而残忍、不可原谅，粗俗不堪……”

“Listen, deeply, deeply ashamed to the worst version of myself.” She paused. “A self I don’t even recognize.”

“我听着，为自己最恶劣的一面感到深深羞耻，”她停顿一下，“这是我未曾认识到的自己。”

“How did that feel?” Ms. Bateman asked. “You’ve got to own it.”

“感觉怎么样？”贝特曼问道，“你得把它背下来。”

Ms. Lewinsky doesn’t have a speechwriter; she wrote the speech herself. But she has plenty of advisers: journalists, editors, new friends, old friends, her lawyer, her publicist, her family. Which is great, if everyone is in agreement. Except that no one is ever in agreement.

没有人帮莱温斯基写演讲稿，这是她自己写的。但是有不少人给她建议：记者、编辑、新老朋友、她的律师、公关、家人。如果大家意见一致那固然好，但是根本没法达成一致。

The major disagreement was over the opening: a joke about a man 14 years her junior, who hit on Ms. Lewinsky after she spoke at Forbes.

最大的反对意见集中在演讲的开头：是关于一个比她小14岁的男人的笑话，莱温斯基在福布斯做过演讲之后，他来向她搭讪。

“What was his unsuccessful pickup line?” she would ask rhetorically. “He could make me feel 22 again. Later that night, I realized: I’m probably the only person over 40 who would not like to be 22 again.”

“他到底是哪句话说错了？”她自问自答，“他说他能让我重拾22岁的感觉。后来我才发现：‘在年过40的人里，我可能是唯一一个不愿意重拾22岁感觉的人了。’”

It was funny, yes (even hysterical, judging by the reaction at TED). But did the joke sexualize her off the bat? For a woman ingrained in the public psyche as a “tart, slut, whore, bimbo,” as Ms. Lewinsky put it onstage, should she try to avoid the innuendo?

这话的确很有趣（TED讲台下的观众们的反应甚至有点过于激动了）。但这个笑话是否一下子让她显得性感了？正如莱温斯基在演讲中所言，她在公众心理中已经被固定为“轻佻女子、荡妇、妓女、蠢女人”，她难道不应当避免做出这方面的暗示吗？

Maybe she should cut that part and go straight to the next line, somebody suggested: a question for the audience.

有人建议，也许她应该把这段删掉，直接说下一句话——对观众提出一个问题。

“Can I see a show of hands,” she would ask, “of anyone who didn’t make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?”

这个问题是：“你们当中有谁在22岁那年没做过错事，没做过令自己懊悔的事，请举手好吗？”

Ultimately, she stuck with the joke. (The question would stay, too.)

最后，她还是说了这个笑话（那个问题也保留下来了）。

She performed that opening later that day in a practice session downtown, then again a few days later in front of a large gathering of friends, over wine and cheese. She would practice the speech walking down the street, running errands, on a flight from Amsterdam to Oslo. As she joked on Twitter: “If you see me walking down the streets of nyc muttering to myself, don’t worry ... just practicing my TED Talk.”

当天晚些时候，她在市中心的家里排练了这个开头，几天后又在一大群朋友们面前说了一次，桌上有葡萄酒和奶酪。这段演讲她走路也练、出去办事也练、从阿姆斯特丹到奥斯陆的航班上也在练。正如她在Twitter上的玩笑：“如果你看到我走在纽约街头，嘴里喃喃自语，别担心……我是在练习TED演讲呢。”

TED approached Ms. Lewinsky about speaking at the conference, whose theme this year is “Truth and Dare,” after watching her Forbes speech. Kelly Stoetzel, TED’s content director, said, “Part of what I think makes this story interesting is that people will get to see all the dimensions of Monica, not just the person who was reported on 17 years ago.”

TED主办方看了莱温斯基在福布斯的演讲后，邀请她在大会上发言，今年的主题是“真相与勇气”。TED的内容编辑凯莉·斯托泽尔(Kelly Stoetzel)说：“我觉得这个故事会很有趣，部分是由于这样可以让人们看到全方位的莫妮卡，而不仅仅是17年前那些报道中的那个人。”

The idea had been marinating for years. Ms. Lewinsky often thought about the toll that shame had taken on her own life; in graduate school, she studied the impact of trauma on identity.

这个主意已经酝酿了很多年。莱温斯基经常思考那件事如何让羞耻占据了她的整个人生；在念研究生的时候，她学习了有关身份创伤冲击的课程。

Then Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman, killed himself after being recorded by his college roommate being intimate with a man. It was 2010, and Ms. Lewinsky’s mother was beside herself, “gutted with pain,” as Ms. Lewinsky said onstage, “in a way I couldn’t quite understand.”

后来出了泰勒·克莱门蒂(Tyler Clementi)事件，这位拉特格斯的大一新生同一个男人的亲密行为被大学室友录像，之后他自杀身亡。那是2010年，莱温斯基的母亲对此异常激动，“她内心充满痛苦，”莱温斯基在演讲中说，“并且是以一种我不太理解的方式。”

Eventually, she said she realized: To her mother, Mr. Clementi represented her. “She was reliving 1998,” she said, looking out over the crowd. “Reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night. Reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open.”

最终，她还是明白了：对她的母亲来说，克莱门蒂就像是自己的女儿。“她仿佛又重新回到1998年，”莱温斯基抬起头来望着观众们，“她仿佛回到那个每晚坐在我床边的时候，回到那个我淋浴她都要把浴室门打开的时候。”

She paused, becoming emotional. “And reliving a time both my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death.”

她停顿一下，语气变得充满情感。“她仿佛重回到那个父母都担心我会因为羞愧而死的时候。”

“It was easy to forget,” she said, “that ‘That Woman’ was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken.”

“人们很容易忘记，‘那女人’也有很多面，她也有灵魂，她也曾经坚强。”

She doesn’t like to talk much about the past, but she will talk about residuals of her trauma: having to leave the movie theater every time a cop on a screen flashed a badge (a flashback to being ambushed by federal agents in the food court of the Pentagon shopping mall); the studying and reading about it, as a way to ease it.

她并不愿意谈很多关于过去的事，但她愿意谈创伤带给她的残存影响：去看电影时，每当银幕上出现戴着徽章的警察，她都会想起自己曾在五角大楼购物中心的露天餐饮场所遭遇联邦探员埋伏的经历，只得匆匆离开影院；为了平复创伤，她研究和阅读了许多相关材料。

“I had to do a lot of healing work and rehabilitation to get to what transpired over the course of the past year,” she said. “Anybody who has gone through any kind of trauma knows it doesn’t just go away with a snap of the fingers. It lives as an echo in your life. But over time the echo becomes softer and softer.”

“我得做很多事情来让自己痊愈，想办法振作起来，这样才能做到去年那些事，”她说，“任何经历过创伤的人都知道，这不是打个响指就能好起来的。它就像生命中萦绕的回声。但随着时间过去，这道回声也变得越来越温和。”

And yet this isn’t simply about her story, she said. This was about using it to help others. As she put it, shame and humiliation have become a kind of “commodity” in our culture — with websites that thrive on it, industries created out of it, and people who get paid to clean up the mess.

她说，她要讲的并不仅仅是自己的故事，她想用自己的故事来帮助其他人。她说，羞愧和耻辱已经成了我们文化中的某种“商品”——有些网站就靠着它来兴旺发达，有些工业在创造着耻辱，有些人专门靠着善后赚钱维生。

What happened to compassion? she asked up on stage. “What we need,” she said, “is a cultural revolution.”

人们的恻隐之心去哪儿了？她在演讲中问。“我们需要的是一场文化革命，”她说。

THE WAY MS. LEWINSKY tells it, she was “Patient Zero” for the type of Internet shaming we now see regularly. Hers wasn’t the first case ever, but it was the first of its magnitude. Which meant that, virtually overnight, she went from being a private citizen to, as she put it, “a publicly humiliated one.”

按照莱温斯基女士的说法，如今我们常常在网络上见到各种羞辱事件，而她正是“第一位受害者”(Patient Zero)。她并不是第一例，但在重要程度上却是空前的。也就是说，一夜之间，她就从一个普通公民，变成了“遭到公开羞辱的对象”。

“She couldn’t go to a restaurant and order a bowl of soup — literally — without it being reported the next day,” said Barbara Walters, who said her interview with Ms. Lewinsky was one of the most watched segments in television history.

“这么说吧，哪怕她到饭馆去点一碗汤，第二天都会上新闻，”芭芭拉·沃尔特斯说。她表示，自己对莱温斯基的采访是电视史上收视率最高的片段之一。

The story was the perfect combination of politics and sex. “It was like reading a really wonderful dirty book,” Ms. Walters said, “except it was her story and her mother’s story and her aunt’s story.”

她的故事完美地结合了政治与性。“简直就像读一本精彩的黄色小说，”沃尔特斯说，“只不过这是她的故事，是她母亲的故事，也是她的阿姨的故事。”

It was before the days of the Internet sex tape, but barely: Princess Diana had been photographed with a hidden camera while working out at the gym; Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape was stolen from their home and bootlegged out of car trunks.

当时网络性爱视频还没出现，不过也快了：戴安娜王妃在健身房健身的照片被暗藏的摄像头拍到；帕梅拉·安德森(Pamela Anderson)与托米·李(Tommy Lee)的蜜月性爱录像从家中失窃，以盗版的形式被四处售卖传播。

“It was at the tip of the spear of this invasive culture,” said Mr. Friend, who is working on a book about the 1990s.

“这是这种侵害性文化(invasive culture)首当其冲的武器，”弗兰德说，他目前正在创作一本关于90年代的书。

And so it went from there. Ms. Lewinsky was quickly cast by the media as a “little tart,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” She was described by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as “ditsy” and “predatory.”

就是从那时开始，莱温斯基很快被媒体定位为“轻佻的小妞”.《华尔街时报》就是这么称呼她的。《华盛顿邮报》(The New York Post)给她起外号叫“小胖胡椒罐”。在《纽约时报》上，莫林·道德(Maureen Dowd)说她“愚蠢”、“掠食成性”。

And other women — self-proclaimed feminists — piled on. “My dental hygienist pointed out she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong. Betty Friedan dismissed her as “some little twerp.”

还有一些女人——有些自称是女性主义者——也加入进来。“我的牙医说她有第三期牙龈炎，”艾丽卡·荣格(Erica Jong)说。贝蒂·弗里丹(Betty Friedan)说她是“小蠢货”。

“It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Gloria Steinem wrote me in an email, noting that in Ms. Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” “I’m grateful to [her],” Ms. Steinem said, “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”

“这种性耻辱针对女人远胜于针对男人，”格劳丽亚·斯坦尼姆(Gloria Steinem)在给我的电子邮件中写道.她指出，在莱温斯基的事件中，她也成了“极右翼”的靶子。“我很感谢她有勇气重新回到公众视野之中，”斯坦尼姆写道。

Had the Lewinsky story unfolded today, certainly the digital reality of it would have been worse (or at least more pungent). “They would have dug up her private photos,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.” But there would have also been avenues to push back: more outlets, more varied voices, probably even a #IStandWithMonica hashtag.

假如莱温斯基的故事发生在今天，网络曝光肯定会更加严重，至少会是更加刺激。“他们肯定会挖出她的私人照片，”法律教授丹妮尔·希特伦(Danielle Citron)说，她还著有《网络空间里的仇恨犯罪》(Hate Crimes in Cyberspace)一书。但是，也同样会有人回击：会有更多人出来说话，会有更多不同的声音，twitter上甚至会有“#我支持莱温斯基”的标签。

“If it happened today, I think the consensus that she deserved to be thrown under the bus would be considerably weaker,” said Clay Shirky, a journalism professor at N.Y.U. who studies Internet culture. “And the key thing that’s changed is not information — there were credible press reports about Cosby for years, just as Clinton’s denial was ridiculous on its face — but the ability to coordinate reaction.”

“如果这件事发生在今天，我觉得不会有那么多人觉得她活该被扔到汽车底下去，”纽约大学专门研究网络文化的新闻学教授克雷·舍基(Clay Shirky)说。“最重要的改变并不是信息——关于科斯比（Cosby，指影星Bill Cosby强奸案——译注），多年来也有可靠的媒体报道，正如克林顿的矢口否认非常可笑——但是人们的相应的反应能力已经发生了变化。”

In that respect, Ms. Lewinsky may finally be in a unique position to tell her story. “I don’t know … exactly how you combat cyberbullying,” Ms. Walters said. “But at least she’s fighting back. … I do think it’s about time we gave her a chance.”

因此，现在的莱温斯基可能是置身一个独一无二的处境来讲述她的故事。“我不知道……你们是如何应付网络欺凌，”沃尔特斯说。“但至少她反击了……我觉得现在应该给她机会。”

THE NIGHT BEFORE TED, Ms. Lewinsky began a ritual. She lit candles. She set up a table of crystals. She debated which necklace to wear, then ordered dinner and tea.

TED演讲的前一天，莱温斯基进行了一项仪式。她燃起一支蜡烛，在一张桌子上摆满水晶饰物，仔细盘算该戴哪条项链，然后叫了晚餐和茶。

She would be in bed by 9:30 and up at 5 a.m.; Amy Cuddy, the Harvard researcher whose TED talk on body language clocked nearly 25 million views, was meeting her in the morning. They would power-pose together.

她应该在晚上9点半上床，上午5点起床；哈佛大学研究员艾米·卡迪(Amy Cuddy)关于肢体语言的TED演讲有将近2500万人观看，翌日，她俩将会见面，一起摆出“高能量姿势”(power-pose)。

Ms. Lewinsky had a friend from Los Angeles there with her, and Ms. Cuddy stopped by to wish her luck. The two had never met in person.

莱温斯基身边有个从洛杉矶赶过来陪她的朋友，卡迪过来拜访，祝她好运，两人之前从未私下见过面。

“If you had told me a year ago I was going to be delivering a TED talk, I would have laughed in your face,” Ms. Lewinsky said, seated on the carpet.

“如果一年前你告诉我我会做TED讲演，我肯定当时就觉得很可笑，”莱温斯基坐在地毯上说。

She looked at her friend.

她望着那个朋友。

“A year ago. …” she choked up. “Well, you were there. It was so, so hard. There were times I thought I wouldn’t make it.”

“一年前……”她声音哽咽。“啊，你也在，实在太艰难了，有时候我觉得自己实在挺不住了。”

“I’m just so grateful,” she said. “I’m at once grateful and surprised.”

“我很感激，”她说，“我现在又感激又惊喜。”

Earlier, I had asked Ms. Lewinsky what she hoped to accomplish with a platform like TED. She asked if I had read the David Foster Wallace book “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” In it, there is a chapter about suffering, and the story of a girl who has survived abuse.

早先，我问莱温斯基，她希望通过TED这样的平台取得什么样的效果。她问我有没有看过大卫·福斯特·华莱士(David Foster Wallace)的书——《对丑陋人物的简访》(Brief Interviews With Hideous Men)。书中有一个章节是关于痛苦的，讲述了一个挺过虐待的女孩的故事。

What the young woman endures is horrific, said Ms. Lewinsky, but by going through it, she learns something about herself: that she can survive.

那个年轻女人的经历非常可怕，莱温斯基说，但是经历了一切，她也更加了解自己，她明白自己可以挺过去。

“That’s part of what I thought I could contribute,” she said. “That in someone else’s darkest moment, lodged in their subconscious might be the knowledge that there was someone else who was, at one point in time, the most humiliated person in the world. And that she survived it.”

“我觉得这就是我能做的贡献，”她说。“在其他人生命中最黑暗的时刻，他们或许会在某个时刻下意识地想起，有人曾遭受世上最大的耻辱，但是她活下来了。”