
In the aftermath of ousted Fox News head Roger Ailes' death, many obituaries and commentaries have been penned -- but few are as personal as Monica Lewinsky's in the New York Times.
Rather than write "another obituary" for Ailes, Lewinsky wrote that she intended her op-ed as "an obituary for the culture he purveyed -- a culture that affected me profoundly and personally."
The news culture Ailes created at Fox, where he'd only been working for a few years when the scandal between Lewinsky and former President Bill Clinton broke in 1998, included non-stop coverage of Lewinsky.
According to Lewinsky, Ailes "took the story of the affair and the trail that followed and made certain his anchors hammered it ceaselessly, 24 hours a day."
Lewinsky cited a quote by former Fox executive editor John Moody, who said "Monica was a news channel's dream come true" in a 2014 Ailes biography.
"Their dream was my nightmare," she said. "My character, my looks and my life were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random in the service of higher ratings."
After the Drudge Report broke the story of the affair (one of the first instances of online news beating out traditional news sources for a scoop), Lewinsky said the ensuing Fox News coverage made her into a caricature.
"I ceased being a dimensional person," she wrote. "Instead I became a whore, a bimbo, a slut and worse."
According to Lewinsky, much of the "culture of humiliation" that's occurred since she was publicly given a scarlet letter was the result of the coverage Ailes promoted.
"Our world -- of cyberbulling and chyrons, trolls and tweets -- was forged in 1998," Lewinsky wrote.
Read Lewinsky's entire op-ed via the Times.