Monica Lewinsky opens up on affair with Bill Clinton in Vanity Fair

Bill Clinton's former mistress Monica Lewinsky writes that she's troubled by what she called Hillary Rodham Clinton's "impulse to blame the Woman" for the affair that nearly took down a presidency.

In an article in the June issue of Vanity Fair magazine, on newsstands Wednesday, Lewinsky declared of the scandal and the impact on her life: "It's time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress."

Lewinsky, 40, took note of reports earlier this year of Hillary Clinton's conversations from the 1990s with an Arkansas confidante, the late Diane Blair, whose papers have been made public. Among other revelations, Blair said Clinton called Lewinsky a "narcissistic looney toon" and blamed herself for not being sensitive to Bill Clinton's stresses as president.

Said Lewinsky: "Yes, I get it. Hillary Clinton wanted it on record that she was lashing out at her husband's mistress. She may have faulted her husband for being inappropriate, but I find her impulse to blame the Woman -- not only me, but herself -- troubling."

Lewinsky questioned whether someone who was narcissistic would have had the decency to refuse to wear a wire against Clinton allies as Lewinsky wrote her FBI interrogators had proposed.

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton, considering a run for president in 2016, did not return a message seeking comment.

Summing up her 1995-97 relationship with the 42nd president, the one-time White House intern maintained that while she was exploited by Bill Clinton, she wasn't coerced.

"Sure, my boss took advantage of me," she wrote, "but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship."

The only abuse, she said, came after the affair went public, when Clinton's allies sought to scapegoat her and undermine her credibility.

Lewinsky wrote of being suicidal in the aftermath of her public outing -- how her mother feared she would be "literally humiliated to death."

Lewinsky said she's come to "deeply regret what happened" between herself and the president and kept quiet through several recent presidential campaigns. But now, she said, she wants to stop "tiptoeing around my past -- and other people's futures."