Former President Bill Clinton said as part of a Hulu documentary about his wife Hillary that his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and other dalliances over "many years" were a coping mechanism to deal with the stress of being president.

“Nobody sits down and thinks, “I think I’ll take a really irresponsible risk,” Clinton said about the 1998 affair. “It’s bad for my family, bad for my country, bad for the people who work with me.”

By way of explaining how he ended up at age 49 in an affair with a 22-year-old, Clinton said he did it to "manage his anxieties."

“You feel like you’re staggering around — you’ve been in a 15-round prizefight that was extended to 30 rounds, and here’s something that’ll take your mind off it for a while,” he said, continuing, “Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments and terrors, fears of whatever, things I did to manage my anxieties for years.”

"It was awful"

Clinton, now 73, speaks of the 1998 scandal that led to his impeachment by the House with regret for its impact on the country and his family including Hillary.

“You know, we all bring our baggage to life and sometimes we do things we shouldn’t do. It was awful what I did,” he admitted.

Despite his ready admissions more than 25 years after the affair was discovered, Clinton was still employing his famous spin machine to tell his own version of events--or more likely, one that Hillary was happy to have televised.

Clinton almost didn't make it to the presidency when in 1992 Gennifer Flowers claimed the two had a 12-year affair. At the time, he denied it but after he was elected to a second term. admitted to sleeping with her at least once.

Other accusations

A number of other women accused him of groping, sexually harassing or assaulting them between 1978 and 1994: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey. He was also known to be a very close friend to convicted child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein before Epstein's death and to have repeatedly visited the island where much of the trafficking took place.

And in 1998 when the scandal broke, he denied repeatedly that he had an affair with Lewinsky until her taped conversations and the semen-stained dress were released publicly. Then he parsed the word "is" to avoid admitting that he lied to investigators--which is why he was eventually impeached.

Clinton did not address any of these allegations in the documentary "Hillary" or admit to any other indiscretions, so let's not laud his honesty or openness too much.

Of course, his wife, the subject of the documentary, would hardly want the man she stood by for decades to be outed as a promiscuous, perverse, predatory man, now would she?

From watching him as president, we know that he has a charming presence that fooled a lot of people about the kind of person he was, and likely still is.

The world will probably never know the extent of what Clinton did behind closed doors.