Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and her infamous Oval Office affair are back in the news again, undoubtedly to the great chagrin of former President Bill Clinton.

In a recent interview, Lewinsky suggested that the best way for Clinton to handle the public exposure of their mid-1990s extramarital activities would have been for him "to resign" or to at least not lie about it and throw her "under the bus," according to NewsNation.

The secret Clinton-Lewinsky affair was a major White House scandal that led to a failed impeachment and significantly damaged the reputations of both participants, the latter much more so than the former.

Clinton should have resigned or at least not lied

Lewinsky this week sat down for a conversation with "Call Her Daddy" podcast host Alex Cooper to discuss the fallout of her life-changing affair with the former president that left her publicly shamed for decades afterward while former President Clinton continued to be hailed for years as a hero and role model for Democrats.

Recalling how Clinton had mishandled the public revelation of the affair, Lewinsky said, "I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was nobody’s business and to resign."

"Or to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus," she continued. "And at the same time, I’m hearing myself say that, and it’s like, OK we’re also talking about the most powerful office in the world. I don’t want to be naive either."

Asked initially to reflect more broadly on how the situation had been handled by not just the Clinton White House but also the Washington D.C. media, Lewinsky replied, "It’s really complicated because you are talking about issues and situations where so many people are impacted."

"Maybe this is a reflection of my generation or my age, but I don’t know where the right balance is -- because there was damage no matter what," she later added. "I think there was so much collateral damage for women of my generation to watch a young woman to be pilloried on the world stage, to be torn apart for my sexuality, for my mistakes, for my everything."

The Clinton-Lewinsky affair

According to Time magazine, Lewinsky and former President Clinton secretly engaged in a two-year affair from 1995 to 1996 when she was an intern for White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, which became public knowledge two years later in 1998 when an anonymous tipster informed the lawyers representing Clinton accuser Paula Jones in her civil lawsuit against the president.

The affair quickly became fodder for the media and soon also became part of and ultimately eclipsed then-Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation of the Clintons' Whitewater real estate scandal, and the coverage of those developments resulted in arguably one of the biggest lies ever told by a president when Clinton dishonestly vowed to the American people, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

That lie -- as well as a similar one that he told to a D.C. grand jury in July, though he publicly confessed to the affair afterward -- became increasingly apparent as more information about the affair came out in media reports and Starr's report, which prompted House Republicans to impeach Clinton by the end of the year, though he was ultimately acquitted by the Senate on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Clinton never really apologized to Lewinsky

Meanwhile, as Clinton survived the impeachment and went on to publicly rehabilitate his image, with plenty of help from the fawning media -- at least until the #MeToo movement grabbed hold of the Democratic base -- Lewinsky was essentially forced into hiding by that same media that seemingly held her solely responsible for sullying the sleazy president's already tattered reputation.

Newsweek reported last year that Clinton eventually acknowledged that he should have but hadn't ever personally apologized to Lewinsky for his part in ruining her life.

As for Lewinsky, who now hosts a podcast of her own, she told podcaster Cooper of the decades after the affair, "I was lucky enough to hold onto a strand of my true self, but I lost my future," and added, "I’m so grateful for how my life has changed in the last 10 years … but that certainly was not a given."