Read her recount of the Clinton affair at TED talk

As a starry-eyed White House intern, she made a mistake she's come to regret for the rest of her life - she had an affair with then United States president, Bill Clinton.

Lewinsky was a recent speaker at TED Talk in Vancouver, where she shed light on the legendary affair and spoke out against cyber-bullying.

See the full text of her speech:

“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. At the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.

Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply. In 1998, after having been swept up in an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before.

The media landscape of the mid 1990s was, of course, very different from what it is today. This scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. It was the first time traditional news was usurped by the Internet, a click that reverberated around the whole world.

Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.

Now I admit I made mistakes — especially wearing that beret — but the attention and judgment that I received — not the story, but that I personally received — was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’ I was known by many, but actually known by few. I get it. It was easy to forget ‘that woman’ was dimensional and had a soul.

In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. … I lost my sense of self. When this happened to me, 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it cyber-bullying.

This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998. And by ‘this,’ I mean the stealing of people’s private words, actions conversations or photos and then making them public. Public without consent, public without context and public without compassion.

Of course, it happens with extreme regularity now. Take for example, in the past year: the leak of nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities; the hack, in which the most embarrassing personal emails traveled far and wide; the release of 100,000 images and videos on the website SnapChatLeaked.com.

Tyler’s tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences. I began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different … Every day online, people — especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this — are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day.

For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers traffic in shame.

A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks; the more clicks, the more advertising dollars … We are in a dangerous cycle: the more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it. And the more numb we get, the more we click.

With every click we make a choice. Public humiliation as a blood sport has to stop. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.

'Shame can’t survive empathy'

I’ve seen some very dark days in my life. It was empathy and compassion from friends, family, coworkers, even strangers that saved me. Empathy from one person can make a difference. Compassionate comments help abate the negativity.

The Internet is the superhighway for the id, but online showing empathy to others benefits us all … Just imagine walking a mile in someone else’s headline.

Why speak now?

The top-note answer was and is: Because it’s time. Time to stop tiptoeing around my past … Time to take back my narrative,” she says. “Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: you can survive it. I know it’s hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story.”