Hillary Rodham Clinton, in an interview with People magazine released Wednesday, said she had "moved on" from the Monica Lewinsky scandal that dominated her husband's second term as president.
In an interview timed to the publication of her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton said she did not take time to read an essay by Lewinsky that Vanity Fair published last month about the Bill Clinton affair and her life since then.
"I think everybody needs to look to the future," Hillary Clinton said.
Asked about published reports that she called Lewinsky a "narcissistic loony toon" after the affair became public, Clinton said, "I'm not going to comment on what did and didn't happen."
The brief comments are the first time Clinton has publicly addressed questions about Lewinsky since the scandal was revived in recent months, partly by conservatives and partly by Lewinsky's Vanity Fair article.
In the People interview, Clinton discusses her life since leaving the secretary of state's job last year, saying she has been cleaning out her closets ("very calming"); doing yoga and aquatics ("not as much as I should"); and watching the Netflix series House of Cards, a Washington-based political thriller.
She said she was trying not to dwell on any decision about running for president in 2016.
"With the extra joy of 'I'm about to become a grandmother,' I want to live in the moment," she told the magazine. Her daughter, Chelsea, announced in April that she was pregnant and expecting her first child in the fall.
"At the same time," Clinton added, "I am concerned about what I see happening in the country and in the world. Through the next months, I will think more about what role I can or, in my mind, should play."
The Lewinsky scandal re-emerged in January after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., brought it up in addressing criticism that the Republican Party had waged "a war on women." President Bill Clinton, he said, had taken advantage of a young intern.
"That is predatory behavior," Paul said on the NBC News program Meet the Press.
The next month, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, published a trove of White House-era documents from Diane Blair, a friend of the Clintons who died in 2000.
The Blair papers included diary entries based on conversations with Hillary Clinton. According to those entries, Clinton called Lewinsky a "narcissistic loony toon" and said the relationship with Bill Clinton was consensual.
Then, in May, Lewinsky -- who was a 22-year-old White House intern during her relationship with Bill Clinton -- wrote the Vanity Fair piece. In the essay, she said she found Hillary Clinton's "impulse to blame the woman -- not only me, but herself -- troubling."
A Section on 06/05/2014