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Hillary Clinton Documentary Interview With Director Nanette Burstein


Yeah, and I did not have a lot of time with him. It wasn’t until the end [of the filming process]. I wasn’t sure if I was going to ask him to be interviewed or how important it would be, and then later in the editing process, I realized it would be really nice in the section about her being Secretary of State to hear from Obama. So we went to him, and we didn’t have a lot of time left. He did ultimately agree, and he agreed, like, “OK, I have limited time, and I need to know specifically what you want to ask me about.” And he was agreeable. I knew specifically what I wanted him to talk about, which is what I did, so that did not take a lot of time. And he’s incredibly articulate and he can just sit down in a chair and talk about it and then go about his day.

President Barack Obama chats with Hillary Clinton backstage following a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2016.Barbara Kinney/Hillary for America

One thing that I really found interesting is that there’s a lot of talk about Hillary’s close confidant and advisor, Huma Abedin, but she does not sit down for an interview. I assume you reached out to her, so what can you say about that?

I mean, Huma is extremely involved in [Hillary’s] life still, to this day. And Huma was very helpful to me. If I needed to contact any of [Hillary’s] friends or colleagues, they would never call me back if Huma didn’t say, “No, [she’s] not just a crazy person, and yes, Secretary Clinton is OK with you talking to her.” So she was unbelievably helpful and supportive of this project. She just isn’t someone who wanted to sit down for an interview. She’s had her own struggles with the media about her own life and prefers to be more behind the scenes.

Were you personally bummed that she didn’t participate?

I mean, yeah, it would have been nice so then people don’t go, “Why isn’t Huma Abedin in it?”

You filmed in the Clintons’ house in upstate New York, right?

Yes, in Chappaqua. We filmed in their guest cottage.

What was it like being in their home?

They have these two cute dogs running around. It’s not an exaggeration that they love to read and there are bookshelves and books everywhere. They are very down to earth. People think they maybe have this elitist lifestyle and I did not find that to be true at all. They have pretty modest living arrangements, and are very laid back, other than there are Secret Service around, which is a requirement.

Hillary Clinton and Nanette Burstein pose for photo

Clinton with the documentary’s director, Nanette Burstein.

Jack Berner

Did doing this documentary change your view of the Clintons?

I like them a lot more afterwards. Just getting to know them as people. Look, I voted for her, and I thought she would have made a great president. I thought she made a great senator of New York, but I was never a Hillary-acolyte. I didn’t put her on a pedestal. I didn’t really think a lot about her. In fact, I thought, like a lot of people, “Oh, she seems a little guarded.” And I didn’t find that to be true at all. I found her to be quite approachable and accessible and very down to earth. Even smarter than I had imagined, too.

Burstein’s four part documentary series, Hillary, premieres Friday, March 6 on Hulu. Jessica Radloff is the Glamour West Coast editor. You can follow her on Twitter at @JRadloff.*





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Hillary Clinton: ‘The Press Has Never Taken Reproductive Health Seriously’


The reality that Hillary Clinton is planning, determined and unglamourous, for the future, that Hillary Clinton is ready to hold the media accountable for dismissing women’s rights, that Hillary Clinton is advocating for newborn babies at hurricane-ravaged clinics, that Hillary Clinton is strategizing on the issue of humanitarian-worker burnout—is so confusing. Didn’t Hillary Clinton lose? Doesn’t she have some fancy luncheon to be at? Isn’t she tired of being defeated?

“I believe that it’s never the wrong time to stand up and use your voice on behalf of yourself and other people,” she says. “You may not always be successful but you might move the process a little bit forward. And that will have an impact on people and their lives.” It’s odd to see Hillary Clinton’s life, with its giant moments of achievement and humiliation watched by the world like an Olympic event or a Super Bowl, the way she might see it—as tiny, incremental changes as the result of unending work.

“I think at the very least you have to vote,” she says. “Don’t ever, ever, ever give up on your vote.” Clinton says that since her election loss in 2016, young women have regularly come up to her to tell her they’re sorry they didn’t vote, because they thought she didn’t need their vote to win. Her fundamental refusal to go away after 2016—an insistence that has taken the form of a book, an upcoming Hulu docu-series, and regularly viral comments about the presidential election—inspire fury, even in some of her longtime fans. She seems not bothered by this.

Clinton with client families and workers at Centro MAM

Megan Maher | Clinton Foundation

“I know from my long experience in trying to make change and help people that you can never give up, you can never give in,” she says. “Right now we have people in power in our country who want to discourage you, they want to depress you. They want to convince you that it’s not possible to stand up against the combined power of a president and the people who support him and the businesses who are profiting off of him and his policies. And I just don’t believe that.”

Making your way through a world in which some believe fetuses are human even as they ignore the death rates of real, live women is depressing. It is discouraging. Same with living—and bringing life into—a world where the climate is out of control, and the government won’t address it. It would be nice to just lie down. That’s exactly what powerful people want, Clinton says. They want you to feel powerless. That’s how they win.

She has to go—she has a session about preventing violence in the wake of climate catastrophe, she has more meetings with solar energy groups, she has plans to talk more about the intersection of climate change and gender equality.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” she says, which feels like an amazing understatement. “If you’ve got the energy and the time in busy lives like the ones we have, then get involved with groups and organizations that stand for what you believe in. (She recommends Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters.)

“At the very least,” she says again, sounding hopeful, and not the least bit tired. “Vote.”

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.





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Hillary Clinton Wants to Give Meghan Markle a Hug


Meghan Markle is in the middle of a legal battle with the British tabloids and recently admitted how difficult the negative media attention directed at her since she married Prince Harry has been. But over here in the U.S., she’s racking up high-profile supporters, like Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Ellen DeGeneres. Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also a big fan.

“Oh my God, I want to hug her!” Clinton, no stranger to being derided in the press, said in a recent interview with BBC Radio 5. “I feel as a mother I just want to put my arms around her. I want to hug her. I want to tell her to hang in there and don’t let those bad guys get you down. Keep going, do what you think is right.” She even offered some techniques for dealing with the public pressure, like humor and deflection—but added “it is tough what she’s going through and she deserves a lot better.”

“I have a great deal of feeling toward and about her [Meghan] because it’s one thing to be told what it will be like when you step onto the biggest stage with the brightest spotlight, joining the royal family…and yet it still is really hard to imagine,” Clinton continued. “It takes some getting used to, to have your every move scrutinized and analyzed, and frankly things made up about.nAnd I really wish her and her husband the very best because they are struggling to have a life of meaning and integrity on their own terms—and that’s hard enough if you’re just walking around in today’s world, but if you’re on that big a platform, it’s really difficult.”

Clinton also said that she thinks race and gender do play a part in the coverage of Markle. “I don’t think there’s any doubt of it,” she said. “I think even if you go back and look at social media from the time the engagement was announced, race was clearly an element in it. And to think that some of your, what we could call mainstream media, actually allowed that to be printed in their pages, or amplified, was heartbreaking and wrong.”

“She is an amazing young woman. She has an incredible life story. She has stood up for herself. She’s made her own way in the world. And then she falls in love and he falls in love with her, and everybody should be celebrating that because it is a true love story,” Clinton said. A young Meghan Markle, of course, famously wrote the then-First Lady a letter as part of her campaign to get a sexist dishwashing soap ad changed when she was just 11. (Spoiler: It worked.)

Here’s hoping these two amazing women can get together to work on a charitable project together soon—or at least meet up for a glass of wine.



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Hillary Clinton Says Her Husband's Affair with Monica Lewinsky Wasn't an 'Abuse of Power'


In the year since the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement took center stage, many women (and men) have spent time reflecting on events of the past and how they might be perceived if they happened today. We saw this most recently during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings, when Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony drew obvious comparisons to Anita Hill‘s during the Clarence Thomas hearings back in 1991.

Another public figure who has been subjected to this reassessment is former President Bill Clinton, who, when asked about #MeToo this summer, said he doesn’t “agree with everything.” Now his wife, Hillary Clinton, has weighed in on the matter. On CBS’ Sunday Morning, Clinton was asked about her husband’s relationship with former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, more than 20 years ago, and whether it should have led to his resignation. Her answer: “Absolutely not.”

But it is the follow-up to the initial question that many see as problematic.

“It wasn’t an abuse of power?” asks CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil. “No,” says Clinton. Dokoupil continues, “There are people who look at the incidents of the 90s and they say, ‘A president of the United States cannot have a consensual relationship with an intern; the power imbalance is too great.'” Clinton interjects, “Who was an adult.”

“Let me ask you this,” she continues, “where’s the investigation of the current incumbent, against whom numerous allegations have been made, and which he dismisses, denies, and ridicules? So, there was an investigation [of President Clinton], and it, as I believe, came out in the right place.”

Let’s break this down: She is indeed correct about the allegations against President Donald Trump, but what Clinton says in defense of her husband is so deeply disappointing for those who understand how power works. To argue that because Lewinsky was an adult at the time there could be no power imbalance is just wrong and negates the workplace harassment experiences of women of every age.

It saddens me that the Clintons don’t seem to have evolved their points-of-view on the matter since the ’90s, as so many others have in the wake of #MeToo. In that June 2018 interview where Bill Clinton said he had questions about the movement, he also took a defensive (and questionable) stand. “Nobody believes that I got out of that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt,” he said. “But you typically have ignored gaping facts in describing this. And I bet you don’t even know that. This was litigated 20 years ago, and two thirds of the American people sided with me.”

Lewinsky herself has done some re-thinking about the relationship. “Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern,” she wrote in a Vanity Fair essay in February. “I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot. (Although power imbalances—and the ability to abuse them—do exist even when the sex has been consensual.)”

“He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet,” she continued. “He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college.”

Social media users quickly called Clinton out for her failure to recognize the power dynamic between Lewinsky and her husband.

We cannot make necessary progress if we refuse to look at our collective past and learn from it—as hard as it may be to face. That’s true for everyone, even Hillary Clinton.

MORE: This One Quote From Bill Clinton’s Latest Interview Says a Lot About His Feelings on #MeToo and Monica Lewinsky





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Monica Lewinsky Walked Out Of An Interview After Being Asked Question About Bill Clinton


Monica Lewinsky is no stranger to media scrutiny, having endured a national scandal involving then President Bill Clinton more than 20 years ago. In the advent of the MeToo movement, she’s discussed reckoning with that moment and moving on, but on Monday the affair was back in the news after an Israeli news anchor asked her an “off-limits” question about Clinton at a public event, prompting Lewinsky to walk offstage just moments later.

Lewinsky attended a conference in Israel on Monday to deliver a speech on online harassment and cyberbullying—a cause she has taken up recently and that she discussed with Glamour last year. However, the event took a turn when she sat down for a scheduled 15-minute talk with Yonit Levi, who referred to remarks Clinton made on the Today show in June when asked about Lewinsky. (Clinton told interviewer Craig Melvin that he apologized “to everyone in the world” when asked if he offered a personal apology to Lewinsky.) When asked if she was still expecting an expression of regret from the former president, Lewinsky paused and then said, “I’m so sorry, I’m not going to be able to do this,” before getting up and walking away.

On Twitter, Lewinsky explained that there had been “clear parameters” set before the interview about “what we would be discussing and what we would not.”

“I left because it is more important than ever for women to stand up for themselves and not allow others to control their narrative,” she said via a note posted in a tweet. “To the audience: I’m very sorry that this talk had to end this way.”

Lewinsky also took media outlets to task for the way they reported the incident. In several articles, Lewinsky is described as having stormed off stage and becoming “angered” by Levi’s questions. Lewinsky clarified these characterizations, writing, “stormed? not quite. politely said i was leaving? yes. walked as fast as i could off stage in heels? yes.”

Lewinsky revisited her time interning in the White House in a powerful op-ed for Vanity Fair in which she described the post-traumatic stress that the highly publicized affair caused and questioned whether or not the relationship was truly consensual, given Clinton’s position of power. Still, she has worked to move past Clinton’s narrative being so entwined with hers, and on Monday, it was clear that she wasn’t going to let someone else steer the conversation for her.

MORE: Monica Lewinsky Reckons With #MeToo in a Powerful New Essay: ‘I’m Not Alone Anymore’





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Hillary Clinton Wants To Help Reunite Immigrant Families By Providing Transportation Resources


During OZY Fest, a two-day event in Central Park this weekend, Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with nonprofit leader Laurene Powell Jobs and shared that she plans to help reunite immigrant families by providing transportation options.

“I’m going to be tweeting about this in the days to come, but if any of you work for an airline please direct-message me because these families will need vouchers and discounted tickets to be reunited over these thousands of miles,” she said on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.

As a result of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, thousands of children have been put into government custody while their parents are sent to immigrant detention centers until they can post bail. One major hurdle parents face once they are released from detention is that they often have to figure out how to get to the state in which their child is being held. If a parent is detained in Arizona, for example, and their child is moved to a foster care facility on the East Coast, they have to find ways to travel across the country with few resources. Activists and volunteers have offered to drive parents in some cases, but Clinton’s solution could help to provide a quicker solution for immigrants who have access to their passports and are able to fly.

This isn’t the first time that Clinton has discussed the controversial immigration policy: She’s previously slammed it as “truly, unimaginably cruel.” She also tweeted that the policy had created a “humanitarian crisis” and that “every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged.”

The former Secretary of State also pulled no punches when it came to discussing Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, criticizing what appeared to be the president accepting Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election over information from U.S. intelligence agencies.

“It’s really distressing and alarming,” Clinton said. “It should concern every American of any political party because this was a direct attack on our democracy.”

Clinton was just one of the speakers of OZY Fest, which the New York Times described as “part music festival, part TED talk, part food fair.” The event also included guests like Rose McGowan, Cynthia Nixon, and Michelle Wolf.

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