Bill Clinton insists he doesn't owe Monica Lewinsky an apology

Former President Bill Clinton insisted in a weekend interview that he doesn't owe a personal apology to Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose adult life has been defined by their inappropriate sexual affair and the global scrutiny that followed.

'No,' he told NBC in an interview airing Monday on the Today show. 'I do not – I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.'

'I apologized to everybody in the world,' Clinton said, implying that was enough.

And the flustered former president, more famous for his Don Juan-like seductions than for his policy legacy, portrayed himself, not Lewinsky, as history's victim in the mass-media's retelling of the 1990s saga.

lot of the facts have been omitted to make the story work,' he declared, 'I think partly because they're frustrated that they got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office and his voters don't seem to care.'

And Clinton complained in the interview that he left the presidency financially ruined because of the costs associated with the legal consequences of his actions.

'Nobody believes that I got out of that for free,' he said. 'I left the White House $16 million in debt,'

He's worth about $80 million today, aided by an aggressive schedule of speaking events – many of which paid him six-figure fees for individual appearances. 

In a March essay for vanity fair magazine, Lewinsky wrote that 'what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power.'