| Next week marks a quarter century since the release of one of the most salacious best-sellers of the nineties. The Starr Report, published online on September 11, 1998, outlines in lurid detail the relationship between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern. Named for the special prosecutor assigned to investigate the President, the report, which stretched to well over four hundred pages, would become a commercial blockbuster upon its arrival in bookstores, and earned a place in digital history almost instantly, crashing government servers and reportedly drawing twenty million readers in its first two days on the Internet. The week after the report’s début, the New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead contemplated its significance. Lewinsky, she argued, was a complicated figure, regardless of how politically useful it might be to portray her in simple black or white. But in key ways, Mead went on, the President’s former paramour was undeniably a victim—and not only of the most obvious culprit. Mead’s words, twenty-five years later, remain a ringing indictment. The “report isn’t an account of sexual abuse,” she observes. “It is sexual abuse.” | 
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