Lewinsky: Don’t force parents to tattle on kids

Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose sexual relationship with President Clinton led to his impeachment, is urging the federal government to protect parents’ rights not to testify against their own children.

Lewinsky, who now hosts the “Mr. Personality” reality TV show on the Fox network, recounts her reaction to her mother’s call to testify in connection with the probe into her relationship with the president.

“I was horrified and sickened,” she writes in a Mother’s Day opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. “Not unlike many young women, I had confided in my mom – to a certain extent – and expected our conversations to remain between us. In a million years I could never have fathomed a situation where we would find our bond – a deep, important and inviolate one – tested to the extent and in the manner that it was.”

Lewinsky admitted a sexual relationship with Clinton and discussed it in 1997 with her friend Linda Tripp, who secretly recorded the talks and handed the tapes over to investigators.

The tapes Tripp gave to then-Independent Counsel Ken Starr led to the perjury and obstruction of justice probe of Clinton, his impeachment in the House and a Senate trial that acquitted him.

In subsequent testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, Clinton had denied having sex with Lewinsky.

The TV host says she felt Mother’s Day was an appropriate time to urge Congress to grant protection between parents and their children.

We have a husband-wife privilege, a doctor-patient privilege, an attorney-client privilege and even a privilege between priest and penitent. But no comparable confidential boundary is recognized for parent and child.

All of these existing privileges place value on certain relationships in order to foster and then protect them. Their inviolability is deemed more important than the truth-finding function of the courts.

Isn’t the parent-child relationship every bit as important, if not more so? …

Parent-child privilege was certainly a concern to which I had never given a moment’s thought before the investigation in 1998. The image of my mother – wan and emotionally distraught – as she left the federal courthouse just over five years ago will be forever fixed in my memory. She was not the first or last parent to be placed in the untenable position of having to violate a most basic parental instinct. Perhaps by next Mother’s Day this will no longer be a worry.