In the FX Series on the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal, It’s Not Just the

But if “Impeachment: American Crime Story” acknowledges #MeToo, it also complicates the narrative, and maybe even serves as a course correction. When the movement first emerged, there was a broad focus on punishing bad actors and weeding out the problematic people — a hunt-and-purge drive that has extended into other areas of social justice. But in this telling, the world of the ‘90s isn’t a binary place, divided into innocent women and predatory men. It’s a complex web of motivations and major and minor players, in which women aren’t just complicit. They’re largely running the show.

Lewinsky never fit perfectly into the #MeToo template. Unlike the Clinton accusers who complained about unwanted advances — such as Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment lawsuit was the path to Lewinsky’s downfall — she always contended that their relationship was consensual. She wasn’t a pure, defenseless victim. She was a person with agency, capable of her own bad choices. In the series, she talks about Clinton moonily, clinging to the trinkets that the married president has given her, waiting desperately for his late-night phone calls. She doesn’t want a payoff, settlement a reckoning or a public apology in the series. She wants him.

That’s not to exonerate Clinton himself — for spectacularly bad judgment, and for taking part in a power dynamic that was grossly uneven and fundamentally cruel. The series doesn’t let him off the hook, even if it suggests that he had genuine affection for Lewinsky; nearly every word he utters, to her and every other person, is a whispery lie designed to save his own hide. But when it comes to making Lewinsky suffer in the ways that truly upended her life, the true guilt belongs to the women.

There’s Ann Coulter, played by Cobie Smulders as the hard-drinking leader of a salon of right-wing conspirators, looking for every angle to take Bill Clinton down. (“This is a coup d’etat, and we are the coup,” she purrs to her compatriots at one point, holding a bottle of wine.) There’s Betty Currie, the president’s personal secretary, whose kindness to Lewinsky masks the fact that her loyalties are firmly on Clinton’s side. There’s Susan Carpenter McMillan, an antiabortion activist who convinces Paula Jones to walk away from a hefty settlement offer and pursue a trial —creating the opening for Lewinsky’s downfall, and leading Jones directly to the slaughter. There’s Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent grasping for dollar signs, who convinces a bureaucrat named Linda Tripp to tape her rambling phone calls with Lewinsky, providing the hard evidence that will take the scandal public.

And especially, there’s Tripp, the series’ true protagonist: the person who sets the action in motion and has to bear the consequences of what she’s wrought. In many ways, the entire series functions as a kind of supervillain origin story, a study of how an obscure government employee — disgusted by…