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Lewinsky Tells Story; Journalist: I was Kidnapped in Ukraine; Hillary Clinton Concerns Nigeria Kidnappings

Aired May 08, 2014 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, and look at that way. Justice has been served now. They know what Donald is like and, you know, things I said before about Donald is absolutely true.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: When he was on the witness stand, he claimed that he didn't even know your history with the NBA.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

COOPER: I'm not a sports guy. I know your history with the NBA.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But that's -- that's Donald. That's Donald. I know, that's Donald.

COOPER: You have no doubt he knew (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) he knew.

COOPER: It's got to be so difficult to, you know, to come forward with allegations, to launch this lawsuit against somebody very powerful, very wealthy, spends a lot of time in court.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

COOPER: And then to not really be able to have it play out. I mean to not feel like you -- justice has been served.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it hadn't been.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In one case.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Donald had been exposed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: V. Stiviano was reportedly under investigation for allegedly blackmailing Donald Sterling. If she's found guilty, could that help Sterling keep the Clippers? We're going to talk about that more in the next hour of NEWSROOM.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news. COSTELLO: All right, breaking news just in to CNN. The House Veterans Affairs Committee will force Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki to testify before lawmakers. Lawmakers will subpoena Shinseki. He's accused of instituting a secret waiting list for certain veterans in Phoenix. Much more on this story throughout the day on CNN. I'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Monica Lewinsky is telling her story in this month's "Vanity Fair" with an extremely personal and intimate essay, detailing a life defined by scandal and blocked from moving on by anyone who can't let her history stay in the past. Lewinsky writes, "I was so young that I had no established identity to which I could return. If you haven't figured out who you are, it's hard not to accept the horrible image of you created by others." Now Lewinsky is taking the opportunity to recreate her own story, but it's not the first time. Jean Casarez has more.

Hi, Jean.

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi. Good morning, Carol.

You know, she says in the article that the reason she wrote this - because a lot of people are wondering -- she said she wants to give a purpose to her past. And the country and the world has learned she's 40 years old. She says she can't get a job. She hasn't gotten married, like she wants to do. So the experts now are debating, are the result of her life, which could be half of her life, purposefully driven by society or someone not letting her get ahead, or is it the product of her own choices?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CASAREZ (voice-over): This isn't the first time Monica Lewinsky has tried to reinvent herself.

MONICA LEWINSKY: Hi, handsome.

CASAREZ: From "Saturday Night Live" back in 1999, to interviews.

LEWINSKY: I was a 22-year-old foolish kid.

CASAREZ: The resulting were uneven at best. She now tells "Vanity Fair," "I was arguably the most humiliated person in the world." An endorsement for the diet company Jenny Craig doesn't last long because of negative reaction. A line of hand bags is a flop. And a tell-all book does little to leave the scandal behind. Reputation expert Mike Paul says at first she makes all the wrong decisions.

MIKE PAUL, "REPUTATION DOCTOR": She ran towards reality television. She ran towards making sure that she had a book out to deal with the situation. She didn't say, I'm done with this, I really want to get my life back. And to prove that I want to get my life back, I'm not going to touch this issue at all.

CASAREZ: To escape, she heads to grad school at the prestigious London School of Economics, and largely avoids public life for 10 years.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: She reached a level of fame, notoriety, that has just proven impossible to overcome. She is simply too famous it seems to have a normal life.

CASAREZ: After getting a masters, Lewinsky tells "Vanity Fair," "I moved between London, Los Angles, New York and Portland, Oregon, interviewing for a variety of jobs. Yet because of what my potential employers so tactfully refer to as my history, I was never quite right for the position." She says concerns about potential backlash from the Clintons hurt her in job interviews. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says other key figures in the scandal damaged her more.

TOOBIN: The people who made Monica Lewinsky a public figure were Ken Starr's prosecutors. The last thing Bill Clinton wanted was her to be a public figure at all.

CASAREZ: Paul agrees her troubles stem less from the president than from the incident itself.

PAUL: Bill Clinton didn't ruin her life. The situation didn't ruin her life. Public opinion didn't ruin her life. Her decision to have a relationship with a married man who happened to be the president of the United States ruined her life.

CASAREZ: Lewinsky now says, "it is time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress and move forward."

CASAREZ (on camera): What advice would you give to her from this point on?

PAUL: I think the biggest piece of advice I'd be giving her right now is that unless she owns her behavior 110 percent and isn't seen as blaming others, this crisis will continue.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CASAREZ: And, Carol, we now have read the entire article. I know you have, too. The first line of the article, Carol, it is so vulgar, we can't even say it on television. That's how the article begins. It's a question she was asked when she was taping her HBO documentary "Monica in Black and White." But I guess the question is, does this help her or does this continue the cycle she's been in for 15 years now?

COSTELLO: You know, I can't help but think, in listening to your report, Jean, that clearly she was wrong to have an affair with a married man. That was completely wrong. But take out the fact it was with a famous man who, you know, was controversial in his own right and had - you know, was - I don't know, it just seems wrong to blame her 16 years after - to continue to blame her 16 years after the fact. She can't escape this thing, this terrible thing she did 16 years ago still. I mean he -- the gentleman in your piece seemed to be blaming her for the entire thing. And it's not entirely her fault. It's just not.

CASAREZ: And that's why we want to show both sides, because this is a controversial issue. She's a controversial person. It's something you just keep thinking about and talking about. And there's two sides. I think even as a person, you vacillate on both sides, trying to find what the truth is in her life here.

COSTELLO: Jean Casarez, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

CASAREZ: Thanks.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, he was kidnapped in Ukraine. Now, a "Time" magazine correspondent is speaking out about his ordeal and what he says Vladimir Putin really wants.

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COSTELLO: Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he's pulled 40,000 troops from the Ukrainian border because he wants to open dialogue open (ph). He says it's the only hope for a solution. Sounds encouraging, right? Except, according to NATO, there is absolutely no evidence that Russia has actually withdrawn its troops from the border. So, Ukraine continues to boil. Simon Shuster is a correspondent for "Time" magazine. He has long covered Ukraine. He was born there. And he was actually kidnapped that past Monday in Ukraine. In "Time's" latest cover story, he writes about what Putin really wants to happen in the region.

Simon, welcome.

SIMON SHUSTER, CORRESPONDENT, "TIME": Thank you.

COSTELLO: First of all, I'm glad you're OK. So, tell us about this kidnapping incident.

SHUSTER: Yes, it's become a fairly common occurrence for journalists in parts of Ukraine that are essentially taken over by pro-Russian separatist rebels. They set up checkpoints at random all over the towns that they control, on the roads between the towns. And, you know, if you aren't lucky in who's manning that check point when you go through it, then you could easily be detained or beaten up. This is actually the second time this has happened to me. During my coverage of the crisis in eastern Ukraine, and it's happened to probably a dozen journalists.

COSTELLO: Well, tell us more in detail about it, because it was chilling. Someone hit you over the head with a gun?

SHUSTER: Yes, that's right. So the check point was manned by about a dozen guys in civilian clothing, just local -- local men. I mean it was hard to call them anything more than thugs.

And one of them became extremely aggressive and agitated when he saw that I had a bulletproof vest, a flak jacket with "press" clearly written across the chest. And he pulled me out of the car and without saying a word to me, clocked me on the head with the butt of his gun, kicked me under the chin and only then asked for my documents. And then they called their commander over who drove up. He was wearing camouflage.

So he looked somewhat more like an identifiable militant or combatant. And he had a large shotgun. He took me back to their basement headquarters in the city hall building of that town which has been occupied by the pro-Russian militants now for about ten days, two weeks.

COSTELLO: And oddly, at one point a nurse attended to you and like tended to your wounds and apologized. And after that happened, how did you manage to escape?

SHUSTER: I managed to escape with the help of my Russian colleagues in eastern Ukraine. The militants didn't take away my cell phone. So I put in a call to one of my Russian colleagues on the ground there, a photographer. And he basically put the word out. Obviously Russian journalists have an advantage in working in the pro-Russian areas of eastern Ukraine because they're seen as friends of the -- of the pro- Russian separatists. Whether that's true or not, it depends on the journalist.

But my friends are able to basically call the people who are holding me. We knew all the guys who had kidnapped me. We had interviewed some of them before, and they called and sort of vouched for me and said he's a friend. He's fine. He's an objective journalist, leave him alone. And they got I'd say even a bit spooked at the fact that they had injured an American journalist and some of them apologized and let me go.

COSTELLO: Well the strangest thing about this is it wasn't clear in your mind if these people who kidnapped you were actually connected to Russia and Vladimir Putin, or were they just angry at the Ukrainian government? I mean what do they want?

SHUSTER: You know that's really the more enlightening part of that whole unpleasant experience. I got a close firsthand look at the interplay between them, how they interacted with each other inside their own headquarters and the various types of people who were involved in this rebellion, insurrection, whatever you want to call it.

It became quite clear that it's really, really difficult to tell the difference between militants who have come from Russia and are well armed and better trained and just random thugs whose have joined this out of some personal desire to claim more turf in some gang war and just a lot of civilians. For example, the nurse that you mentioned, she would -- you know, she would like her town to become a part of Russia. She would like her town to split away from Ukraine. And she volunteered to serve at the infirmary of this occupied city hall building.

So you know what is she? Is she a combatant as well? Is she a hostage to the situation? And it just highlighted to me the difficulty that Ukrainian authorities are going to have trying to parse all the different kinds of people involved in this -- in this rebellion.

COSTELLO: Absolutely. Simon Shuster, we're glad you're OK. Thank you so much for joining me, Simon Shuster from "Time" magazine.

SHUSTER: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM Nigeria's president saying the abduction of school girls may doom the terror group that took them captive. New details of an attack though raise ominous doubts.

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COSTELLO: Nigeria's President says the militant group Boko Haram's abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls may be a turning point in his country's fight against terror.

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GOODLUCK JONATHAN, PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA: I believe that this kidnap of these girls will be the beginning of end of terror in Nigeria.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Well the group's latest attack has more than doubled villagers burying more than 300 people in mass graves. Some victims hid behind locked storefronts to get away from these terrorists groups only to be burned alive when attackers torched the buildings. International outrage is growing.

The First Lady, Michelle Obama, showing her support for the kidnapped girls on Twitter.

Former First Lady Hillary Clinton also speaking out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: The government of Nigeria needs to get serious about protecting all of its citizens, girls and women as well as boys and men and ensuring that every child has the right and opportunity to go to school in security and safety. That is a fundamental responsibility of any government and Nigerians should hold their leaders accountable for it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: CNN's Vladimir Duthiers joins us live from Nigeria. So how is the Nigerian President backing up this statement? Is he backing it up with any action?

VLADIMIR DUTHIERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's a great question, Carol. In fact, as you said, the President saying that this abduction of these 200-plus girls in northeastern Nigeria is a turning point. It's a point where he thinks terror will end in this country. A lot of people are scratching their heads and saying strong words, confident words, but we have not seen any of that backed up with any kind of activity.

In fact, the parents that we've spoken to of those abducted children tell us that they've seen no significant search and rescue operations. They haven't seen any kind of significant military presence on the ground. And then as you mentioned, just this week alone on Monday, 300 people killed in a Boko Haram slaughter in a market town not far from where these girls were taken.

They arrived in armored personnel carriers with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Shop owners who try to flee the violence went into their shops, they were burned alive. People hacked to death. The town in mourning now continued impunity of Boko Haram across northeastern Nigeria and in fact even in the capital of Abuja.

Just in the last three weeks alone, there have been two bombings, two explosive devices that have gone off in the capital.

So people are saying yes, Mr. President, sounds confident, it sounds like you're doing the job, but what are the actions on the ground? And so it's going to be interesting to see going forward if this international support coalesces into something meaningful to the people in the northeastern part of the country who have been living under a reign of terror.

CNN NEWSROOM continues after a quick break.

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