Monica Lewinsky finally met Ken Starr

The two had never met, though they certainly were not strangers.

Two decades earlier, she had been a prime focus of his investigation into then-President Bill Clinton and the commander in chief’s claims about the nature of his relationship with her, a White House intern.

It had been a long time, but she had not forgotten. How could she have?

And now — finally — Monica Lewinsky was standing face to face with the man who had helped upend her life.

“Let me introduce myself. I’m Ken Starr,” Lewinsky recalls the former special prosecutor saying on Christmas Eve.

“This was the man who had turned my 24-year-old life into a living hell in his effort to investigate and prosecute President Bill Clinton on charges that would eventually include obstruction of justice and lying under oath — lying about having maintained a long-term extramarital relationship with me,” she writes in Vanity Fair.

“Ken Starr asked me several times if I was ‘doing O.K.’ A stranger might have surmised from his tone that he had actually worried about me over the years.”

She adds: “His demeanor, almost pastoral, was somewhere between avuncular and creepy. He kept touching my arm and elbow, which made me uncomfortable.”

In a pointed essay about what she learned from the #MeToo movement, Lewinsky writes about the moment she bumped into Starr — the “man in the hat,” as she calls the former U.S. solicitor general and federal judge — over the holidays at a restaurant in New York.

“I turned and introduced him to my family,” she writes. “Bizarre as it may sound, I felt determined, then and there, to remind him that, 20 years before, he and his team of prosecutors hadn’t hounded and terrorized just me but also my family — threatening to prosecute my mom (if she didn’t disclose the private confidences I had shared with her), hinting that they would investigate my dad’s medical practice, and even deposing my aunt, with whom I was eating dinner that night. And all because the Man in the Hat, standing in front of me, had decided that a frightened young woman could be useful in his larger case against the president of the United States.”

She adds:

Understandably, I was a bit thrown. (It was also confusing for me to see “Ken Starr” as a human being. He was there, after all, with what appeared to be his family.) I finally gathered my wits about me — after an internal command of Get it together. “Though I wish I had made different choices back then,” I stammered, “I wish that you and your office had made different choices, too.” In hindsight, I later realized, I was paving the way for him to apologize. But he didn’t. He merely said, with the same inscrutable smile, “I know. It was unfortunate.”