The One Dessert Monica Lewinsky (52) Says She’ll Never Give Up

When Monica Lewinsky published a five-day food diary earlier this year to promote her new podcast, readers discovered something unexpected: a woman with deeply held opinions about ice cream that predate most of her public life by at least a decade.

The dessert in question is Baskin Robbins Peanut Butter ‘N Chocolate, and it appears in her diary more than once.

A Loyalty That Goes Back to Grade School

The ice cream shows up on a Friday after a lunch out in Los Angeles, retrieved from her corner market on the way home. It reappears on Thursday evening as the natural conclusion to a dinner of Trader Joe’s pad see ew, which she describes as evidence of her “mad microwave skills.”

She wrote in the diary that she has loved this particular flavor “since at least the fifth grade,” and went on to describe exactly why: “It has big chunks of frozen peanut butter and a perfect salty-to-sweet ratio.”

The Context — A New Chapter, Publicly Told

The food diary was published around the launch of Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky, her Wondery podcast that debuted in February 2025. The show features intimate conversations with guests about reclaiming something lost or taken, a theme drawn directly from her own experience.

The diary was, in its own way, an extension of that same impulse — someone living publicly and without apology for her tastes.

The Rest of the Snack Situation

The ice cream is far from the only item worth noting. Across five days, Lewinsky’s diary references Butterfingers, Starburst, sour rainbows, Rice Krispies treats, Swedish Fish, and Sour Patch Kids. She eats four Tagalong cookies for breakfast on the way to a sound resonance healer appointment. She eats Thin Mints with chili-lime chips, a combination she herself acknowledges sounds alarming.

The Old Loyalties That Run Deepest

The peanut butter chocolate ice cream is not even her only documented lifelong food attachment. In 2022, while visiting Portland, she crowd-sourced Twitter to track down a specific cinnamon-streusel coffee cake she remembered from her college years there in the mid-nineties. When she finally found it at a QFC, she shared a photo and noted she is “very particular” about her cake-to-crumble ratio.

Pepperoni pizza, meanwhile, has been her favorite since childhood. She once wrote a poem about it in first grade that later found its way to the internet in 1998 — a detail she recounts with the kind of wry self-awareness that has become her signature.

The ice cream, the coffee cake, and the pizza between them tell a fairly complete story: some loyalties just outlast everything else.