Gennifer Flowers - Bill Clinton Controversy

Bill Clinton Controversy

Gennifer Flowers came forward during Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential election campaign, alleging that she had had a 12-year relationship with him. Flowers at first denied that she had an affair with Clinton, but later changed her story.

After Bill Clinton denied having a relationship with Flowers on 60 Minutes, she held a press conference in which she played tape recordings she had secretly made of phone calls with Clinton. Clinton subsequently apologized publicly to Mario Cuomo for remarks he made about the then-Governor of New York on the tapes. During the press conference Flowers was famously asked, by John Melendez of the Howard Stern Show, if she was planning to sleep with any other candidates before the election. However, news reports at the time speculated that the taped phone conversations between Flowers and Clinton could have been doctored. Clinton aides James Carville and George Stephanopoulos also backed this claim as well. George Stephanopoulos later claimed in a 2000 interview with journalist Tim Russert that "Oh, it was absolutely his voice, but they were selectively edited in a way to - to create some - some impression."

In December 1996, Gennifer Flowers talked about her sexual relationship with Bill Clinton on The Richard Bey Show. The show was canceled the following day. Richard Bey later attributed a direct connection between the two consecutive events.

In his presidential deposition in January 1998, while denying Kathleen Willey's sexual accusations against him, Bill Clinton admitted that he had a sexual encounter with Flowers. In 1998, Flowers admitted that she had made a total net profit of $500,000 by publicizing her alleged affair with Clinton to Penthouse, Star Magazine and other news sources. In his 2004 autobiography My Life, Clinton acknowledged testifying under oath that he had an encounter with Flowers. He stated it was only on one occasion in 1977. However, it has not been proven exactly what type of sexual advances Clinton made during this 1977 encounter.

Flowers sued George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and others in 1999 for defamation (later amending the suit in 2000 to include Hillary Rodham Clinton as a defendant), claiming that they orchestrated a campaign to discredit her. Judicial Watch represented her in her defamation lawsuit against Hillary's former aides, Stephanopoulos and Carville. In her case, Flowers argued that the defendants ignored obvious warning signs that the television news reports did not conclusively determine that someone had interfered with the tapes. Summary judgment dismissing the case was given by a US district court in 2004. The dismissal was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 2006.