During Bill Clinton's
1992 presidential election campaign, Flowers came forward to say that she had had a 12-year extramarital relationship with Clinton, and that he had assisted her in securing a job as an administrative assistant with the
Arkansas Appeal Tribunal. The State of Arkansas fired Flowers in early 1992 for failing to show up to work. Clinton subsequently apologized publicly to
Mario Cuomo for remarks he made about the then-
Governor of New York on the tapes, in which he had said that Cuomo acted like a
mafioso. During the press conference, Flowers was asked several questions by
"Stuttering John" Melendez of the
Howard Stern Show: if she was planning to sleep with any other candidates before the election, if Clinton used a
condom and if there ever was a
threesome. She responded by laughing at Stuttering John's prank, whereas her advisor wanted to ignore him by trying to answer other questions. News reports at the time speculated that the taped phone conversations between Flowers and Clinton could have been doctored; Flowers had sold the original tapes to
Star and they were never lab-tested. Clinton aides
James Carville and
George Stephanopoulos backed the claim the tapes were doctored as well. 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, Flowers talked about her sexual relationship with Clinton on
The Richard Bey Show. The show was canceled the following day. Bey later attributed a direct connection between the two consecutive events. In a deposition in January 1998, while denying
Kathleen Willey's sexual accusations against him, Clinton admitted that he had a sexual encounter with Flowers. Flowers sued Stephanopoulos, Carville, and others in 1999 for
defamation (later amending the suit in 2000 to include Hillary Clinton as a defendant), claiming that they orchestrated a campaign to discredit her.
Judicial Watch represented her in her defamation lawsuit against Bill Clinton's former aides, Stephanopoulos and Carville. In her case, Flowers argued that the defendants ignored obvious signs that the television news reports did not conclusively determine that someone had interfered with the tapes. The dismissal was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in 2006. ==Post-controversy years==