Gennifer Flowers Biography

“I met Bill Clinton in 1977 while I was working as a news reporter for KARK-TV in Little Rock, Arkansas. Shortly after we met, we began a sexual relationship that lasted for twelve years.” So began a statement released by Gennifer Flowers in 1998 in the run-up to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

Gennifer Flowers had already made the same claim in 1992, when Bill Clinton was a Democratic nominee for president. Clinton, who was married and already the subject of whispers that he was a womanizer, denied Flowers’s claim, even after Flowers produced tape recordings of what she said were conversations between her and Clinton. In the end, Bill Clinton was elected president that year and reelected in 1996 before admitting under oath in 1998 that he had, in fact, had a sexual encounter with Flowers — though he said it was on one occasion only, in 1977.

Gennifer Flowers appeared nude in Penthouse magazine in December 1992, just a month before Clinton took office as president. She published a memoir, Passion and Betrayal, in 1995, and married businessman Finnis Shelnutt in 1996. As of 2016, her personal site described her as an author, speaker, singer and “an inspiration and role model to women and men alike.”